Jay’s experience working with PWC’s clientele was that teams are working from home or in a mixed home/office environment. This is driving the adoption of digital processes to new levels. All organizations make use of manual processes, but the effect of distributed working is beginning to eliminate manual workarounds. Instead, replacing them are digital processes that meet corporate standards of transparency, auditability, and control, regardless of where someone is working.

Jay felt that these digital processes enabled more centralization of systems that promoted greater consistency, accuracy, and transparency. Maintaining proper risk management, policy compliance, and regulatory compliance is very important, especially where many of these issues change regularly in a fluid situation, and where staff has to be made aware of the updates. Jay also felt that this capability also provided enhanced litigation protection for class actions.

One paradoxical development? More use of manual EUCs

Jay also observed that while this elimination of manual processes has helped significantly, teams have paradoxically also invested further in using manual applications to fulfill their responsibilities. Staff are adopting EUCs – End User Computing applications – even more enthusiastically away from the office, given the challenges of collaborating with developers in the corporate IT function.

These applications can be Excel Spreadsheets, applications developed in SAS, MATLAB, or Python environments, or data visualization tools like Tableau. These are powerful, but uncontrolled, falling outside the realm of a corporate IT function. This lack of control can expose the business to multiple compliance, risk, and operational issues.

Jay suggested that the best practice for managing these EUCs isn’t to ban them, but to manage them proactively, like any other application. Organizations should apply the principles of application lifecycle management to support their development, management, and ultimately, their retirement. This capability needs a central EUC inventory, combined with self-attestation to capture the right application parameters – the significance to the business, any connections to other applications, and the application’s ownership, for example.