Many IT organisations struggle to maintain appropriate service levels as the organisation changes through mergers, acquisitions, and demergers. If unchecked,...
Why undertake an IT Audit?
Audit is a long standing management tool for corporate governance that is increasingly recognised to be of equal value for technology management. The results of IT Audit need not be restricted to IT governance activity; it is considered vital in corporate risk mitigation for organisations to undertake regular external IT Audit projects to ensure that both board and executive supervision of technology activities are taken seriously.
Why Choose Your IT Audit With Beyond Technology
Using generalist auditors for specific IT audits will not generate optimal results as the generalist auditors lack real world experience and often recommend best practice approaches that without contextual understanding, fail in implementation. All of the Beyond Technology Consulting audit products are focused on providing the required oversight to the organisations executive, but also provide truly actionable advice to IT on how to improve their service levels to the business.
These core products include:
- Broad IT Function Review and Audit
- IT Operations Review and Audit
- External Service Provider Operations Audit
- IT Infrastructure and Application Portfolio Review
- IT Governance and compliance Audit
- IT Risk Audit
- Business/IT alignment Audit
- Internal Audit function Technology SME
It is generally considered best practice to undertake periodic external reviews of IT to consider efficiency, costs, service levels, risk profile and business alignment. These may take the form of a broad IT Review, or specific compliance audit activities.
Each of these Audits provide a management report that identifies any areas of concern, considers industry benchmarks and make recommendations in terms of “Actionable Advice” on how measurable improvements can be made. The focus of each audit is tailored to suit our client’s individual needs or concerns.
Common areas of concern include:
- IT skills and resourcing levels
- Cyber Resilience & Information Security
- Business/Technology alignment
- Process maturity and Technology Innovation
- Architecutural effectiveness and agility
- Data and Digital readiness
- Documentation maturity
- Software licensing and hardware lifecycle management
- Helpdesk service levels
- Project benefit realization
- Technology and operational efficiency
- Infrastructure performance & vulnerabilities
- Proactive and Preventative maintenance
- Recoverability and Data integrity
- Failure point identification
- Governance effectiveness
- Policy compliance
- Security risks
- Financial & budget management issues
- Operational risk & sustainability
Our approach
Beyond Technology Consulting utilizes a formal IT Audit methodology that applies its specific Technology to Business alignment focus to the traditional IT Audit governance process. While the traditional approach simply looks for compliance against control measures, we take a broader view of the efficiency and effectiveness of these controls in ensuring alignment between business and IT goals. If you outsource your IT capabilities, or manage your own IT department it is good business practice to regularly undertake IT Audit processes using an independent 3rd party such as Beyond Technology Consulting.
Our experience and understanding of IT auditing and innovative technology capabilities provides us with the knowledge needed to help you maintain confidence in your IT Audit Planning and Processes. Services can range from a short review and planning exercise though to the development, planning and execution of a multi-year audit plan
After you identified the root cause of our difficulties we have never looked back”CFO | Financial Services Industry
I was astounded to see how reprioritising our IT could deliver such a material improvement in business outcomes”MD | Large field services organisation
It’s the first time that I clearly understand how we engage our IT to change the status quo”CEO | Large Professional Services Firm
Reading your report produced without conflict-of-interest, I clearly understand how biased previous technology advice had been”CEO | Not-for-Profit Organisation
Our business outcomes
Beyond Technology advise businesses on how to optimise the use of IT to achieve business outcomes.
Beyond Technology Consulting has several ways to help CFO’s and CIO’s to improve their organisation’s balance sheet. Our consultants are highly skilled in identifying how to optimise your IT costs to ensure that you are taking advantage of the technology available to your organisation.
Many organisations carry a significant IT failure risk without understanding either the potential or consequences of failure. Quantifying the latent risk, and taking steps to mitigate it not only makes good business sense, it often provides significant improvement in the efficiency and availability of “business as usual” IT service.
With the growing demands on IT departments it can be all too easy to focus on rapidly expanding capability and addressing the day-to-day challenges of running the technology. Properly aligning IT to direct business requirements, while improving the communication channels between IT and the business delivers massive efficiency and capability improvements.
Digital and Technology enablement is critical to all business's growth plans, and without appropriate IT foundations and planning your growth journey will be lost at sea. Aligning your technology planning to your business strategy and ensuring appropriate priority is given to future enablement projects makes a decisive difference to your business growth plans.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Drop us a line and we’d be happy to answers any questions you have.
In most professions where information is asymmetric (i.e. the professional could take advantage of knowing more about the subject that they are advising you on) such as Lawyers and Doctors, the governing body can deregister the professional as stop them from practicing. This does not happen with Technology professionals so conflict of interest is a critical problem. Similarly when a technologist is heavily invested in one specific technology it often becomes their go-to solution (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail). By Maintaining our independence, Beyond Technology Consulting ensures that you are provided with unbiased and actionable advice that you can trust is free from conflict of interest and be assured that we are not monetising the advice that we provide you.
"Actionable Advice" is accessible, accurate and is advice that is provided in a language and manner that does not require technical qualifications to understand. We ensure that our recommendations are fit-for-purpose with an understanding of the context of your organisation to be both affordable and achievable.
We focus on understanding the core requirements of the business so that our advice is based on your requirements not the avaliable technology. This ensures that you don't end up with a solution looking for a problem and ensures that technology outcomes will grow with your business and flex with changes in the technology.
We focus on understanding the core requirements of the business so that our advice is based on your requirements not the avaliable technology. This combined with a bias towards flexible technology solutions helps to provide technology outcomes that will grow with your business and flex with changes in the technology.
There are two key reasons that organisations don't undertake regular independent technology reviews. Firstly many boards and executive don't know that organisations like Beyond Technology Consulting exist and they are left thinking that the only options are IT Audits that are provided by the big accounting firms that don't provide any answers or actionable advice. The second reason is that they don't feel that they understand enough about IT to be able to get value from a review. Beyond Technology Consulting understands this and have designed our organisation to provide "Actionable Advice" that is accessible, accurate and provided in a language and manner that does not require technical qualifications to understand.
Related Case Studies
Evidence of the outcomes we have achieved
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