Considering Social Distance as an Influence Factor in the Process of Process Modeling

Enterprise repositories comprise numerous business process models either created by in-house domain experts or external business analysts. To enable a widespread use of these process models, high model quality (e.g., soundness) as well as a sufficient level of granularity are crucial. Moreover, they shall reflect the actual business processes properly. Existing modeling guidelines target at creating correct and sound process models, whereas there is only little work dealing with cognitive issues influencing model creation by process designers. This paper addresses this gap and presents a controlled experiment investigating the construal level theory in the context of process modeling. In particular, we investigate the influence the social distance of a process designer to the modeled domain has on the creation of process models. For this purpose, we adopt and apply a gamification approach, which enables us to show significant differences between low and high social distance with respect to the quality, granularity, and structure of the created process models. The results obtained give insights into how enterprises shall compose teams for creating and evolving process models

Cognitive Insights into Business Process Model Comprehension: Preliminary Results for Experienced and Inexperienced Individuals

Process modeling constitutes a fundamental task in the context of process-aware information systems. Besides process model creation, the reading and understanding of process models is of utmost importance. To better understand the latter, we have developed a conceptual framework focusing on the comprehension of business process models. By adopting concepts from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, the paper presents initial results from a series of eye tracking experiments on process model comprehension. The results indicate that experiences with process modeling have an influence on overall model comprehension. In turn, with increasing process model complexity, individuals with either no or advanced expertise in process modeling do not significantly differ with respect to process model comprehension. The results further indicate that both groups face similar challenges in reading and comprehending process models. The conceptual framework takes these results into account and provides the basis for the further experiments

Learning to Read by Learning to Write: Evaluation of a Serious Game to Foster Business Process Model Comprehension

Background: The management and comprehension of business process models are of utmost importance for almost any enterprise. To foster the comprehension of such models, this paper has incorporated the idea of a serious game called Tales of Knightly Process. Objective: This study aimed to investigate whether the serious game has a positive, immediate, and follow-up impact on process model comprehension. Methods: A total of two studies with 81 and 64 participants each were conducted. Within the two studies, participants were assigned to a game group and a control group (ie, study 1), and a follow-up game group and a follow-up control group (ie, study 2). A total of four weeks separated study 1 and study 2. In both studies, participants had to answer ten comprehension questions on five different process models. Note that, in study 1, participants in the game group played the serious game before they answered the comprehension questions to evaluate the impact of the game on process model comprehension. Results: In study 1, inferential statistics (analysis of variance) revealed that participants in the game group showed a better immediate performance compared to control group participants (P<.001). A Hedges g of 0.77 also indicated a medium to large effect size. In study 2, follow-up game group participants showed a better performance compared to participants from the follow-up control group (P=.01); here, a Hedges g of 0.82 implied a large effect size. Finally, in both studies, analyses indicated that complex process models are more difficult to comprehend (study 1: P<.001; study 2: P<.001). Conclusions: Participants who played the serious game showed better performance in the comprehension of process models when comparing both studies