Mark-IT's consultants have been involved at all aspects of IT audits.

- As key members of IT development project, their work has come under the close scrutiny of the companies investors, (legal) advisors, auditors and accountants, by way of technical Audits.

- The users of any software have been the first to comment about the efficiency and usability of any software that they have provided.

- The technical colleagues working alongside them will have (often quite vociferously!) argued the case for alternative IT strategy. They will also have given credit for the highly innovative solutions and concepts implemented by Mark-IT's consultants.

- And finally, they have been awarded a number of assignments to work with Auditors, Venture capitalists and Software houses to examine IT projects and comment on their robustness (performance and functionality), scalability, hardware strength, degree of completeness, underlying supporting staff, taxable status etc etc. On some projects this has extended to comments about the overall marketing strategy.

With this total perspective of the IT industry, Mark-IT is able to provide expert, and very usable, opinions about any project. An interesting approach on any IT Audit is to work with a list of 15 key indicators and assign a score against each of them identifying their relative strength. If requested, they will also discuss this with the system developers and outline a strategy, with supporting technology, resources, cost and time for strengthening the weaker points.

Listed below are a few recent more technical projects

DATA-BASE PERFORMANCE

Reviewing the poor speed performance of a web-based system which accessed a very large (230 million row) SQL data-base - to review (and evaluate) alternative D/B design for improving response times

LOAD TESTING AND CONTINGENCY PLANNING

Mark-IT were asked to examine an Internet Start up project and look at

- How well the IT systems would cope with the expected 10-fold increase in activity - in terms of software, hardware and communication links.

- How the "business" would cope in the event of total failure lasting more than 1 day.

 REVIEW TENDER DOCUMENTS

The principals of a large multinational company needed a second and independent opinion about quotations of around $.25million for hardware, software and personnel to build a prototype web-site capable of running an e-commerce application. Mark-IT helped senior management to better understand the key issues, redefine the requirements and save over 20% of costs - as well as reduce build time by 3 months.

 DETERMINE THE R&D STATUS OF AN IT PROJECT

Recent legislation (UK Finance Act 2000 - section 837A) allows some R&D projects to be given advantageous tax status. A recent assignment by Mark-IT was to examine a large £2M software project and assess the development work involved. Based on the nature of this work and the well-defined criteria as outlined in the Guidelines issued by the DTI for section 837A, Mark-IT were able to to prepare a formal document justifying that a very large part of a large multi-million pound contract should be favourably by the Inland Revenue.

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