• Eliminate as many overlapping connectors as you can. Try again, again, again, again, and one more time. Overlap spaghetti is a sign that you have not really understood how to explain your architecture.
• After you eliminated your overlaps, you should be left with a grouping of boxes that is more or less logical. If there is a sequential process, there is a high chance that your boxes line up according to it. If things are related, they are probably located next to each other. In the previous steps, you looked purely for overlapping connectors, now go over your diagram again and think about function.

There are a few more on the full post, including one about adding colour which I like a lot but may not fit into the culture of a staid IA department. But it would work well for a presentation.

I could work with flowcharts every day, all day.

I love #flowcharts! Something about them just scratches that itch.

— Neil McIntyre (@neilmcintyre) March 31, 2016

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Their work appears to be geared toward tech workers, but the open plan office fad has spread to non-tech companies as well. I work in the very conservative construction and building materials industry and even my company is converting offices to open plan. It’s also taken the accounting firms by storm.

Executives and high-performance employees (HPEs) tend to optimize against completely different trade and life principles—they generally have very different views of the world. This disconnect shows itself very clearly in the environmental conditions of our creative and technical offices. My latest anonymous survey shows that 58% of HPEs need more private spaces for problem solving, and 54% of HPEs find their office environment too distracting.

It’s comforting to know I’m not the only person who finds the hustle and bustle of an open plan office to be distracting and to inhibit concentration. When companies move to open plans, perhaps they should make sure there’s sufficient quiet rooms available for everyone who wants them. At least half of us, it seems.

Check out the link for even more discussion around how innovation depends more on processes and time, not space.

When I looked at the Rocket Fueled People website, I found something else interesting. Part of the work they do is described culture auditing, which is something internal auditors can and should do more of. These types of findings are valuable for management.

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash

Business presentation design is a blend of practicing good design, and making compromises to deal with the practicality of working with lots of non-designers. Being able to deal with frequent changes, keeping design standards up (also on page 5 to 20), and making sure that everyone can make decent looking edits in the presentation.

Now, I’m painfully aware that the majority of auditors don’t give a hoot about designing a beautiful report or presentation. It’s a reliable source of frustration for me!

But the quote above is something I need to keep in mind when I notice misalignment of elements of a slide or poor structure in a Word document report.

As a profession, auditors are aware that effective communication skills are critical to being able to do our job well and make sure our clients know the value we bring to the organization. The content of our reports and presentations is most important, but good design facilitates effective communication of that content.

Photo by Alex Litvin on Unsplash

It would be so great if audit software did something like this, along with the audit specific features we need like work paper approval and sign-off, issue tracking, and report generation. All the audit software I’ve seen and used is just so clunky and poorly designed. I guess it’s too much of a niche market to get really well designed software that is polished and complete.

With Slack, you could set up a specific channel for each audit, or even sections within an audit (e.g. procurement), or phases of the audit (e.g. planning). Invite only those team members that are involved in that area of the audit to the channel, and add people later as needed. They’ll be able to read back and catch up on what’s happened before they joined.

So much of email is sending files back and forth, which would be eliminated with Slack. You wouldn’t even need to let someone know via email that a file’s been updated and is ready for review by the team or manager, since that communication would be within Slack too.

Are there any internal audit teams out there using Slack to reduce email volume and work collaboratively?

Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

David Myers, the former controller of WorldCom, recalled thinking that he was “helping people and doing the right thing” while perpetrating one of the largest accounting frauds in history. In his mind, the fraud was superficially sustaining the company, its stock price, and the jobs of its employees.

For some, the theory is that it was a simple cost-benefit calculation, underestimating the likelihood of being caught and, therefore, the cost. But the article linked to above notes that in other cases, there wasn’t a whole lot of calculating going on at all:

Waksal understood that calling his daughter and telling her to dump her shares was wrong. Since he knew the SEC monitors this kind of trading, his decision couldnâ€t possibly represent the careful reasoning of a self-made man who prided himself on his intellectual prowess. Had he actually put his mind to it, presumably he could have devised a better fraud.

Part of the problem is how separated the perpetrators of white-collar crime are from their victims, or how relatively small the impact of their fraud will be on them, in their minds. As businesses become bigger, and our communities grow and our connections to each other loosen, this will continue to be a big factor.

Actually the article doesn’t really conclude much. Some felt remorse, some didn’t. Most didn’t think things though, but if they did they underestimated the impact on their lives and their victims’ lives. Some acted out of perceived pressure to meet earnings targets, while others believed they were doing what was right and would be recognized as such (*cough* Fastow).

Interesting read, and always fun to read about the schemes and perpetrators’ justifications for them. Be vigilant, it can happen in your company.

The concept behind bitcoin, and other similar currencies, is the blockchain. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions, replicated across the network by members or users of the chain in sequence. Each new entry is timestamped and follows the previous valid transaction. A transaction, once validated, cannot be reversed. The strength of the process is rooted in the distributed nature of the blockchain. It’s basically a constantly updating database that everyone has a copy of, or at least part of a copy of it.

Deloitte held a Dbriefs webinar on blockchain on January 14. It was an introduction to all of us (it seemed) to the confusing concept of blockchain, and how it will be used in the future by businesses to conduct transactions. The Big Four are really starting to explore the potential of blockchain in this area.

In case I haven’t made it clear (and that’s a real possibility), the picture in this WSJ blog post is worth a thousand words, and at least several thousand of my words.

In talking to a friend of mine the other day about blockchain, he noted that the primary risk is on how distributed the blockchain is, or whether any single entity controls a significant part of it. This makes sense, because if any one entity controls a significant part of the chain, it can effect fraudulent transactions, and replicate them across the chain.

A second criticism of blockchain is whether there is anything original about it if there is no cryptocurrency involved. For bitcoin, it only exists in its blockchain. For transactions involving non-cryptocurrencies, is blockchain any different from a database with a distributed version of multiversion concurrency control?

I’m pretty interested to see where this technology takes us. How do you think bitcoin, and the blockchain, will be used in the future?

The main thing is never to act against your conscience, not to put your signature on documents you do not believe in, not to vote for those who you think should not be elected, not to approve decisions, not to applaud, not to pass on lies… not to pretend. Let your creed be ‘Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.â€

Back in Grade 11 English, I had to choose an author and read several of their books, and then do some kind of essay on their major themes and style. I chose Solzhenitsyn because I was fascinated with the Soviet Union.

Good advice to people in business: Don’t put your signature on documents you don’t believe in [electronic or otherwise]!

The hack placed new index.html and index.php pages in every folder, I learned upon further inspection of my hosted files via FTP. It made cleaning things up a bit tedious, but not difficult.

I think the problem was that I had several old WordPress installations hanging around on the server, which had vulnerabilities left unpatched by updates to newer versions. For example, I had an install from years ago where I just played around with new themes.

Before replacing/removing the added or changed index files, I first had to uninstall all the old WordPress sites, leaving only this one (which had always been kept updated).

I have learned some lessons, suffice it to say, about being diligent about security.

1. WordPress updates – Always update to the latest version right away!
2. Remove old WordPress installations that are no longer being used (and kept up to date)
3. Backups – Make them regularly

It did have one benefit, however: It forced me to become reacquainted with my blog and all the files on the server. I’ve been neglecting this place over the past few years. I aim to change that going forward.

I tweeted this to Rogers, one of Canada’s big telecom companies:

https://twitter.com/neilmcintyre/status/667060548908032000

Every month, I’m billed for my mobile phone service and cable TV on the 11th. Rogers bills in advance of the services being performed, but that’s a subject for another day.

The problem is, I usually don’t have access to the bill until much, much later. When it’s available, I get a notification email.

I started to wonder whether this is a process issue with invoicing (i.e. producing a complete and accurate invoice), or perhaps an interface issue between their usage tracking system(s) and the customer-facing, web-based system. If I had to guess, I would think it’s probably the latter.

But it raises the question as to whether it’s appropriate to backdate the invoice when it’s clearly not created on the invoice date. The question becomes more pertinent when the customer is a business with payment terms based on the invoice date, but that’s not relevant here. (That does cause me to wonder whether it would be beneficial for B2C companies to offer their customers payment terms, but I’m guessing someone already ran the numbers on this.)

Thinking about cutoff, their revenue recognition would be based on when the services are rendered and the amounts are earned, so that takes us back to the fact that they’re billing in advance of those services, and thus that should be accounted for properly, irrespective of invoice dates.

In any case, on November 21 I received notification via email that my invoice was available online. Of course, it was dated November 11.

Update 2015/12/18: December’s bill, dated the 11th, arrived today (a bit earlier!)

Anyway, what’s new with you? It’s been a while…