IT Audit Transformation in a digital society

Top 10 transformation towards the digital IT journey by ISACA Journal, Transforming the Auditor:

1. Establish/solidify better integration across entire risk spectrum
2. Reexamine fundamental mission strategy and formulate capabilities needed to audit IT of tomorrow
3. Examine and realize end-to-end audit life cycle 
4. Continuous alignment and risk assessments, instead of outsiders coming in, to help advance business strategy in rapidly changing technology
5. Leveraging technology and provide a managed services approach
6. Establishing robust GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) to best offer automation, improved productivity, ensure consistency, enhance risk coverage and assessments
7. Advance analysis is key for trending and prediction of high risk
8. How to do this
9. Engage CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology to manage interview process, capture risk notes and themes and making information available on real-time basis for global team inclusion
10. Leveraging collaboration technology throughout enterprise 

When Accenture applied these characteristics, audit totals increased by 250% from (16 to 45 annually) from 2012 to 2015.  It was noticed that monitoring proactively embarks awareness of changing risk profiles and resulted in leadership reaching out to audit team for strategic decisions rather than post decision. Lessons learned included:

1. Alignment of IT audit with business strategy – audit function nimble to changing technology/business needs
2. Clarify governance on a continuous basis not just annually and IA plan accordance with business strategy/risk
3. Run IT as a business with organization/people as customers with defined service offerings and focus on value-add and measure customer satisfaction
4. Manage performance metrics and critical success factor – and highlight deficiencies as well as achievements
5. Transforming people requires strong leadership to change internal culture and foster proactive change and radical shifts
6. Go big with increasing enterprise capabilities, applying rigor and discipline to internal business processes of IT
7. Communicate success by demonstrating value IT audit adds and speaking highly of accomplishments that is meaningful and measurable