Abstract Auditors face a world of increasing rates of technological change. They must determine the impact of this change on controls and audit procedures for the systems they evaluate. To date the response has been for the various professional bodies or some expert to produce new state descriptions of the controls and audit procedures needed in advanced computer systems. The adequacy of this response will deteriorate as auditors confront increasingly diverse kinds of computer systems. Consequently, individual auditors must know how to dynamically generate the controls and audit procedures needed when they evaluate a new kind of data processing system. What is needed is a process-oriented theory of information processing system change - one that allows auditors to understand the reasons why advanced computer systems emerge and the ways in which existing systems change their form to become advanced systems. This paper seeks to provide the rudiments of such a theory. It conceives of information processing system change as being stress-motivated. This, in turn, provides the basis for conceiving the effects of change on controls and audit procedures to be an ordered process rather than a random sequence of events. The results of an empirical test of the theory proposed are described.
Davis et al. (Sat,) studied this question.