Blue Ocean Strategy – Internal-Audit Growth Areas

Objective:

Today’s internal audit function is confronted with a surging area of compliance. Modern compliance departments occupy fields of service traditionally provided by auditing operations – among other areas in the form of classic conformity audits. This often generates a climate of conflict within the company which necessitates a clear delineation of responsibilities. The necessity of a strategic repositioning and a reconfiguration of the existing audit-services portfolio arises as an immediate consequence of these circumstances.

Within the workshop’s framework, participants learn to tap fields of expansion systematically to the advantage of their internal audit team. The task employs current strategy models in a gradual manner. In the process, ARC’s “audit strategy as balance” approach combines the two classic schools of strategy. These consist of a “resource-based approach” (RBA) and a “market-based approach” (MBA). Based on practical state-of-the-art strategy approaches as formulated by US-American Professor Richard d’Aveni and others, ARC develops aggression-and-defense strategies for clients. In this effort, the ARC team employs what meanwhile has become an often-used technique known as “blue ocean strategy” for its clients. The approach originally was propagated by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of The Blue Ocean Strategy Institute at the Paris-based international graduate business school and research institution INSEAD. Its focus is on the high growth and profits an organization can generate by creating new demand in an uncontested market space, or a “blue ocean,” rather than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers for known customers in an existing industry.

With respect to internal audits, ARC has expanded this strategy approach and meanwhile conducted various strategy-consulting projects on the basis of this methodology for audits in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. This places the consulting team in a position to employ its experience drawn from repositioning projects already conducted and clearly demonstrate its capability based on practical examples.