Quality of process element labels - where are we now, where should we go from here?

Abstract

The redesign of business process models is up to now mainly limited to the improvement of their semantic quality. Conformance is checked between statements that are used in the model and the domain to be modeled. However, to ensure the semantic quality of a process model it is crucial to consider its intended purpose (e.g., as a communication foundation). Also the empirical and pragmatic quality, which improves readability and understandability, respectively, must be addressed. Awareness should be raised about the fact that the improvement of both quality dimensions is a critical success factor. In this talk, I will argue that the curriculum of BPM must be extended by teaching concepts and guidelines towards making process models readable and understandable. Also, the improvement of process model element labels in particular and process models in general must be tackled interdisciplinary. I will show that the improvement of both quality dimensions is a hard mathematical problem. An “optimal” design of process element labels and process models must therefore be considered as a trade-off between empirical and pragmatic quality.