Information Audit

Information Audit

The Information Audit (IA) extends the concept of auditing holistically from a traditional scope of accounting and finance to the organisational information management system. Information is representative of a resource which requires effective management and this led to the development of interest in the use of an IA.

Prior the 1990s and the methodologies of Orna, Henczel, Wood, Buchanan and Gibb, IA approaches and methodologies focused mainly upon an identification of formal information resources (IR). Later approaches included an organisational analysis and the mapping of the Information flow. This gave context to analysis within an organisation’s information systems and a holistic view of their IR and as such could contribute to the development of the Information Systems Architecture (ISA). In recent years the IA has been overlooked in favour of the systems development process which can be less expensive than the IA, yet more heavily technically focused, project specific (not holistic) and does not favour the top-down analysis of the IA.