Tangible Business Process Modeling - Methodology and Experiment Design

Visualized business process models are the central artifacts to communicate knowledge about working procedures in organizations. Since more organizations take the process perspective to share knowledge and make decisions, it is worth investigating how the processes are elicited. In current practice, analysts interview domain experts and translate their understanding to process models. Domain experts, often unfamiliar with process thinking, have problems understanding the models and providing meaningful feedback. It is our desire to improve process elicitation and strengthen the role of the domain expert. To do so, we propose to complement interviews with a toolkit and a methodology to engage the domain experts in process modeling. We call this Tangible Business Process Modeling (TBPM). In this paper, we outline our approach and present the design of an experiment for empirical validation. Through the use of TBPM, pracitioners are expected to achieve better understanding, higher consensus and a higher rate of adoption of the results.