The importance of establishing a strong governance framework to manage risk has been increasingly realized in the business world. Organizations are under constant pressure to identify every business risk they might face – social, ethical, economic, environmental as well as financial and operational, and to take measures to manage them at an acceptable level. Hence, the trend of developing robust internal controls that can mitigate organizational risk is gaining momentum.
As much as developing the governance framework with internal controls is essential, auditing the effectiveness of such internal controls is also crucial to help prevent and detect any errors or irregularities before they negatively impact the business. Auditing ensures that there are no gaps in risk mitigation – whether it is misappropriation of assets, information risk, risk of fraud, and investment risk, etc.
ServiceNow Audit Management – A Perfect Solution
Are you finding it daunting to keep up with regulatory compliance, manage cyber security threats, and mitigate risk with ever-changing policies, regulations, procedures, and business needs that call for a process or project change?
Out of the 200 audit business partners surveyed in February 2021 by Gartner, many stated that implementing a project or precess change regularly leads to control gaps and such changes can result in significant or even extremely negative outcomes.
Negative outcomes experienced as the result of making a change – as reported by percentage of audit business partners:
- Unintended impact on other areas of the organization, negative impact on business unit or rework (61% of business partners)
- Non-compliance with organization policies and standards, laws and regulations, or regulatory fines and penalties (54% of business partners)
- Fraud, loss of data or other organisational assets, or financial loss (45% of business partners)
Source: 2021 Gartner Audit Business Partner Panel Survey
ServiceNow Audit Management Application:
Not all organizations would have the resources to keep up with the ever-changing regulations, policies, etc. To avoid negative outcomes from such changes, organizations should not only improve visibility into change but also strive to deploy audit resources faster. How will you achieve it? All you need is a robust solution that will help you manage compliance with regulations and internal controls, enhance information security practices. The audit is the last step in the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Journey, ensuring everything is done right for risk mitigation!
The ServiceNow Audit Management application automates and consolidates most of the activities in the audit process, providing users with guided workflows that reduce errors and eliminate tedious tasks. It enables organizations to streamline audits and prioritize remediation activities and improve their internal audits.
With ServiceNow’s Audit Management solution, Audit professionals can quickly assess and define objectives easily, with simplified communication between business units. ServiceNow encourages seamless communication across the business units and gives direction to your users via a centralized workflow.
- Defines audit scope from the existing data, selects test plans, and obtains sign off on audit plans.
- Ensures regulatory compliance by ingesting controls, related policies, tasks, issues, and other related information.
- Enhances internal audit management and planning by preparing organizations better for audits with assessing the risk of auditable units beforehand.
- Increases audit productivity by optimizing resources around internal audits, reducing manual effort, and eliminating recurring audit findings.
- Enables continuous compliance monitoring which helps audit managers to be ready with solutions to overcome any issues that may arise.
- Boosts profitability by minimizing costs with automated evidence collection combined with smart issue management.
- Streamlines audit operations in terms of:
- Managing audit tasks/activities, test controls using automated indicators and test templates, walkthroughs, and interviews across teams.
- Collecting evidence by indicating results (pass/fail) within the required timeframe.
- Improves decision-making by communicating priorities at every level and differentiating issues from observations.
- Automates audit review and approval process and automatically generates audit report detailing activities and the outcomes.
- Provides a centralized system of record to help manage the communication, coordination, and completion of tasks related to the audit.
- Connects all stakeholders from those who request evidence, control owners, audit entity owners to approvers in order to automate evidence collection on a single platform with a simple and transparent process.
Next Steps
If you want to establish a foolproof governance framework and ensure nothing is amiss in your risk mitigation efforts, and experience automated workflows and ease of operations, you should leverage the ServiceNow Audit Management module. A reliable IT partner who has in-depth experience in ServiceNow solutions – can help you with utilizing ServiceNow Audit Management Solution effectively.
As a ServiceNow Premier Partner, KANINI has deep expertise in implementing ServiceNow Audit Management. We develop a multi-phased approach for our clients enabling them to quickly recover value from their investments. Our team of ServiceNow experts can help you get started with your journey to build a Repeatable audit process with improved visibility and performance on the ServiceNow platform. We typically see this as the starting point for organizations that want to move from a manual and decentralized process to a more automated and collaborative experience that provides better visibility and performance.
The next level of maturity is Managed – your audit process and key results become more predictable and proactive with each audit cycle.
Finally, the pinnacle level of maturity is Optimized – where your organization becomes risk-aware and benefits from integrated enterprise GRC/IRM.
Whether large or small, organizations that focus on growing their maturity with their ServiceNow journey realize the shift from reactive to proactive workflows. If you are looking to get started, connect with us. We are happy to help!
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