Business process modeling support by depictive and descriptive diagrams

Abstract

The design of a “good” business process model is a time-consuming and error-prone task and requests high training effort from the process modeler. These barriers might be a reason why business processes are often designed with software tools, which were not intentionally developed for this purpose, but are highly familiar for the process modeler (e.g., add-ins for MS Office family) and thus a process model can be quickly designed. As consequence of such a tool choice for process modeling the variety of techniques available for Business Process Management cannot be exploited. To mitigate this situation, we first examine approaches aiming to support business process modeling more intuitively. We then suggest the introduction of an additional layer to business process models with depictive diagrams that are not bounded to a concrete process modeling language or descriptive diagrams using natural language text. We then show how such a layer can be aligned with common process modeling languages and thus provides a seamless integration with more advanced Business Process Management languages and tools. We expect that our approach will fertilize techniques facilitating business process modeling for all types of process modelers including business experts with limited experience of process modeling.