caats

Linking ERM and Performance Measurement – part #2

A proposed integrative model Dave Coderre, CAATS, www.caats.ca During the strategic planning process senior managers propose goals and objectives for the coming year. ERM should evaluate objectives to ensure that risks have been considered and the chosen objectives are consistent with the entity’s mission. The risks should be analyzed and prioritized and mitigated by an appropriate response that considers the entity’s risk tolerance and risk appetite. The risk appetite will vary depending on…

October 17, 2018

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Integrating ERM and Performance Measurement: Part #1

Enterprise risk management (ERM) and performance management (PM) are two essential processes for the management of an organization. Both are designed to support the organizations’ efforts in making decisions and meeting its goals—ERM through the identification and management of those risks that could affect business objectives, and performance management through the identification and measurement of the drivers needed to achieve results and provide value. Yet despite having mutually consistent objectives,…

October 12, 2018

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Auditing the Right Things

Is there a mismatch between where internal audit spends its time auditing and the risks that organizations face? Boards/audit committees should constantly re-evaluate whether internal audit is being used effectively to deliver risk-based assurance. The fundamental questions for boards/audit committees are: are we doing the right audits; and are we doing audits right. In previous articles I have discussed ‘how to do an audit right’ – namely, the importance of…

September 20, 2018

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Making IT Audit more Effective and Relevant – part #2

The next area that will need to be address by CAEs is ensuring that risk-based audit plans are relevant and that selected audits provide maximum value to senior management. Today’s business environment changes rapidly to adjust to market conditions, evolving legislation and economic forces; and the risk-based audit plan must keep pace with this rapid change if it is to properly identify and assess emerging risks that can impact the…

September 10, 2018

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Making IT Audit more effective and relevant – part #1

Are you an IT auditor who takes comfort in your specialized knowledge and feels secure in assessing general and application controls – but does no more? Then you need to wake-up to today’s business environment and step out of your comfort zone. You also will probably need to pull the general auditor away from the safety of pure compliance audits. The notion of the integrated auditor was usually applied to…

September 2, 2018

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ACL Scripts Part #5 – Validating User Input

If you have been trying to build scripts following my previous posts, then you are ready to make your scripts a little more robust; particularly if your scripts will be used by other people. There are always issues when you prompt the user for input such as: did they actual provide any input; and is the input the right type and correct format. Since the proper running of the script…

July 13, 2018

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ACL Scripts Part #4

In my previous discussion about variables, I neglected to mention ACL system-generated variables. These are more evident now, and can easily be seen by using the Variables tab in the Overview/Navigation window. The most common use of ACL system-generated variables are those created by the STATISTICS commands: MAX1, MIN1, HIGH1, LOW1, AVERAGE1, RANGE1, TOTAL1, COUNT1 and ABS1. These, and other variables, are created by the execution of ACL commands and…

July 5, 2018

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ACL Scripts Part #3

Scripts are a powerful way of improving consistency and speed when processing the same commands over and over again. But they can also be used to provide relatively novice users with the ability to run more complex analysis. By now you may be ready to develop more interactive scripts that you can give to other users. This usually requires prompting the user for input; validating the input; and acting upon…

June 29, 2018

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ACL Scripts Part #2

I hope that, after having read, and tried, the approaches to developing ACL scripts in the Part #1 post, you are anxious to learn more. Certainly, the Part #1 suggestions will allow you to build simple scripts to re-run analysis, but there is more to scripting: more power, flexibility and control. In particular, you may want to control the ACL environment to allow the scripts to run without, for example,…

June 22, 2018

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ACL Scripts

Many new ACL users overestimate the difficultly in developing simple ACL scripts. I would agree with you if we were talking about IDEA scripts which require some knowledge of Visual Basic. But, in my opinion a simple, ACL script which only performs commands that you have previously executed and want to execute again, is simple to create. Assumption: you have performed an analysis and want to save it in a…

June 15, 2018

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