You are the manager of internal audit for a medium-sized financial institution. Your organization has grown rapidly over the past few years, and management believes this growth will continue for at least another five years before it begins to plateau.

Like most financial institutions, your organization depends heavily on its computer systems. Indeed, senior management within your organization has continued to invest substantial amounts of funds in computer systems because they see them as a source of competitive advantage. Over the past two years, expenditure on information systems has been close to 8 percent of your organization's revenues.

During the past year, several performance problems have been experienced with some key information systems. For example, a few months ago, response times at automatic teller machines began to increase significantly. Customers became frustrated, and as a result a local newspaper gave your organization some bad publicity.

Management has become increasingly concerned about identifying performance problems with your organization's information systems before they have a serious impact. In this light, they have asked you to design and put in place some type of control system that will allow them to obtain an early warning of performance problems that are emerging within your organization's key information systems. At this time, however, management does not wish to expend large amounts of money on the design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of this control system. Rather, they would like to see whether a system can be developed that provides good early-warning signals of emerging performance problems but is still relatively cheap to operate.

Required: Provide an outline of the control system you will put in place to meet management's objectives. Remember, at this time you should not be investing large amounts of money to implement and to operate various performance measurement tools. Try to think of ways to get some global indicators of performance without having to invest large amounts of resources.