Have you met Allen, Director of Internal Audit Services? Spend the next few minutes getting to know him a little better.
Where is your favourite place on campus?
I love it over by the Faculty Club where they have those old houses. It has a very strong sense of place and gravitas.
Tablet or paper?
Tablet, though I do find myself still having to use paper occasionally.
Name one thing you've brought to work from home.
My tablet! Or rather, my Microsoft Surface that is.
What is the one thing you can't live without?
I know this is probably clichéd: my smartphone. It's basically an appendage at this point.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Butan. I regret not going there when I was in Nepal.
You can invite anyone - alive or dead, real or fictional - to dinner. Who would it be?
Leonard Cohen. There's something about him and his mind that I just find interesting - his worldview, his perspective. Otherwise, if I could bring anybody, it would probably be Aristotle. I have an undergrad degree in philosophy after all.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
With someone in strategic communications, government relations, something like that. I think it would be very fascinating.
What does "uplifting the whole people" mean to you?
David Turpin said something at my orientation that I found profound - he said if you look from the middle ages to now, there's around sixty institutions that have survived since then including churches, governments, and things like that. But out of those sixty, around forty of them are universities - they've outlasted countries and monarchies. So when you're talking about "the whole people," you're not just talking about a traditional view of a university as a pinnacle of higher learning and mankind's knowledge base, it's also making it more egalitarian - it's a public good. Right now public opinion of universities, particularly in North America, is shifting away from it being a public good to more of a private good. I think what "uplifting the whole people" is talking about is having the university be broad instead of elitist.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
I think the biggest issue facing us as a species is our ability to create technology but not adapt quickly enough to it, and how it in turn runs amok on us. You can see this in a number of things. Technology typically always drives a change in culture, but it's always behind - technology leads out it front. I fear that as the rate of technological development continues to accelerate, we will become even more out of touch with it. So I'd like to see some sort of start to us recognizing that issue globally and thinking about how we are going to start closing that gap.
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
Presence. Common vision. Decentralized - my manager summed it up very well when she called the U of A's structure a "federal model", which is very different from anywhere else I've worked.
About Allen Amyotte
Allen Amyotte is the Director, Internal Audit & University Auditor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and has held this title since May of 2018. The internal audit function is responsible for both compliance and continuous auditing (data analytics) in addition to operational and internal controls auditing. Allen holds an honours baccalaureate degree in liberal arts from the University of Saskatchewan. Allen is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and holds a Certification in Risk Management Assessment (CRMA). He is also a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.