This model offers significant value for Risk, Compliance, and Audit leaders, especially as organizations plan for 2022 and beyond. It helps answer essential questions around how value is defined, delivered, and elevated from basic satisfaction to true stakeholder delight.
Key questions this model helps address include:
- How do we think about customer satisfaction?
- How do we decide what to build in order to deliver it?
- How do we move beyond satisfaction into delight?
Indifferent Requirements
Indifferent requirements are activities or features that add little or no value to stakeholders and are often maintained only out of habit.
- Testing a sample of 25 items rather than 10 without added insight.
- Low-value audits such as T&E, AP, Fixed Assets, or Payroll performed routinely without risk context.
- Time reporting that is not linked to project completion or exception tracking.
- Overly lengthy disclaimers and issue descriptions in audit reports.
Reverse Requirements
Reverse requirements are activities that stakeholders actively perceive as negative or counterproductive.
- Impractical or unrealistic audit recommendations.
- Recommending multiple suppliers when only one viable supplier exists globally.
- Advising additional headcount solely to achieve segregation of duties.
- Implementing complex systems purely for compliance purposes.
- Outdated risk identification, such as requiring formal backups when data is already replicated in the cloud.
- Misleading analysis, such as reporting cost increases without explaining one-time drivers.
Competition
A core purpose of the Kano Model is to win in environments with many competing products or services. For Risk, Compliance, and Audit functions, competition comes from multiple internal and external information sources.
CFOs, CEOs, CROs, and Audit Committees are inundated with data and analysis from FP&A teams, controllers, external auditors, regulators, sales and operations leaders, analysts, consultants, competitive developments, legislative changes, tax initiatives, and cybersecurity incidents.
The question for RCA leaders is whether they are sufficiently aware of, and differentiated from, these competing channels of insight.
You Know You Are in the “Delight” Zone When
- The CFO seeks your opinion on potential M&A activity, new systems, cyber risk prevention, or policy design.
- Your team looks to you for guidance on career development and training decisions.
- Process owners proactively involve you when considering process changes.
- External auditors value and reference your analysis on audit differences or control deficiencies.
