The effects of information overload on information processing and judgment in an information systems audit task

This research examines the effects of information overload on IS auditors' information processing and their subsequent decisions about which software projects to select for further review. This study provides evidence of a link between information processing, information weighting and judgment as well as examines which coping strategies IS auditors use to adapt to information overload and how these strategies affect their judgments.; To test the hypotheses, an experiment was conducted with highly experienced auditors using a computerized IS audit task. Both policy capturing and process tracing techniques were used. The results suggest that IS auditors do use coping strategies such as accelerated and/or non-compensatory processing to deal with information overload. Non-compensatory processing by itself resulted in marginally poorer performance on one measure—variance in weighting of information. Accelerated information processing lead to decrements in 3 of the 4 judgment performance measures used in this study—consistency, information cue usage and consensus. Negative performance effects were more severe when non-compensatory processing was used also. This study also found that IS auditors tended to give heavier weight in their judgments to the information they spent more time viewing and accessing.