Transformational Leadership for IT Implementations and Internal Control

Many have heard “set a good example” and “lead by example”. These common phrases in a simple way provide valuable incremental insight for understanding success of enterprise system implementations, and the impact on end-users performing internal control activities. Internal control activities represent the policies and procedures of management in performing business requirements. Within enterprise systems, accounting type transactions are critical since they receive a host of interfaces from upstream modules and pass transactions to a wide range of downstream tables and modules. Activities in this type of setting carry the utmost importance and as discussed should be properly exemplified. However, following too many implementations, internal controls suffer. This study presents a conceptual approach for assessing the unique and positive influence of transformational leadership on the success of IT implementations and resulting internal control activities.