Retail stores: Internal control systems documentation

Originally published by: Touche Ross & Co.

Exploring Enterprise Life Cycle: Differences in Informal and Formal Institutional Measures of Business Ethics Implementation

Since science recognizes the fact that an enterprise passes through different life cycle stages, and that life cycle stages differ in terms of management systems, formal structures, control systems, documentation of transactions, and number of procedural hurdles, our main research problem was focused on differences in informal and formal institutional measures of business ethics implementation. The case study research methodology was applied to explore the differences of informal and formal institutional measures of business ethics implementation at different stages of enterprise life cycle. The pre-designed questionnaire was used in conducting face-to-face interviews with 40 managers who were in most cases also owners of the studied enterprises.

MOC Impact Workflow to Ensure that Relief Systems PSI is Updated with Changes

PresentationThe Process Safety Management (PSM) Standard requires that covered facilities manage change through the Management of Change (MOC) program. A robust MOC program effectively identifies and analyzes changes. Observation has shown that many MOC processes employ checklists and workflows to help MOC facilitators identify when engineering expertise is needed (e.g. Preventative Maintenance updates or changes in engineering documents / Process Safety Information (PSI)). Knowing when to update relief systems documentation as required is critical in ensuring accurate PSI. The typical relief systems documentation process involves updating or repeating the documentation for the entire facility on a semi-frequent basis. Based on experience at various facilities, the authors have developed the workflow presented in this paper that either eliminates the need for this expensive process or lengthens the time between updates. This detailed workflow is intended to guide plant-level engineers to understand when a change being reviewed in the MOC process requires a review and potential update of the relief device system PSI. This methodology can reduce the error rate in identifying when relief-systems-related PSI updates are required for changes managed through a site’s MOC process, which ensures facilities more effectively manage relief systems documentation as part of an MOC program

Internal Auditor Participation in Systems Development Projects

There are differing viewpoints in the internal auditing literature regarding the role of internal audit in systems development projects. One argument is that internal audit should act as consultants for such projects. A counter argument is that if internal auditors act as consultants this could impair in dependence. This study surveyed chief audit executives to determine their perceptions of the role of internal audit in systems development projects as well as the actual involvement of their departments in such projects. The findings show that chief audit executives place more importance on internal audit acting as consultants and less importance on independence in these projects. The results also suggest that internal audit has limited involvement in the different phases of the Systems Development Life Cycle of these projects

Syntactic and Semantic Understanding of Conceptual Data Models

Conceptual data models are used for discovery and validation communication between analysts and users; as a communication tool between analysts and designers; as a basis for end-user developed applications; and as part of the systems documentation (e.g., Batra and Davis 1992; Juhn and Naumann 1985; Siau et al. 1997). A goal of creating a conceptual model is to develop a database schema to be used to implement a database that meets the information needs of intended users. To develop a suitable database schema, the designer must be able to use the conceptual data model as a communication tool to verify the assumptions made in its creation. Batra and Davis state that the conceptual model must be capable of providing a structure for the database along with the semantic constraints for communication with users. The conceptual data model also serves as a representation of the database after its completion: it is part of the systems documentation, and hence can be used for system evaluation by auditors or others. Conceptual data models include several components, each of which provides information content. Siau et al. examined the use of two components in entity-relationship data models: the surface semantics and the structural constraints (participation cardinality) of the relationships

Using Distributed Representations to Disambiguate Biomedical and Clinical Concepts

In this paper, we report a knowledge-based method for Word Sense Disambiguation in the domains of biomedical and clinical text. We combine word representations created on large corpora with a small number of definitions from the UMLS to create concept representations, which we then compare to representations of the context of ambiguous terms. Using no relational information, we obtain comparable performance to previous approaches on the MSH-WSD dataset, which is a well-known dataset in the biomedical domain. Additionally, our method is fast and easy to set up and extend to other domains. Supplementary materials, including source code, can be found at https: //github.com/clips/yarnComment: 6 pages, 1 figure, presented at the 15th Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing, Berlin 201