The Influence of Knowledge Management on Internal Control Operations: a case study

Abstract

Enterprise Risk Management rarely involves subjective judgement: through rigid protocols, risks are identified and acted upon to continuously improve processes in terms of risk exposure either from in-house controllers or external auditors. With the rise of Knowledge Management, proven to be more than an ephemeral management fashion, the effects on Internal Control are still to be fully understood and could be of significant impact in terms of actual insights gained and lessons learnt from internal controlling campaigns or auditing sessions. Through the observation of the Internal Control team, their stakeholders and external auditors in one of the biggest food processing companies in the world, we try to identify the flow and impact of implicit and explicit knowledge, its management and their effects on the three observation subjects.