The Fourth Dimension of Information System Audit and Security

摘要

Information system audit and control methodologies have come a long way from a small beginning fifty years ago. In a competitive flat world, large non-governmental enterprises affect the society in so many ways that the failure of a large enterprise is not only an issue of interest to its shareholders or its employees but also to the society, at large. The global financial meltdown has shown that ordinary tax-payers have to step in to save such large enterprises by infusing public funds. Today there is no objective metric to measure whether an enterprise has behaved responsibly and whether public funds should be used to save it. In this paper, the authors have proposed that the annual system audit/security function for an enterprise should be expanded to include a focused report on how socially responsible the enterprise has been during the year. The authors have developed a metric, based on Millennium Development Goals for measuring the social responsibility component in the working of an enterprise. The authors propose that this metric be used as the fourth dimension for IS Audit and Security to annually evaluate every enterprise.