How to Bore Your Auditor

Presentation Summary

Lance Tucker, Ravindra Harve - Boston College

In 2010 our Data Warehouse project of eight years received its first formal audit. Although a data warehouse is similar to other applications that receive audits, we learned that there are a variety of concerns specific to a data warehouse environment. We have been working with our auditors to develop solutions to the audit items that are both relevant and practical. Our technical team is quite small, the business functions and roles are just starting to mature, and some of the auditing recommendations are quite daunting. A number of initiatives have been defined to address these issues including data security classification, account management, and formalizing some relationships with the business components of the warehouse.

This presentation will address the top 11 things for 2011 that we learned may be helpful for a successful audit. This presentation will review both technical and process ideas for meeting auditing requirements. Our data warehouse is Oracle based with users using both Cognos and Oracle Discoverer BI tools. The presentation will conclude with a demo of a work-in-progress of our data warehouse administration application that we are building to manage several of the items addressed by the audit.