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During the past decade, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementations have exponentially grown within first large and then small- and medium-sized enterprises. Contemporary implementations, often through application service providers (ASPs), increase already existing pressures to adopt the embedded “best practices” that have been incorporated into the ERP software. The result is the rapid spread of generic business processes enabled through one of only a handful of leading ERP packages. This chapter focuses on the extant research on biodiversity and its focus on the negative effects of monoculture strategies – that is, the focus on a single crop (system) versus a diversity of crops (systems). The biodiversity research establishes a clear pattern of deleterious effects resulting from the vulnerabilities of monoculture strategies. These patterns are mirrored in the ERP environment as vulnerabilities loom from the diminution of diverse business processes, limited adaptability to business environment changes given technology-driven/enabled processes, and increased susceptibility to widespread parasite damage through cyber-attacks. The implications of the study raise questions as to the sustainability of accounting systems, the business environment, and society as a whole from the rapid implementation of sterilized business processes and uniformly vulnerable enterprise software.

This chapter investigates if and how the introduction of an Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERPS) influences the information characteristics quality, timeliness and complexity. Subsequently we analyze whether the influence of an ERPS adoption on these information characteristics has an impact on the perceived value of information available for performance measurement (PM) purposes. On the basis of the extant literature a structural model is developed which tries to capture the direct and indirect effects of the degree of ERPS adoption on the perceived value of the information available for PM.

In this paper we report on the approach we have developed and the lessons we have learned in an implementation of the monitoring and control layer for continuous monitoring of business process controls (CMBPC) in the US internal IT audit department of Siemens Corporation. The architecture developed by us implements a completely independent CMBPC system running on top of Siemens’ own enterprise information system which has read-only interaction with the application tier of the enterprise system. Among our key conclusions is that “formalizability” of audit procedures and audit judgment is grossly underestimated. Additionally, while cost savings and expedience force the implementation to closely follow the existing and approved internal audit program, a certain level of reengineering of audit processes is inevitable due to the necessity to separate formalizable and non-formalizable parts of the program. Our study identifies the management of audit alarms and the prevention of the alarm floods as critical tasks in the CMBPC implementation process. We develop an approach to solving these problems utilizing the hierarchical structure of alarms and the role-based approach to assigning alarm destinations. We also discuss the content of the audit trail of CMBPC.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.