Beyond Visualization: on Using Sonification Methods to Make Business Processes More Accessible to Users

Making business processes accessible to users constitutes a crucial challenge throughout their entire life cycle: users should be enabled to understand business process models ( Analysis & Design phase), keep an overview on running process instances ( Operation phase), perceive process adaptations ( Operation phase), and comprehend as well as interpret results of analyzing processes ( Evaluation phase). What sounds easy for small process models quickly becomes an enormous challenge in the context of complex wallpaper process models because they can consist of hundreds of process activities, data flows, and resources and can have thousands of running process instances in different execution states. Obviously, for such scenarios it becomes very hard to recognize or even understand, e.g, deviations from the regular process execution path. Research has been conducted to analyze how visualization methods can help users to understand processes. There exist several tools that offer process visualization approaches to support users to model and monitor business process models and instance data. However, visualization methods for business processes show several limitations [1]: (a) limited screen size, (b) irregular process patterns, (c) executions or large number of process instances in different execution states, (d) displaying process change information as well as assessing certain process analysis and mining results are difficult, yet crucial. In such cases, it can be beneficial to use data sonification in order to enhance process visualizations. Although many reasons appear to apply sonification for representing process-related data, only very few approaches addressed this issue so far. Kramer et al. [2] found out, that the auditory perception is especially sensitive to temporal change. Furthermore, sonification, in contrast to static visualization, can only exist in time. As process instances per definition can only exist in time as well, sonification naturally lends itself to this area (as do animated visualizations). This promises advances when trying to convey process exceptions and changes to users.