Interesting posting on the India IDEA google groups.
Hi All,
I remembered an IDEA user mentioning that the greatest benefit which IDEA Software can provide to an organisation is its tremendous value proposition from hindsight to insight to foresight into any business process and the state of its internal controls.
Hindsight allows the IDEA user to examine historical issues like 'Was there an inventory outage?', 'What caused the outage - which controls failed to operate?', 'What loss did it result into?', 'What safeguards were placed to avoid recurrence of outages?'
Insight allows the IDEA user to examine current issues like 'Has any employee submitted a duplicate travel claim?', 'How did it happen - which controls are failing?', 'What loss did it cause to business?', 'Have recoveries being initiated?'
Foresight allows the IDEA user to arrive at a semblance of upcoming concerns like 'Could a duplicate vendor invoice be lodged in the system?', 'How could the system controls be subverted to book a duplicate?', 'What could be the potential for loss?'
The ability of IDEA to examine the state of internal controls across a time frame from the past to the near future is amazing.
New Features in IDEA like Correlation, Trend Analysis and Time Series play a very valuable role in providing foresight to users into potential fraud, wastage, abuse, irregularities, inefficiencies which can befall an organisation in the future based on the current state and health of controls.
The capacity to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of the performance of controls has never been more realized than now - thanks to IDEA.
I hope you enjoy your journey with IDEA from hindsight to foresight too.
Kind Regards
Jairam