The Harvard Business Review has posted a “script” of a scene from The PowerPoint Zone between a general manager and a new college graduate.  The manager hired the grad to work with lengthy PowerPoint “decks.”  He asks the new grad to take a PowerPoint deck and change all of the circles to squares one by one.  Though this interchange between the two is humorous, it is also troubling.  Why would a culture like ours require its best-and-brightest to spend tens of thousands of dollars on graduate and post-graduate education and then remand them to a fate of editing PowerPoint slides?  What’s especially telling about this scenario is that it happens frequently to auditors.  I have heard numerous stories of auditors taking workpapers in PowerPoint or other Office applications and simply copying-and-pasting data from one document to another while making subtle changes.  If this is our fate as a professional society, we are wasting resources. 

It is time for auditors to automate their documentation process using reliable information technology tools.  This will require us to change the way we understand audit documentation — in the future, audit documentation will not be trapped within “documents” but will be driven through social networks that cause monitoring systems to respond based on contents of the documentation.  The ‘Facebook Age’ is coming to auditors and will be here whether we are ready or not.