Improving Remote Collaborative Process Modelling using Embodiment in 3D Virtual Environments

Identifying, modelling and documenting business processes usually require the collaboration of many stakeholders that may be spread across companies in inter-organizational settings. While modern process modelling technologies are starting to provide a number of features to support remote collaboration, they lack support for visual cues that are present in co-located collaboration. In this paper, we examine the importance of visual cues for collaboration tasks in collaborative process modelling from distributed remote locations. Based on this analysis, we present a prototype 3D virtual world process modelling tool that supports a number of visual cues to facilitate remote collaborative process model creation and validation. We report on a preliminary analysis of the technology and also describe the future direction of our research with regards to the theoretical contributions expected from the evaluation of the tool.