The Effect of Business Process Representation Type on Assessment of Business and Control Risks: Diagrams versus Narratives

ABSTRACT

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) (U.S. House of Representatives 2002) mandates the assessment of internal controls over financial reporting, and many organizations are using diagrams to document their internal control processes. While educators regularly stress the effectiveness of diagrammatic representation of process information over textual representation, no prior study has offered convincing evidence that diagrammatic representation leads to improved performance. In an experiment, we...more