Abstract:

The proposed methodology  supports operational excellence by raising the Information security - IT audit knowledge base to the level of corporate governance. The market success of the enterprises depends on the ability to support their business processes. A possibility for exploring ways of this support is to extend information security - IT audit knowledge base to the top management, as tools for improving operations. This might even propagate to the staff the strategic importance of these disciplines, beyond the compliance to laws, and to the requirements of government administration. An illustration of the method is the improvement of corporate operations even during an outsource process. Top management usually decides to outsource an activity to spare at least some of its costs. Unfortunately, in quite a lot of cases, beyond a decrease in headcount - that looks nice at the stock exchanges, anyway - otsource does not yield other benefits. Even the quality of the outsourced services might deteriorate. In the followings examples for the identification of such corporate activities will be presented, and the way of exploring their desirable characteristics will be shown, that might help not only in avoiding disadvantages of outsource, but even in gaining advantages for both sides: to the customer and to the supplier just as well.