I know it's almost April 15th so the talk of audits might scare some people. (Be thankful you don't have my accountant who initially told me I was getting a $2000 refund but later said I owed $500. And she charged me $400 for that news.)
Audits in regulated industries
But this blog isn't about auditing your taxes, it's about audits of IT departments in regulated industries. These are the industries like pharmaceuticals, biotechs, banking and healthcare. As we noted in a previous blog about IT versus QA dynamics, audits and audit requirements can create havoc within a company.
A bad cycle
Some disturbing observations that we've come across with clients is the whole concept of remediation as a given after the auditors pack away their clipboards and leave. Companies budget for remediation expense as if it is something they must accept.
Some companies are audited more than once a year by different agencies. So for them, it's audit, remediate, audit, remediate. And there's a Ka-ching after every audit. It reminds of those clown punching bags we had as kids. Smack it, it falls over and then pops up for the next smack. And they smile and say "Thank you very much, Mr. Auditor".The real problem may be that remediation only addresses the findings, it does not address the underlying causes that create the cycle in the first place. It's like getting a nail in your tire and just patching it. Perhaps the real answer is you shouldn't be driving over the nails in the first place. Some companies need help finding the road without the nails.
What's the answer?
If companies could avoid or at least dramatically reduce remediation cost, then the savings could be invested in strategic projects,
dropped to the bottom line or passed on to their clients. IT would no longer just be looked at as a cost center by the CFO, affectionately known in most companies as Dr. No.Companies on the audit carousel who are getting a little dizzy need to conduct a thorough assessment of their environment against standards or best practices such as ITIL. If they created a pareto diagram of the areas being tagged for remediation after each audit, they could match these areas to ITIL elements for guidelines to a more robust solution. Not only should these remediation dollars lessen, but efficiencies may also result. If a company doesn't feel comfortable stopping the carousel on their own, give us a call and we'll take you for a spin.
Court Square will be discussing important issues like this at a number of conferences this year as noted in our calendar. (And it only took three marketing interns to show me how to add that to our blog template. Yeah me.) Come visit us at Interphex this month in New York in booth 3133. If you come on April 25th, you can have your picture taken with "Cher". I'll talk about some highlights of the show in a post-Interphex blog.
The Marketing Maven
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