“Great when people with the same in­te­rests come to­gether” – Re­view of the IIA Da­ta An­a­lytics Event in Zurich

On September 30 this year, together with my executive colleague Martin Riedl, I was able to represent dab:GmbH at the IIA Data Analytics Event in Zurich. The one-day IIA meeting – for the first time after a longish break in Switzerland – revolved around data analytics.

*The quote in the title comes from a participant who told me she was very satisfied with the event – very much how we saw it too.

The agenda offered the following papers:

• Asea Brown and Boveri: Integrating data analytics in your audits
• Zürich Insurance: A journey towards data analytics
• Philip Morris International: Focus on central data analytics / benchmarking
• Holcim: Process mining and internal audit
• Nestlé: Data analytics at Nestlé Group Audit – Empowering auditors with tools and techniques
• Zürcher Kantonalbank: Data analytics for planning, field work and continuous auditing

Without going into details of each paper: All participants were unanimous in praising the practical relevance of the topics presented to implementation of digital data analytics in day-to-day business.

Specially appealing and producing much response were the topics that the event focused on, underscored by the large number of attendees. Instead of the 60 participants originally planned, a total of almost 120 persons attended the event, said the organizer, and registration had to close weeks before the intended deadline.

This tells us how much focus attaches to data analytics in auditing, and demonstrates the great demand for platforms on which theme-related information, thoughts and ideas can be exchanged. Content-wise we found ourselves very much at home in many of the papers of course, where solutions offered by dab:GmbH like the dab:Exporter data analytics tool or ready defined ACL™ check routines for SAP® data were topics looked at.

The venue – the Swissotel in Zurich – contributed to the success of the event with an ideal choice of conference rooms for the attendance and a bright, spacious catering zone; organization with IIA Switzerland was efficient and professional leading up to and during the event.

Concluding you can say it was a highly relevant data analytics event right in tune with the modern scenario, in which we were glad to be involved and for which much praise was received from the participants. We look forward to a possible repetition in 2016, and would also like to see such an event in Germany where data analytics – no matter whether for auditing or other specialist areas – are as much a focus as was the case in Zurich.

Links:
www.svir.ch
www.acl.com