Timeline visualization for documenting process model change

Abstract

Organizations need to deal with change in order to remain competitive in a dynamic, global business world. When business processes need to be redesigned, it often remains unclear why a process evolved to its current form. Against this background, process change documentations can be helpful in order to illustrate and capture change information. The main purpose of this paper is to expand our understanding on how to visualize process change information and to explore the concept of timeline visualization for this application area. Using an expert inspection approach, we first identify shortcomings of existing timeline tools in meeting visualization requirements of business process change. We propose a conceptual design for change visualization using timelines that aims to support a contextual, temporal and comprehensive documentation of business process model changes.