Evolution, risks, controls, and strategies

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Oh no, not more IT people who think they know about accountancy

"A big part of the problem here arises because accounting ideas are extremely stable over time while IT ideas are not. Thus our idea of a system wide control is fifty or more years ahead of theirs "

Well the ideas are exactly the same. You have controls in place to detect discrepancies and then find and eliminate the causes of those discrepancies. If there is a discrepancy then it means something has gone wrong, if it is in an automated system then you have a systematic failure (a bug). The only difference IT makes is to make the controls more automated (and ought to make them more reliable, if you have competent IT people who understand finance).

Anyone who thinks IT ideas are moving forward at an incredible rate has been listening to too many Microsoft, IBM and Sun salesmen.

I have had to work on so many systems that have a financial component that have been designed by people who don't even have a clue about the basic principles of bookkeeping that I have long lost tolerance with IT people who seem to have nothing but scorn for accountants.

What would you trust? A system that was designed by a genius of the Italian renaissance (Pacioli the inventor of double entry bookkeeping) and has been working extremely well for the last four hundred years or a C++ programmer with an enormously inflated sense of his own importance (and without a clue about basic business knowledge). In this respect IT never actually catches up with accounting, the idea that IT is fifty years ahead is a complete joke.

The IT ideas that keep changing are hype largely, the important ideas haven't changed much at all.

Posted by: jorwell   Posted on: 08/02/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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