Continuous Assurance and Business Compliance in Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

The increase of reliability and compliance of business processes is currently a major concern of organizations which simultaneously intend to achieve their organizational objectives and be compliant with external regulations. Thus, organizations are frequently looking for methods, tools and solutions which enable them to improve business compliance, and reduce the likelihood of situations that may jeopardize their operational performance and corporate image. This chapter aims to bring together a set of results and conclusions from a research project whose purpose was to conceptualize and validate an innovative solution which simultaneously monitors and audits organizational transactions executed in Enterprise Information Systems. A prototype was developed and deployed in a near-real environment. From the results, we conclude that the prototype offers Continuous Assurance services and is applicable to any organizational transaction, regardless of its type, dimension, business area or even its information system support technology. This independence is guaranteed by the abstraction level of an ontological model which is used to represent the organizational transaction we intend to monitor and audit. A case study enabled us to confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposal in business compliance.