Alert Driven Process Integration and Exception Handing: A Case Study on Audit Confirmation with Web Services

Information technology has recently been employed widely in different industries. However, in the audit profession, there is limited adoption of contemporary information technologies. Besides automating regular audit processes, which mainly involves streamlining the communications across different organizations (such as the client and its business partners), the monitoring of the overall process as well as exception handling is crucial to the process quality and responsiveness. In this paper, we apply our earlier framework of e-service enactment and enforcement for requirements elicitation and use the concept of alert management for process modeling, together with a Web service based implementation for data and process integration. We illustrate our approach to an Alert-driven Audit Management System (ADAMS) with a case study on the audit confirmation process, which requires the most automation of work.