Information systems audit and control issues with enterprise management systems: qualitative evidence

Abstract

Today, organisations may have production applications running on multiple servers, spread geographically throughout the organization. In such circumstances, organisations will look to software assistance through packages collectively known as Enterprise Management Systems (EMS). This paper shows how the introduction of such software creates a new set of IS audit and control problems for such environments. Five sites were interviewed and case studied. While many audit issues were identified, the following problems were clearly highlighted in the cases: a lack of backup in terms of critical human resources; change controls are often nonexistent; possible malfunction of scripts causing various impacts including loss of data integrity; and, pre-emption of the execution of critical production systems crippling the entire production environment. Moreover, while the academic and practice literatures were found to be comprehensive regarding the audit and control issues peculiar to the EMS environment, the study identified issues that are not covered in the literature.