On the Net: How Aetna's Internal Audit Department has built a home cyberspace

Internal Auditor, August, 1996 by Serge Beaulieu, Jimmy Nasr, Douglas Rath

After seeing the Net as an opportunity to network with the worldwide audit community, share ideas and best practices, and participate in discussions about differences between audit department approaches, our Internal Audit Department at Aetna Life Insurance Company established its own Internet site. While we were enthusiastic about this project from the beginning, we realized that we needed a clear and shared understanding of what we wanted to do. We developed a formal project plan, which included our milestones, main tasks, sub-tasks, and time frames, and we identified eight major steps for success:

1. Defining content.

2. Choosing project staff.

3. Communicating with other involved parties.

4. Doing on-line research.

5. Constructing the home page.

6. Testing the home page.

7. "Going live."

8. Maintaining the home page and fostering continuous improvement.

Like other organizations, Aetna Life Insurance Company is capitalizing on this rapidly expanding information resource. We're able to illustrate what is special about our department while maintaining a full-time presence where we can be reached. It's a concept that other internal audit shops may also want to consider.

* Defining Content

Our biggest lesson learned from this stage of the work was that time spent at the beginning of the project to clearly define content is extremely valuable. In considering the content of our home page, we assessed the amount of information we wanted to provide. As regular users of the Net, we knew that too little information would result in a site that was uninteresting and offered browsers little value. On the other hand, too much information, or information that was poorly organized, might frustrate users and reduce the number of return visitors.

We decided that the initial content of our home page would include information about our department; examples of successful audit workplans to be studied and emulated by others; and summaries of useful books reviewed and evaluated by members of our department. As the project progressed, this list evolved to also include links to other Aetna sites, information about employment opportunities within the department, current topics, and motivational quotes.

We quickly identified a general flow of information and drew a chart showing the different tiers of information (files) that we needed to link together in order to set up the home page structure. This chart also helped us to define a naming convention to simplify the assembly of the pages and their future maintenance.

* Choosing Project Staff

We believe that quality people are absolutely essential to creating a quality product. After assessing the tasks required to get our project off the ground, we specified the following essential skills for project staff:

* Ability to set direction.

* Knowledge of electronic communication and the Internet.

* Knowledge of auditing.

* Ability to communicate and negotiate with other involved parties in the organization, including internal department sources, to develop home page content and enable implementation.

* Knowledge of Internet etiquette. It is generally agreed, for instance, that the Internet should be used to share information, not for purely commercial purposes.

* Ability and willingness to learn HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

The core team we developed to create the home page included the director of audit, the manager of audit's information technology (IT) services team, and two IT auditors/desktop specialists. Subsequent maintenance and continuous improvement of the home page will be managed by different teams within the department.

* Communicating with Other Involved Parties

Just as the Internet is composed of many inter-linked, yet independent, computer sites, developing an Internet presence requires extensive communication with interested, and sometimes independent, parties. We communicated with the following entities, among others, as we developed our site:

In-house Internet Experts

Our home page development coincided with the deployment of an in-house corporate Internet server, registered as www.aetna.com. The Internal Audit Department's address is a sub-area of the server, www.aetna.com/audit/. The deployment gave us the opportunity to collaborate with our IT support team as we carried out most of our testing of the home page and the server.

External Internet Service Providers

We explored many server services available through external providers. We found that most external providers, which were usually local companies, offered reliable, comprehensive services at relatively low prices. Corporate prices ranged from $100 a month for fairly basic services, to more than $2,000 a month for comprehensive services that included WWW, electronic mail, and FTP, at very fast transmission speeds.

Corporate Communications

We communicated with our corporate communications department to ensure the content and presentation of the material on our home page was within the external communication guidelines set for the company. Even though there are very few national, local, or even corporate standards on home page content, legal considerations such as copyright laws need to be taken into account before setting up an Internet site.