Information Technology Cost Estimation Agencies Need to Address Significant Weakness in Policies and Practices
To estimate reliable cost for the sucess of an IT program by providing the basis for the informed decision making and realistic budget information. To assess the extent to which selected departments ... and agencies have appropriately implement costestimating policies an procedures(four caracteristics of a reliable cost estimation: comprehensive, well-documented, accurate, credible). ... IT cost estimation ... Check out what may go wrong with the information technology cost estimation. Results of the US GAO audit can help to identify high risk areas: comprehensiveness of estimations, their documentation ... , lack of adequacy and inadequate implementation.
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Performance Audit of Public Debt Management Information Systems
and External Financing Department – Ministry’s organizational unit responsible for public debt management. Audit team evaluated the activities of the IT service provider - LEPL Financial-Analytical Service ... implemented by the Public Debt and External Financing Department of the MOF. Hereby, the audit team also to assessed systems’ data integrity and security. In the course of the audit, the audit team also studied ... The usage and development of the information technologies in public financial management is an important priority of the country at the phase of intensive implementation of electronic governance ... ... More effective IT governance needed ... Importance of effective performance of public debt management e-systems may be explained by the world’s increased dependence on such systems. In parallel with the performance audit of debt management ... information systems of the Ministry Of Finance of Georgia, Supreme Audit Institutions of 11 countries also studied this topic, both in terms of systems’ performance and their practical application by local ... financial institutions. Audit conducted by the State Audit Office of Georgia has revealed security and governance shortcomings related to management and usage of these systems.
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Copyright Office Needs to Develop Plans that Address Technical and Organizational Challenges
, the Copyright Office registers about 500,000 creative works a year for copyright and records documentation related to copyright transfer and sale. In recent years, the Register of Copyrights has discussed ... The mission of the Copyright Office, a service unit within the Library of Congress, is to promote creativity by administering and sustaining a national copyright system. As part of this mission ... the need for a modernized Copyright Office, to include upgrades to the current IT environment. ... No justified investments without IT strategy ... GAO shows in its report on the US Copyright Office, what is a role of IT strategy in organisaion. Effects can be found at the bottom and at the top: the lack of strategic plan can make it more ... difficult to solve practical problems, but it can also put the overall mission of the Office at risk.
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Traffic Ticketing information system
tickets) and also the internal environment of the System that guarantees the quality of its performance and safety. ... The audit included two areas of focus - the environment surrounding the Traffic Ticketing Information System - the System (designed to input, process, manage and collect payment for the traffic ... Security can hinder effectiveness ... SAI of Kuwait analysed system supporting collection of the traffic tickets - data input, processing and management. What was found was lack of basic safety measures, that hindered the effectiveness ... of the system.
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Management and protection of assets in the field of the information-communication technologies at the ME SR
internal and security directives, unidentified critical and strategic Information Systems (IS), absolutely unsatisfying principles, procedures, conditions and policy relating to the data backuping (and ... The Supreme Audit office of the Slovak Republic (SAO SR) has conducted the audit at the Ministry of Environment of the Slovak Republic (ME SR) for the audit period 2011 and 2012 to examine ... the compliance with the generally binding legal regulations and the general statues in the field of the information-communication technologies (ICT) and the information systems of the public administration (ISPA ... ... Started from contracting, ended in security ... The perceptive and filled with findings audit - conducted by the Slovak SAI - discovered the list of issues which started in careless contracting procedures, failure to update the development concept ... and ended in exposing the organization to high security risks.
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Management of Information Resources of the Ministry of the Interior
Many activities of the Ministry of the Interior require the use of information resources that are of great significance to the entire State, such as the state and departmental registers, and public ... information systems. Whereas the Ministry has failed to implement some of the public audit recommendations of 2007 and 2010,6 we analysed, whether there have been any positive changes in the field of IT ... management. Their impact is important not only because the Ministry manages 16 information resources, which ensure data availability to the population, efficient activity of the services, and operation ... ... Process maturity examination can help in IT audit ... Main risk areas in case of this audit were strategic and organisational - Ministry’s weak ownership of IT resources, insufficient audit and internal control function. SAI Lithuania auditors found ... also flaws in change management and security processes. But the finding, which gave them the key to the root cause of problems, was connected with maturity assessment of the auditee's IT processes.
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Management of Police Information Resources
Police tasks of the necessary data are processed departmental registers, information systems, automated data processing systems and networks where information is stored, processed and transferred ... to the classified information. The police department has all of these information resources, so the audit focused on the activities and actions of the Department to ensure planning and organizing of the recourses ... , monitoring, evaluation and coordination and other aspects of registers and IS strategic management. The audited period was 2012-2014. For the analysis, there were used previous data and data of 2015 ... ... Fundamentals of IT organisation ... Review by SAI Lithuania makes readers aware that nowadays it is difficult to develop a larger IT system without whole conceptual infrastracture: planning composed into strategy of the organisation ... and well understood architecture of information. Well functioning IT management structures, which on the other hand may sound trivial, were proved here as the key to success.
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Report on the government’s processing of confidential data on persons and companies
Rigsrevisionen has examined how eight government institutions process confidential data on persons and companies in 11 selected IT systems. The report is based on IT audits carried out in connection ... with the annual audit in the spring 2014. The purpose of the audit was to assess whether confidential data on persons and companies are adequately protected by the government institutions. ... ... Inadequate protection of confidential data ... If a government institution does not protect confidential data to the extent necessary, the risk that third parties get unauthorized access to the data is very high. In opinion of the Danish SAI ... , inadequate protection of confidential data may also erode the citizens’ and companies’ confidence in government data security. That may eventually become a barrier for the continued efforts to implement ... e-government and make government administration more efficient.
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General and Creation Control of the Information Systems of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The objective of the audit was to assess general and creation control of the information systems of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since the beginning of 2009, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has ... achieved considerable progress in the management of the information systems. The auditors reviewed and assessed all key elements of the process. ... Overview of problems - area by area ... SAI Lithuania looked into all critical elements of a Ministry's information system, starting from IT architecture, through information security to automation of data processing.
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Management of Information Resources of the Ministry of Agriculture
The Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania has managed 32 information systems and registers. Of these, 24 ones are managed, developed and upgraded by a state enterprise subordinate ... to the Ministry of Agriculture, the Agricultural Information and Rural Business Centre. The annual amount allocated by the Ministry for the maintenance of the Centre totals LTL 17.5 million on average ... . The objective of the audit was to assess the general and development controls of the information resources of the Ministry of Agriculture. The audit was conducted at the Ministry of Agriculture and the state ... ... Without appropiate IT management  it is hard to achieve reliable, consistent and secure systems for agriculture ... Since 1996 the Ministry has been using information systems of varying complexity for collecting and processing data, including personal data. The Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania ... has managed 32 information systems and registers. SAI of Lithuania revealed that systems were not well mantained what affected use of funds devoted to the systemsand also their legality and security.
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