Design woes leaving IT folk out of control

摘要

A bad control is often a good control that doesn't work effectively. The opera-tive word in that statement is "effectively'': evaluation requires an understanding of the control's intent within the context of the system and the business. It is here that IT people often stumble when designing controls. Without an understanding of the intended result, they may craft ones that follow formulaic business rules but nevertheless miss the point, says Will O'Brien, presi-dent of the Manta Group. In financial systems, an example of an application control is a program that records invoic- es on the general ledger whenever invoices are issued, in order to track the financial flow, he says. "You can program an application control just by reading the usiness rules, but that's not sufficient. You need to have a general control that is more of a manual process.