Agile Audits in the Federal Public Sector
Shared Services Canada, is a new Government of Canada department created in 2011, responsible for delivering mandated email, data centre and network services to partner organizations in a consolidated and standardized manner to support the delivery of Government of Canada programs and services for 42 federal partner departments. As part of its new mandate, Shared Services set out to transform the way government delivers email services, manages data centres and now cloud services, ensures security against cyber-attacks and procures and provides IT and telecommunications equipment.
From the outset, Shared Services Canada’s Office of Audit and Evaluation was faced with a formidable challenge, building its audit capacity while delivering quality assurance products in real time on some of the biggest, riskiest and most complicated IT projects undertaken by the Government of Canada. While the Office of Audit and Evaluation started with a traditional approach, it became immediately apparent that traditional audits taking over a year to complete would not meet the needs of the department. An innovative solution was needed to deliver timely assurance advice to management.
Shared Services’ Office of Audit and Evaluation has now been delivering agile system under development audits of its IT infrastructure transformation programs for the past two years. This session would present lessons learned from developing and applying an agile approach to audit. The presentation will cover both the agile approach and how you can make this approach work in different audit environments using the lessons identified by Shared Services Canada’s Office of Audit and Evaluation. We will also present senior management and the audit committee’s perspective.