Audit Your Organisation

Overview of this component

Traditionally, audits were mainly associated with gaining information about financial systems and the financial records of a company or a business. However, recent auditing has begun to include other information about the system, such as information about security risks, information systems performance. The general definition of an audit is an evaluation of a person, organisation, system, process, enterprise, project or product. Audits are performed to ascertain the validity and reliability of information, so right here at the beginning of the AmbITion process, be brutally honest with yourselves about where you are at now. By understanding the complete picture of your situation now, you’ll be able to see what your starting point is and so plan accordingly.

What is your Aspiration?

Any digital development is not just about the technology. Its about enhancing the potential of your organisation to be better equipped for the 21^st century. It’s about your artistic content, your audience development, your organisational and your business model development. If your digital development idea comes from the core passion and purpose of your organisation, then you’re starting on the right foot.

What is your Capability?

Do you have experience of implementing change and introducing new systems before? (this experience doesn’t have to be digital/IT related – change and new systems tend to impact people and their ways of working, and this will need sensitive management).

What is your expertise?

The motivation and commitment to the digital development journey needs to be owned by the Chief Executive of the organisation. You may have a digital native in-house who can lead or support the process.

It might be useful to carry out a staff ICT skills audit: we used Survey Monkey with some AmbITion organisations to achieve this (it allowed people to complete the audit through an online questionnaire, which could be anonymous, and automatically aggregates responses into easy to read tables, etc.

Take a look at our resource: How to... Recruit Staff for Digital Developments.

At this stage you can identify if you need to bring in an expert to facilitate your journey through the thinking and planning process. Seriously consider whether, if the project is big, complex or involves technologies that are new, you might need to work with an appropriate consultant who understands digital development within an arts sector setting.

What is your Capacity?

What else have you got going on? Can you manage an IT implementation/and manage the impact of change on the organisation and staff at the same time as your ongoing activity and any other organisational developments currently on the go?

What is your Commitment?

Is the level of buy-in high throughout the whole organisation? Everyone needs to be involved in the thinking, so that the project ends up completely integrated across the whole organisation. That means your board should be involved, the Senior Management Team, the digital natives in your team and everyone else!

If your board is a bit risk-averse on the subject of Digital Development; or if you’re the digital expert in the organisation needing to influence your SMT/board, then AmbITion’s How To… Help Your Board and SMT Get Digital will be useful.

Audit your IT

Use the IT Audit template to help you do this. Once you have completed the IT audit use the Technology Planning Template to list issues, details, assign priority, and allocate timescales.

Describe what you have done in terms of digital development so far.  What impact have these developments had on your organisation’s core objectives and/or particular strategies?

What IT systems are in place in each department? You need to describe all the functions that you use IT for operationally, and list which software and hardware is utilised. What’s your support, back up and replacement procedures? Do you have any policies relation to IT or digital in place?

How do you use ICT to communicate with:

- each other
- your stakeholders
- your audiences
- potential audiences

You also need to describe how the organisation’s webpresence is set up. What platforms do you use to do what, and who updates them? What digital content is made? How and by whom? Capture baseline information on webpresence platforms (eg. How many Facebook Fans? How many unique monthly visits to your website? How many podcast downloads? etc.)

Note what systems do or do not interface with each other (eg. “we use ConstantContact for our subscribers email list, but our education database of teachers’ emails is on a different Access database”).

What’s next?

At this stage you might feel a bit overwhelmed! Its normal for cultural organizations to get a fright at this stage, particularly if the IT set up and digital developments have previously been ad hoc or piecemeal. But you know where you are at, now. The next stage of the AmbITion Approach is the uplifting part: brainstorming and thinking about where you would like to be! You will also be diagnosing what IT and digital developments you will need to implement to get to where you want to be, from where you are now.