Financial results have traditionally been the sole overall performance metric. The IT balanced scorecard (BSC) is an IT business governance tool aimed at monitoring IT performance evaluation indicators other than financial results. The IT BSC considers other key success factors, such as customer satisfaction, innovation capacity and processing.

The most important thing to consider before including an audit of IT capacity management in the program is whether the system's performance poses a significant risk to the organization. IT capacity management is a process that ensures that IT resources are sufficient to meet current and future business needs, and that they are optimized for cost and performance. A poor IT capacity management can result in system slowdowns, outages, failures, or breaches, which can affect the availability, reliability, security, and efficiency of IT services and business processes. Therefore, before conducting an audit of IT capacity management, the auditor should assess the potential impact and likelihood of these risks on the organization's objectives, reputation, compliance, and customer satisfaction.
Whether system delays result in more frequent use of manual processing (option A) is not the most important thing to consider before including an audit of IT capacity management in the program, as it is only one possible consequence of poor IT capacity management. Manual processing can introduce errors, delays, inefficiencies, and inconsistencies in the data and reports, which can affect the quality and accuracy of financial information. However, manual processing is not the only or the worst outcome of poor IT capacity management; there may be other more severe or frequent risks that need to be considered.
Whether stakeholders are committed to assisting with the audit (option C) is also not the most important thing to consider before including an audit of IT capacity management in the program, as it is a factor that affects the feasibility and effectiveness of the audit, not the necessity or priority of it. Stakeholder commitment is important for ensuring that the auditor has access to relevant information, documents, data, and personnel, as well as for facilitating communication, collaboration, and feedback during the audit process. However, stakeholder commitment is not a sufficient reason to conduct an audit of IT capacity management; there must be a clear risk-based rationale for selecting this area for audit.
Whether internal auditors have the required skills to perform the audit (option D) is also not the most important thing to consider before including an audit of IT capacity management in the program, as it is a factor that affects the quality and credibility of the audit, not the urgency or importance of it. Internal auditors should have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and experience to perform an audit of IT capacity management, which may include technical, business, analytical, and communication skills. However, internal auditors can also acquire or supplement these skills through training, coaching, consulting, or outsourcing. Therefore, internal auditors' skills are not a decisive factor for choosing this area for audit.
Therefore, option B is the correct answer.
References:
* Guide to IT Capacity Management | Smartsheet
* ISO 27001 capacity management: How to implement control A.12.1.3 - Advisera
* ISO 27002:2022 - Control 8.6 - Capacity Management

The most important consideration for patching mission critical business application servers against known vulnerabilities is A. Patches are implemented in a test environment prior to rollout into production. This is because patching mission critical business application servers involves a high level of risk and complexity, and requires careful planning and testing before applying the patches to the live environment. Patches may introduce new bugs, errors, or conflicts that could affect the functionality, performance, or security of the application servers, and cause system downtime, data loss, or business disruption1. Therefore, it is essential to implement patches in a test environment first, where the patches can be verified and validated for their effectiveness and compatibility, and any issues or defects can be identified and resolved before they impact the production environment2.

Enabling audit trails aids in establishing the accountability and responsibility for processed transactions by tracing them through the information system. Enabling audit trails increases the use of disk space. A transaction log file would be used totrace transactions, but would not aid in determining accountability and responsibility. The objective of capacity planning is the efficient and effective use of IT resources and requires information such as CPU utilization, bandwidth, number of users, etc.