Is ACL Analytics Dying?

I fear that ACL Analytics is dying, and has been as long as I’ve been ranting about it.

Making Laurie Schultz their CEO helped, but I don’t think it has been enough.

NOTE: I wrote this well over a month ago, long before I posted the ACL Officially Changes Name & Spots post; I just got sidetracked and forgot about this post. I stumbled across it today in my Drafts folder. I decided to publish it ‘posthumously’ (so to speak) to show 1) how much I’m agonizing over ACL’s direction, 2) how I’ve always felt about ACL’s software, and 3) provide some balance to my previous post.

5 Things We Need from ACL in 2018

Here’s the 5 things I’m hoping will change in 2018 regarding ACL.

They are all related to each other and feed off each other…

Interesting.

No Metrics, Little Analytics

If your department doesn’t track metrics on your analytics, you are probably not doing analytics or you are making little progress in analytics.

In either case, its obvious that analytics isn’t very important to your management.

Which is one of the points I made in my post, 10 Signs Mgmt Doesn’t Really Support Analytics.

So far, I have encountered very few audit departments that track meaningful metrics about their analytics.

Counting the number of projects that include analytics isn’t enough.

Will Robotics (RPA) Replace ACL?

In my last post, I described Why Internal Auditors Should Care about Robotic Process Automation.

In this post, I’ll explore whether RPA can replace analytic packages like ACL, IDEA, R, and Power BI.

That might seem like a strange question, but a few managers and a VP have asked me just that recently. Here’s how I’ve answered it.