Guides | Links

Best Financial Management Practices for School Districts

Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability

Texas School Performance Review

Standard and Poors School Evaluation Services:

GAO Best Practice Reviews

IT Best Practice Documents

Canaudit, Inc.

The "Perspectives" section contains IT good practices articles.

COBIT

Go to the Download section, scroll down to the bottom of the page to Non-member access, and select:
COBiT Management Guidelines OR COBiT Control Objectives.
You have to log in, but it's free.
There's also an "IT Governance Executive Summary" under Anonymous access that lays out the case for board of directors needing to be involved in IT.

GAO (Government Accountability Office)

Go to "Reports and Testimony /Browse by topic" and check the "information management" box; lots of useful material.

FISCAM

Describes the computer-related controls that auditors should consider when assessing the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of computerized data. It's 200+ pages, but it lays out what-should-be in some detail.

IBM Redbooks

Provides detailed documentation for best practices in deploying various IT applications and configurations. This is a good source for product-specific configurations.

Infosyssec: Security Portal for Information System Security Professionals

This link has several search engines and links to research articles relating to computer and network security.

IT Governance Institute

The Resource Center on this site includes articles, white papers, slide presentations, survey results, links and other resources to assist those who wish to learn how to implement and improve IT governance within their own organization.

Microsoft

Under the Products listing, a drop down menu can be used to locate a specific operating system or software, such as Windows NT, 2003, etc. From there, a link to Technical References will lead to additional links on the specific product including deployment guides and technical reference manuals.

NIST (Nat'l Institute of Standards and Technology)

This site has some good computer security practices.

NSA (National Security Agency)

The Research section provides documents on different topics related to IT security.

PISA (Professional Information Security Association)

This site consists of links to other resources that address IT security. The bottom of the page has links to standards and best practices.

SANS

This site consists of links to other resources that address IT security. The bottom of the page has links to standards and best practices.

US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team)

The link to Resources provides several links to other security-related sites. The link to Policy provides information on several federal policies and guidance documents.