Abandon ACL and Others, Part 2

This post is in response to Xavier and Grant, who were kind enough to push back a bit on a previous post, Abandon ACL and Others? See their comments on that post.

I will respond to some of their points and reveal some more of my thinking as to why I believe that auditors need to become a LOT more technical.

Some may think I am just digging my hole a little deeper, but I’ve always loved the journey.

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Abandon ACL and Others?

For the past few years, I’ve been outspoken about auditors that 1) don’t do much data analysis, OR 2) rely only on tools like ACL, IDEA, Arbutus, and the like to do their data analysis.

In this post, I’m going to provide some reasons auditors should not rely on only on these tools. I’ve dealt with this before, but I want to look at it from some different angles.

In this post, I’m speaking only to auditors, as they alone are called to audit the technology and processes their companies use.

In this post, when I mention ‘ACL+’, I am referring to ACL, IDEA, Arbutus, and any other tool that typically only auditors use. I’m also including ACL ‘Robotics’ in this list.

In this post, I’m going to step on people’s toes, but my readers should be used to that by now.

My Python Journey, Part 4

In this fourth post of the Python Journey, I want to discuss WHY I keep going on these journeys despite poor management support. And how I stay sane doing it.

While this post goes beyond my Python journey, previous journeys have been very similar, so in a sense, it has been one looong journey.

My first journey started with ACL, then came SQL, databases, virtual machines and virtual servers, and a host of other technologies, and finally Python and machine learning, all of which I pretty much learned/am learning on my own.

Not only because my audit management didn’t have much foresight or vision, but also because company management approved and launched tools without much guidance or training. Yeah, really.

So what keeps me going and why do I stay here?

See my previous Python journey posts 1, 2, and 3.

My Python Journey, Part 3

In my first Python post, I described the first steps of my python journey.

In my second Python post, I shared my thoughts about whether auditors could learn programming and Python (yes).

In this third post of the series, I want to describe how my audit management has supported my Python journey (spoiler: poorly).

Mack-the-Auditor Gets Audited! Part 2

This is the second of 3 posts; this post describes the audit, some speed bumps, and the audit results.

Read the first post here, which provides the background on the audit and the audit’s scope.

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.