by Jason Rohlf – June 11, 2010
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Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
– from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by Bob Dylan
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While there are many reasons I’m glad to have tramped down the path that has taken me through the first 13 or so years of my career, there is one that jumps out as the crown jewel. As I have mentioned before on the Archer GRC Blog, I love to learn new things. Put away the Oil of Olay, spurn the Botox needle and thumb your nose and Ponce de Leon – the true path to eternal youth is through continuous learning.
And wouldn’t you know it, I was lucky enough to select internal audit as a career, one that places a high premium on the continuous pursuit of knowledge. Huzzah to my good fortune! I can remember life as a green staff auditor like it was yesterday. (It was just yesterday, right?) When my supervisor approached me about promoting me to senior, I was quite pleased. And imagine my delight when he said that because I was on the cusp of such glory, I was being sent to a week-long Senior Auditor training course in sunny Orlando, Florida!
“Let me get this straight,” I countered, “you’re thinking of promoting me AND you’re paying for me to go learn a whole new skill set?? Can you pinch me so I can be certain that I am not dreaming some wonderful dream?”
After he informed me that pinching violated our company’s Code of Conduct, I was sent down to Senior School. In all seriousness, it really was a very exciting opportunity for me. And one particular lesson I learned really resonated with me and sticks with me to this day – namely, the importance of ridding one’s diet of SALT and JELLY.
No, I am not talking about some strange sweet-yet-salty culinary oddity. (Sidenote: If you want the most delicious sweet-yet-salty experience, I highly recommend bacon-wrapped dates and any reputable tapas restaurant.) Our instructor explained to us that as new seniors, we were expected to be the hub of all audit projects, and that meant making sense of the information gathered by our staff and communicating it up to our managers and directors so that, as a team, we could come up with an objective and reasonable conclusion for the audit.
“One thing you need to be highly aware of as seniors is when the auditee is rationalizing their behavior by feeding you SALT and JELLY.”
Clearly this fine gentleman saw the blank stares on all of our faces so he mercifully enlightened us. When we ask our auditees why their process seems inefficient, disorganized or convoluted, they may rationalize it by saying they do it…
Same As Last Time or Just Exactly Like Last Year
AH! I get it – SALT and JELLY! When I first heard this, I thought “great acronyms, but there’s no way anyone would fall back on these excuses as their rationale for carrying on with a bad process.” It just wasn’t possible. And then as I went back out into the working world, I started to pay closer attention…and my instructor was 100% correct. I was blown away at how many people fell back on the old “this is the way we’ve always done it” explanation. And this was not a phenomenon limited to those I audited. As I continued down my windy, tree-lined career path, I was shocked to find that there were many internal audit departments, assurance groups, risk management functions and the like that fell back on that very same “logic” when justifying their way of tackling their responsibilities.
On one level, this line of thinking is bemusing. Yet on another level it’s quite troubling. I don’t think anyone reading this piece is shocked when I say that the environment we now operate in as business professionals is vastly different than the one we had to maneuver 5 years ago. New and unheard of risks have reared their ugly heads. The gap between the skill sets and sophisticated business information we need to identify and address these new threats and those that we actually possess has grown too wide for anyone’s comfort. The challenges that we face in our respective professions demand our attention and require us to be open to new ways of doing things.
I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with numerous professionals who are trying with the best of intentions to address these challenges head on. Working with RSA’s Archer eGRC solutions affords me the opportunity to help these folks identify new and unique ways of doing things. As many of our customers have come to realize, our solutions offer a different approach to tackling these issues, one that is flexible and forward looking, one that seeks to transform business data into valuable business information, and one that rejects the bland concoction of SALT and JELLY.
Let’s face it – the times they are a-changin’. I truly hope we all start swimmin’, lest we sink like a stone.