Aren’t audits fun? The mad scramble for needed documentation. The tight timelines. The limited staff resources. And the reward of knowing you likely have to do it all again in a year, or in six months, or three, or two. The solution? Good governance of your data and information.
Whether regulatory, process, or financial in nature, audits usually require pulling information from multiple systems and are subject to strict deadlines. But these systems often are seriously siloed and inaccessible to the response team – sparking a flurry of emails and phone calls, and the spending of considerable time to reconcile and validate the data eventually collected.
The issue isn’t that the requirements are unknown, or that the audits come as a surprise – most are predictably scheduled far in advance. It’s that information isn’t governed in a way that supports a repeatable, on-demand response. So instead of adhering to an established protocol, you end up with a recurring cycle of disruption.
Take My Compliance Review – Please!
Take, for instance, a compliance review, which might require financial records from the ERP, operational logs from a field management system, contracts from a document repository, communications from your email, and approvals in a project management tool. Because each system has its own naming convention, folder structure, and metadata – or worse, none of these – making sense of it all becomes your single biggest task.
Fixing this, of course, is precisely the job of governance, without which findability becomes an unbearable chore. Documents exist but can’t be located quickly. Versions conflict. Access is denied. Ownership is unclear. And there are no universal guidelines to follow to clarify anything.
A good governance program addresses these issues as a matter of course and pays particular dividends in the audit realm. Establishing clear retention and disposition policies means nothing critical gets deleted – and nothing irrelevant clutters the search results. Standardizing metadata schemas means records can be searched by document type, date range, project, regulatory citation, or responsible party. Assigning ownership means there’s always a clear answer to “who has this?” and “do we trust it?”
Go From Crisis to Competence
The bottom line is that when information is properly tagged and consistently managed, audit response shifts from crisis to competence: reducing the risks of missing deadlines, submitting inconsistent information, or incurring reputational damage. The idea is to treat audit readiness as a deliberate design goal, rather than leaving it to be the habitual fire drill it so often is. While this may not make audits exactly fun to handle, they sure should be a lot less painful to respond to than they are now.
Information governance to support audit response is a big part of what we do – and our Governance Acceleration Program lets us do it faster and better. If this sounds good to you, reach me today and let’s make it happen!
Steve Weissman, Founder & CEO, Holly Group LLC • “The Info Gov Guy™” • steve@hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655 • Member, AIIM Company of Fellows • Recipient, AIIM Award of Merit