An E-Business Audit Service Model in the B2B Context

Abstract

This research studies E-business audit as a specialized service rendered in an information technology intensive environment. A service model is used to research the E-business audit context. Here auditing is viewed as a specialized technical service conducted in the context of E-business technologies, business processes, and people involved in E-business transactions. The specialized audit service is provided to the E-Business transacting firms that in most cases involve transactions between customers and suppliers. A field study of information technology auditors showed that both knowledge of the business processes and of the technologies were critical for them to render reliable and accurate E-business audit findings. The results showed the need for higher training levels in advanced IT methods and tools for technology auditors in rendering IT audit judgments for the business-to-business (B2B) context. Thus, these results provided support for the service model that calls for the appropriate knowledge and use of technologies, business processes, and people in providing service.

Keywords:

• audit services
• E-business audit
• information technology expertise
• E-business audit judgment
• partial least squares
• interaction effects
• information technology auditing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dr. Pathak acknowledges financial support received from the University of Windsor Social Science and Humanities Research Fund and the RTIF Scheme, Odette School of Business. The authors acknowledge the comments from the Senior Editor, Dr. Sipior and the two reviewers for improvement of this paper. The authors also acknowledge the support of special issue editor, Dr. Sue Conger for their paper.

Notes

Q-sorting technique helps researchers in identifying a priori the potential understanding of instrument items. Here either an expert panel or a group of potential respondents were provided the information about the constructs and the items that the construct were to identify. This exercise substantially improves the content validity a priori of these instrument items where new items had to be developed. Given the limited empirical work done in the area of E-Business auditing, the first author used the Q-sorting technique to define the theorized construct.

Senior management at the five professional bodies was contacted since their members are actively involved in E-Business audit in general and B2B audit in particular. Particularly AICPA and CICA are extremely active in this E-Business audit work.

Please see the developers’ website at http://www.smartpls.de for software details. This software uses the interaction algorithm suggested in Chin, Marcolin, and Newsted (1996). It also provides the Cronbach Alpha values along with composite reliability parameter, and finite mixture results to identify the segmentation amongst the respondents. Authors are from University of Hanover, Germany.

The predictive effect where i = interaction model and m = main effects model (Cohen, 1977, p. 282; Chin et al., 1996).

5. (Cohen, 1977, p. 284)