In today’s business environment, transformation and trust go together. Companies are rightly capitalizing on the rise of disruptive technologies to transform – harnessing the power of data, reinventing their systems and processes and developing new business models. To be successful, given the breadth of impact and wide range of stakeholders affected by these transformations, including investors, customers, employers, suppliers, regulators and the public at large, the key foundational element must be trust.
As an independent assurance function, Internal Audit (IA) naturally plays a key role in enabling organizations to build a brand of trust as they move along their transformational journeys.
However, as complexity and disruption increase in the business, Internal Audit will need to have a much bigger advisory role to sustain stakeholder trust in organizations. It will need to provide broader insights on all the risks that an organization faces. These are not just the preventable downside risks that have traditionally fallen within its remit, but also the upside risks that management should be exploring such as innovation, and the outside risks that are on the horizon, such as…
