An Analysis of the Effects of Knowledge Complementarities on the Performance of Information System Audit : A Perspective of the Resident Audit in the Project Office

An Abstract Recently, as Information System projects tend to be more complex, the importance of Information System Audit increases. In the same context, the need for the resident IS Audit also increases, which is supposed to deal with the possible risks and urgent issues by providing the appropriate support and timely coordination during IS project. Basically, for the effective IS Audit, the IS audit team members should be able to understand such a business context as work characteristics, business knowledge, goals, and culture of the organization. The audit team members should also be able to share the various knowledge of Information Technology and audit procedure with the owner of the project. Especially, for the resident audit, it is more important to fill the gaps in expertise between project owner and audit team. However, any studies on the need of common knowledge base (knowledge complementarities) in the IS audit have not been done so far. The purpose of this study is to analyze whether the knowledge complementarity based on inter-organizational communication between the project owner and audit team members makes an effect on the fidelity and performance of IS audit. In order to do this, the relationship among inter-organizational communication and knowledge complementarity, the fidelity of IS audit service, and performance of IS audit has been analyzed, using Structural Equation Model. The result shows that all the relationship is significant, which means that knowledge complementarity between the two different interest groups should be an effective factor on the fidelity and performance of IS audit. This result implies that, for better quality of IS Audit service, how to acquire the knowledge complementarity between the project owner and Audit team should be considered seriously as well as systematically in the process of IS Audit. IT