Designing Process Models to Support Communication and Decision Making

The management and improvement of organisational business processes is a perennial top priority of chief information executives (Gartner Group 2010). When seeking to re design business processes to improve operational efficiency, revenue and/or compliance, or when seeking to build IT based systems to support the execution of organizational processes, organisations use graphical documentations of their business processes so called process models. These models act as blueprints of organizational processes, and are a key tool for making re design decisions, i.e., decisions about where, how and why changes to the processes should be enacted to warrant improved operational efficiency, cost reductions or increased compliance. Any (re ) design decision made on the basis of process models is, therefore, susceptible to the quality of these models. A process model that documents a business process in an incomplete, incorrect, cumbersome to decipher, or otherwise deficient manner will not convey the information about the business domain to the decision maker such that a good decision can be facilitated. Any re design of the processes, in consequence, will then fail to deliver the expected business objectives and net benefits. One key objective of process modelling, therefore, is to enable a common understanding of how a business works at current (as is modelling) or in the future (to be modelling) (Burton Jones, Wand and Weber 2009). Enabling this common understanding of a business enables analysts, for instance, to communicate organizational procedures to relevant staff, to facilitate process performance measurement, to aid the design of supporting IT systems, or to assist decision making about business improvement or innovation. When creating process models, therefore, business analysts require principles that guide them in conceiving graphical representations of business processes that are understandable (useful, intuitive and accurate) to the stakeholders (process owners, process managers, business analysts, systems designers and the like) working with these models. This is important because any application of process models, for tasks such as organizational documentation, process re design, workflow specification, software development or others, requires firstly that the involved stakeholders reach a effective and efficient common understanding about the business domain (Aguirre Urreta and Marakas 2008). At the current point in time, however, there is a lack of theory guided and empirically tested principles to assist business analysts in this challenge. Specifically, a body of knowledge is missing that (a) informs the factors that constitute a good process model one that is effective in communicating meaning to the relevant stakeholders and (2) guides analysts in developing understandable (useful, intuitive and accurate) process models. Therefore, this project aims to address the gap of support for developing understandable process models for organizational projects through developing: 1) A body of knowledge about factors and consequences of process model understandability; and 2) practical guidelines based on rigorous empirical insights to guide the creation of useful, intuitive and accurate process models.