The world seems to be getting more dangerous: terrorists; fraudulent corporations; money laundering; hurricanes; pandemics.
Governments and organizations respond with a flurry of new controls. In some cases these are centrally mandated (e.g. Sarbanes
Oxley). In others, organizations struggle to find their own control solutions. Seldom, however, do organizations work together
as a community of common interests to share solutions to their control threats. In this paper we consider how an open exchange
of control solutions might be supported electronically. We assume a community of similar organizations that wish to exchange
detailed knowledge about organizational control techniques. These might be non-competing institutions, such as libraries,
customs agencies, and even universities; or, they may in fact be competing organizations, wishing to exchange control solutions
in dimensions where they do not compete – e.g. the airlines exchanging best practice about safety and security. The main point
is to propose an information technology architecture that permits a view of organizational controls as shareable, exchangeable
knowledge commodities.
Key words auditing - organizational controls - virtual knowledge base