The three roles an accountant can play in the AIS

An accountant can assume the following three roles in the current business environment:

designer, user, and auditor. As a designer, an accountant has to understand business processes

and control and map business processes to the system, considering the cost and benefit of

different options and critical business needs. It may be noted that the involvement of the

accountant at an early stage of system development pays the highest dividends to the

organization. This is so because controls need to be incorporated in the system at the design

stage itself.

Accountants, as users, need to acquire certain skills in order to make productive use

of information technology. It is expected of an accountant to possess knowledge in the following

areas:

1. A thorough understanding of at least one operating system;

2. A thorough understanding of at least one basic accounting package, word processing

software, spreadsheet, database, e-mail software and a browser;

3. A general understanding of systems and application controls for safeguarding systems

and data against unauthorized use, piracy, virus attacks and system failure.

As user of information technology, an accountant must also know how to test and assess the

acceptability of a particular system being acquired or developed for his use and to operate and

manage such a system and keep it up to date.

As internal and external auditors, accountants are collecting and evaluating evidence to

determine whether a computer system safeguards assets, maintains data integrity, and enables

communication. In addition, an accountant should access to information, achieves operational

goals effectively, and consumes resources efficiently. Thus, information systems auditing supports traditional audit