The auditing profession faced considerable challenges in 2020. Workplace closures, temporary or otherwise, and travel constraints during the COVID-19 pandemic restricted access to workplaces, forcing many audit firms to consider remote auditing techniques in an attempt to maintain their service and the quality of their assurance. This was no more evident in 2020 than in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, which endured a strict 112-day lockdown complete with curfews and severe travel restrictions. This presentation outlines Verus’ experience adopting, trialling, and evaluating different technologies to support remote auditing and how the industry can improve its effectiveness as the pandemic continues to affect the auditing profession in 2021 and beyond.

Cameron Clark is a highly experienced auditor with more than 10 years as a certified Exemplar Global auditor for OHS management systems, completing large and small audit programs as part of self-insurance requirements, management system certification, and internal assurance programs. Cameron is also a Queensland government-approved self-insurance auditor. Cameron works carefully with organizations to identify the objectives of their audit program, refining audit approaches to better engage with those being audited, and minimize the strain and anxiety that audit programs can cause to deliver a beneficial program that focuses on improvements that can have a truly material impact on an organization’s performance. His auditing experience has been drawn from a wide variety of industries in Australia, including from defense, air transport, local government, healthcare, manufacturing, property management, transport and logistics, retail, and finance. Cameron’s cross-sector experience affords him the ability to quickly and easily adapt audit programs so that they are tailored to specific activities, risks, and environments that enhance the quality of information from assurance programs and enable organizations to make decisions driven by high-quality information.

Health care delivery organizations are complex adaptive systems that operate in highly complex and unpredictable environments. The science of those systems assumes that much of organizational life is uncertain and unpredictable, hence it cannot be standardized and controlled. The COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder that we live in a highly complex and unpredictable world; for health care delivery organizations, effective responses to the pandemic have required departures from many conventional practices. This presentation will tackle the quality management, risk management, environmental management aspects, and how to plan while meeting the clinical standards.

Rola Hammoud, MD, DA, MHM, FACHE, is an anesthesiologist and chief medical executive at Clemenceau Medical Center in Dubai, as well as the president of the Lebanese Society for Quality and Safety in Healthcare. She is American board-certified in healthcare management from the American College of Healthcare Executives and is certified from the Harvard School of Business in the management of health care delivery for executives. Dr. Hammoud holds a master’s degree in hospital management from the ESA Business School and University Paris VII (France), as well as a teaching diploma and a mediation diploma. In addition, she is an academic lecturer on patient safety and risk management and a reviewer for anesthesia and quality journals. She is a speaker on healthcare quality and accreditation and an expert on the national committee for the Lebanese accreditation standards development as well as a training faculty for the surveyors of the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Dr. Hammoud founded the Lebanese Society for Quality & Safety in Healthcare in 2012 and was elected twice as its president

The ongoing global pandemic has been a sad reminder that plans are always vulnerable to unexpected and tragic disruption. In the realm of business, having a robust business continuity management system (BCMS) helps ensure that organizations are aware of their internal and external risks and are taking steps to address them in advance. In this session, the presenter will offer a look at BCMS and how a standard such as ISO 22301 can help organizations improve their resiliency.

Dhiraj Lal is the executive director of Continuity and Resilience (CORE). He has worked with the American Express Global Financial Centre (BCM Head for 3 years), Standard Chartered (5 years, Abu Dhabi and Dubai), and Citigroup (10 years, last as regional head of audit, covering also business continuity. He is a former chair of the BCI Forums in Delhi and the UAE. As Asia’s first BCM technical expert, he was invited by BSI in 2007 to help assess two of the first 10 organizations in the world to be BCM certified. He has twice been invited to present at BCI World and also by itSMF (UK), Data Centre Dynamics (UK), DRI Asia (Malaysia), ISACA (UAE), DRI (US), and also various conferences in the UAE, KSA, and India. He is a contributing author to the Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Planning, and co-author of the Step by Step Guide—AE/SCNS/NCEMA 7000:2015, Implement BCM the UAE Way!

Innovation management is a key ingredient for organizations that wish to grow and develop new markets and offerings. The key to successful innovation is imbuing a sense of “intrapreneurship” throughout all layers of the company. In this session, the presenter explains the nature of innovation on the operational level, shows how the organization can develop intrapreneurs, and offers a perspective on why implementing and auditing against the ISO 56000 family of standards on innovation management can help jumpstart this process.

Alice de Casanove is in charge of innovation culture at Airbus North America, where she fosters a relevant mindset to accelerate future businesses. She leads the cultural roadmap for digitalization and anchors Airbus values. Alice plays a determinant role in the publication of the ISO reference on good practices in innovation management (ISO 5600 series). Since 2013, she has chaired the international committee gathering more than 50 countries in close coordination with WTO, OECD, WIPO, and the World Bank. Alice began her career in a video deep-tech start-up before joining French telecom manufacturer Sagem to manage and develop the value of their Innovation portfolio. She later develop video technologies for Actimagine, which became the Nintendo Europe R&D Center. Alice graduated from Telecom Paristech and is finishing a Ph.D. on the relationships between large corporations and start-ups within Lorraine University.