A research program for studying the impact of process representation on risk analysis

Abstract

Business processes modeling plays an important role in helping organizations analyze and implement existing business processes. Specifically, business process understanding is an essential aspect for conducting risk assessment and for detecting internal control weaknesses. In current risk assessment practice, a broad spectrum of notations is used to capture processes with relative strengths and weaknesses. These notations range from pure text-based to purely visual diagrammatic formats. This gives rise to the question whether any of these notations should be preferred in the specific audit and accounting information system domain in order to provide better analysis results. Given the mixed results from prior research, this paper aims to establish a theoretical basis for discussing this question. Based on cognitive research, we identify propositions and derive associated hypotheses. Furthermore, we discuss how analysis performance can be measured in an audit context. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.