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South African business organisations operate in an environment that is changing rapidly. One of the key drivers of this change is advances in information technology (IT). Accountants are educated at various tertiary institutions to prepare them to be competent as information and knowledge workers in the South African business environment. This article aims to determine the nature and demands of the South African business and the IT environment in which accountants must function. This analysis identifies the context within which IT skills are applied by accountants by investigating the South African business and IT environment to determine how educational institutions could ensure that the students they deliver possess the critical IT skills they need to be competent in the South African business environment.

Aims to develop a theoretical model for understanding and enhancing effective self‐learning in a networked human and information technology (IT) environment. Recent educational reforms in different parts of the world emphasize that independent self‐learning throughout the life span is a sine qua non of education. Parallel to this is the development that the Internet and information technology have changed the modes of teaching and learning fundamentally and created unlimited opportunities for learning. There is an urgent need to develop a theory or model that can be used to deepen the understanding of the nature and process of self‐learning and facilitate students becoming highly motivated and effective self‐learners with the support of a networked human and IT environment. The implications drawn from the theory can contribute to the paradigm shift of education in current worldwide education reforms.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how an IT governance framework [Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT)] influences the control environment and the internal control system. In particular, it aims to illustrate how the COBIT’s structure and processes impact on the seven categories of factors that compose the control environment.

This paper aims to highlight how an IT governance framework with its processes enables to improve the control environment assessment and implementation.

The analysis indicates that the implementation of the COBIT framework provides some indications for managers and auditors, which must implement or assess internal control system.

The adoption of the framework allows managers to focus effectively on integrating, aligning and linking processes. This improves the understanding of the key aspects connected to the control environment. In addition, the adoption of the framework allows overcoming some limitations regarding the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations framework.

This paper addresses an area of relevance to both practitioners and academics. This analysis focuses on Accounting Information Systems themes and, through the examination of an IT governance framework, suggests solutions and tools than can help managers and auditors to address the control environment assessment.

The purpose of this article is to provide a selective and comprehensive literature review based on previous research within auditing and enterprise systems (ES). This is done to identify research gaps, propose directions for future research and guide researchers and practitioners on how to better synthesize these two areas. Interaction between ES and auditing is in need of more academic research and practical investigation, which may lead to the development of better solutions, guidelines and frameworks.

A total of 31 academic studies from 2000 to 2010 were included in this study. After reading these studies, different areas had been selected and were addressed in five categories: the future of audit in ES environment, modern audit tools and techniques, changes of auditors' role, differences in perceptions between financial auditors and IT auditors, ERP and compliance with regulations.

ES implementation results in audit process reengineering and increases the need of continuous monitoring of transactions. The presence of IT auditors becomes critical, while financial auditors are asked to enhance their skills in order to be able to conduct effective audit tests. Modern audit tools and techniques must be used so that internal control processes will be appropriate for an ES.

It is not an exhaustive list and some relevant publications might have been overlooked. Much literature has been scanned by reading the title only. In order to conduct a comprehensive review the topical focus was kept relatively narrow on auditing and ES.

Researchers and practitioners must take into consideration the interaction between ES and auditing in order to advance research in this area. Companies must understand the changes that occur in the audit procedure due to ES implementation, so that they will design efficient audit tests and auditors must enhance their knowledge in order to be able to conduct these tests effectively.

This study uncovers and classifies current research within auditing and ES (focusing mostly on ERP systems).

Open innovation is an emerging paradigm which exposes organisations to networked capabilities and competencies though collaboration relationships. The traditional view of the organisational environment raises concerns regarding the mismatch in the methods used to assess business value and understanding service process maturity. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap.

This paper employs a systematic literature review to present a state-of-the-art literature review with particular focus on the applicability of capability maturity models (CMM) within an open innovation context.

The authors present a conceptual account of our research developments and build on the state-of-the-art which bridges open innovation and CMM. The authors provide a comprehensive discussion on the literature and challenge the applicability of individual organisations evolving through maturity stages. The authors identify a significant gap in the emergence of open innovation and CMM and present a service capability sourcing model (SCSM) to bridge these two research areas.

Unpacking the nature of service capabilities allows us to understand the primary components of value co-creation and their contribution towards service maturity within an open service innovation environment. The authors verify the explanation model using a cloud computing scenario within an open service innovation environment.

The contribution of this paper is an explanation model of an open service innovation environment through our SCSM. Though an open innovation perspective, the authors examine the nature of service capabilities and the suitability of traditional CMM in a modern service context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of technological change on the internal audit practices and skills requirements for internal auditors in an e-business environment.

Generalist internal auditors and specialist information technology (IT) internal auditors were surveyed online in ten countries, including the USA and the UK which, together, provided the majority of responses.

The results suggest a need for advanced IT-audit techniques in conducting the internal audit function, thereby increasing IT audit skill demands on generalist internal auditors. However, the results show a low confidence among internal auditors about their IT training and a continuing reliance upon IT audit specialists, rather than their own training/retraining.

The responses obtained in this study provide insight into both the status quo of the internal audit function, and to the changes that are needed to prepare generalist internal auditors for work in an e-business environment and, while the scale of the study limits the extent to which the findings may be generalized, they are consistent with the literature concerning the changing business environment and with the literature on resistance to change, suggesting that the issues revealed should be of concern.

The results reported in this paper are useful to internal auditing educators and regulators in their consideration of the skills needed by generalist internal auditors in e-business environment.

This study sheds light on a significantly growing area which remains relatively unexplored in the auditing-related literature, e-business audit. The study provides empirical evidence on challenges facing internal auditors in an e-business environment, thereby serving as a wake-up call, to both internal auditors and the professional bodies representing them, to defend their jurisdictional space against rival professional groups.

Various forms of IT sourcing used by audit clients create issues of concern for external auditors. This article investigates the nature and basic characteristics of service‐oriented architecture (SOA), a modern information system architecture strategy, to ascertain whether the use of SOA by a service consumer audit client would have an impact on the activities typically performed by the external auditor. It was found that SOA presents a complete shift in the way IT application functionality is constructed and integrated and inevitably effects changes in the accounting system and the related internal controls of the SOA service consumer. As a result SOA has a significant impact on the activities performed during the audit process and introduces various SOA‐related aspects that need to be considered by the external auditor of a SOA service consumer.

While manufacturing digitalization is currently considered an important enabler of competitive advantage, its applicability across the industrial spectrum is unclear. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between the use of digital technologies and different production environments and company sizes. The focus is on three aspects of digitalization: shop floor digitalization, technologies for vertical and horizontal integration and organizational IT competence.

This study is based on data gathered from a survey questionnaire sent to 212 Norwegian manufacturing companies. To test the formulated hypotheses, the two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) method was used.

This study confirmed that large enterprises (LEs) have a significantly higher level of shop floor digitalization and organizational IT competence than small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Regarding the difference between production environments, no statistically significant difference in the implementation level of the investigated digitalization aspects could be found.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies to investigate differences in the adoption of digital technologies between different groups of production environments. This study also provides updated findings related to the relationship between digitalization and company size. The findings presented in this paper provide important insights into directing future research efforts to assist environments that are currently lagging behind in their digital transformation.

There have been major efforts to develop the technology for integrated construction environments and the mechanisms needed to improve the collaboration between construction professionals. Evidently, the development and usage of such an environment is a complicated task. The two issues that can be among the main contributors to this are: the development of the technology and its effective implementation. These two issues are addressed separately in this paper. The paper first explains the approaches of sharing project information, followed by a review of a recent project in this area, the result of which is a distributed integrated construction environment based on the industry foundation class (IFC), capable of supporting a number of construction applications. This environment is capable of supporting a construction team to work collaboratively over the internet. It then discusses the difficulties facing the successful implementation of such environments in construction organisations. This is addressed within the context of two management models for effective implementation of IT: the resource‐based model and the Nolan model.

Founded on the concept of organizational ambidexterity and the competing value model, the purpose of this paper is to develop an information technology (IT) ambidexterity framework to underscore the importance of a balanced and harmonious IT environment in enterprise cloud adoption.

With survey responses from 165 IT executives in a managerial position who are in charge of cloud computing implementation, partial least square method is used to test the research model.

Cloud absorptive capacity plays an important role for firms to secure a competitive advantage. The synergy of the two capabilities (flexibility and control), which have conflicting characteristics, contributes to the enhancement of cloud absorptive capacity and leads to a firm’s knowledge accumulation and performance.

This study is the very first attempt that empirically establishes the relationship between a firm’s competitiveness and cloud computing absorptive capacity. This study provides a comprehensive framework that integrates ambidexterity theory with the competing value framework (CVF) with extending the concept of absorptive capacity that is bounded within an organizational perspective into a cloud computing context.

Firms should treat cloud computing as a strategic consideration to secure a competitive advantage in the contemporary business environment. For a firm’s performance, a dual governance structure, that encompasses flexibility and control, is required to achieve competitive advantage from cloud computing adoption.

To facilitate organizational effort in achieving a harmonious cloud environment, the authors propose a comprehensive ambidexterity framework integrating the CVF approach. This framework maps IT ambidexterity onto the CVF. As CVF considers internal and external factors that ambidexterity theory does not cover, integrating two theories can provide more comprehensive implications and discussions regarding cloud computing adoption.