The Group Internal Audit Services (GIAS) of the Liberty Group has employed a data warehouse empowering the 54-man team to improve the auditing of the group's internal controls and detecting fraud. The GIAS's task has been eased significantly with a "self service" solution that delivers critical information from the mainframe systems from all group companies into a single data warehouse.
The GIAS is tasked with monitoring the internal business of the Liberty Group, and to report to an audit committee responsible to the Board for ensuring that the group's systems comply with statutory requirements.
Until the GIAS was provided with Sybase's Adaptive Server IQ, auditors' requests for reports took up to weeks to fulfil. "We would write an extract program to pull the data off the mainframe and put it in a format that the auditor could analyse," explains Tracy Miedzinski, DWH Administrator in GIAS. "Requests had to fit into the batch window, and often there were delays because it was full, or access was denied. If there was a problem, we would have to rerun the entire request."
Liberty GIAS discovered that performing more that 200 requests a year of this nature on the mainframe was not cost effective, and it placed the auditors in a reactive mode. "The auditors work to tight deadlines, as they are required to submit reports to the Group's board by specific dates," Miedzinski explains. "The auditors rely on these reports to monitor the processes of the various divisions, and as the business grew, so the number of report requests grew, the backlog increased and the pressure on the auditors increased. We needed to empower the auditors to run the queries themselves."
Auditors were provided with an industry-standard front-end - ACL, which hooks into the Sybase warehouse via ODBC with the facility to integrate with any other document sources. "Using this combination users can access the warehouse with minimal transformation of data," Miedzinski explains. "It takes the user about half-an-hour to pull the biggest table consisting of millions of records. It would take two weeks to get the same data from the mainframe. If a mistake is made, the auditor simply retraces his activities and runs the request again - it doesn't mean having to go through a whole development cycle all over again, as was the case when we were having to write programs to extract data from the mainframe."
With ready access to the group's data, auditors have more freedom to extract data in any format they require, and have become more creative in their approach. "In the past the auditors were limited by the speed at which the reports were extracted," Miedzinski says. "Now their only limitation is their own creativity. This adds considerable value to the division in that they are able to detect errors promptly, and have identified fraudulent activities sooner."
"Existing data warehouse databases are being pushed to their limit as they try to accommodate the throngs of users accessing them over the Web," comments Julie Tomlinson, Sybase's marketing manager. "Sybase Adaptive Server IQ with Multiplex is a new architecture. It answers 21st century requirements with 21st century technology. Designed from the ground up for data warehousing, IQ with Multiplex meets the demands of the new generation Web-warehousing and without OLTP tradeoffs."
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