Facilitating Internal Auditing

Monday, February 7, 2011
Companies tend to have a lot of stuff to do internal auditing on—performance, quality, environmental impact, etc. You may already know about the influence of an environmental management system (ISO 14000 family) and quality management system (ISO 9000 family), and possibly the increasingly popular information security management system (ISMS, ISO 27000 family).

Of course, you can just make checklists to go through and cross out, but managing everything on paper slows things down and costs a lot just to aggregate the results. That's why it's good to use an efficient information system.



Students may think there are no rules or procedures to writing research papers, except for maybe the get-it-done-by-the-deadline-whatever-it-takes rule.
It's true that each student clearly knows how far he is (or isn't) with the paper, but the fact is that professors have a hard time remembering the exact status of each student's work. Enter, our workflow for today:


If you have a "Workflow for Revising Workflows," you will have easy access to all the suggestions previously made on each workflow you manage. And this should probably include your own earnest improvements as well as suggestions made by others. These are your BPM records.



A Workflow for Revising Workflows

Friday, February 4, 2011
If you are going to manage workflows, you will have to deal with the "workflow for revising workflows."

According to the Golden Rules of Business Process Modeling, establishing the "trigger" is the important thing. Your "workflow for revising workflows" will depend on whether you want to review your workflows when a request emerges from a user (passive), or to have a monthly meeting specifically for reviewing workflows (active). Today's workflow is triggered by an employee's (user's) suggestion for revision.



It's best to manage personal information digitally. Having to browse printed documents makes it difficult to control access rights as well as appropriately log the process. Where digital personal information should be stored depends on each case, but one thing that is certain is that it should be centralized.

This means someone other than the list manager should periodically check to make sure the information really is managed in one place (task 4. in the below workflow).




Some personal information lists are permanently maintained within a company, and some are deleted after three months.

We already introduced a workflow for keeping track of personal information lifecycles in "Managing Personal Information with a Workflow." Today let's look at a workflow for keeping track of all the stuff that goes on during this lifecycle.


Personal information can be a pain. Having access to even a little information requires you to go through a bunch of procedures. It would be great if we could just stay away from the issue altogether, but unfortunately we have to manage our client list, and sometimes handle other companies' client lists… and sometimes we just can't help having personal information in our possession.

"Managing personal information" means having a system for recording and being able to trace every instance of acquiring personal information, as well as when it is deleted.