Brenda Scholtz
ABSTRACT
Modelling the business processes of an organisation offers benefits such as improved communication, increased understanding of processes, support for change management and gaining of competitive advantage over other organisations. However, Business Process Modelling (BPM) in large projects often needs to be carried out collaboratively in a team environment. The benefits of collaborative modelling are a reduced workload for modellers and improved quality, readability and accuracy of models. The result is also increased understanding of the processes amongst team members. Traditional technologies and BPM tools have several usability problems and often do not allow for effective collaboration and integration of business process models.
Touchscreens are becoming the standardised modality of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs. This paper investigates the use of collaborative business process modelling (CBPM) software and hardware for improving the usability of CBPM projects. A field study comprised of two assignments was carried out to evaluate the difficulties of CBPM with traditional BPM tools running on desktop PCs. A BPM software prototype was then designed which allows the drawing of business process (BP) models using touch and also enables the synchronous display of the process model on multiple tablet PCs.
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Index Terms
- The usability of collaborative tools: application to business process modelling
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Reviews
Michael G. Murphy
Business process modeling (BPM), collaboration, mobile devices, and usability are the contributing elements in this insightful paper. BPM is important in both decision making and operational effectiveness. Team-based collaborative modeling can improve model quality and increase understanding of the underlying processes. In keeping with the trend toward tablet-based apps in support of corporate computing, the authors consider the use of tablets to collaborate on modeling, with a focus on usability. The introduction explains the need for collaborative model building and raises the potential for enhanced collaboration via mobile devices (specifically, tablets). Subsequent sections address the research methodology, including the usability factors to be measured, previous results regarding BPM and collaboration, and a survey of touch technologies with a focus on support for collaboration. The fifth section reports on a field study of collaborative BPM using information science students, with an analysis of the results. The authors introduce their design for BPMTouch, a new tablet-based app for BPM, and summarize the contributions of the paper and directions for future research. There are a good number of relevant figures, tables of analyzed results, and 40 references. The authors make a good case for collaborative BPM via tablets using software designed to enhance operability, satisfaction, effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, understandability, and attractiveness. The prototype presented in the paper shows promise. Follow-up research and broader testing will determine if the prototype is robust enough to enter the BPM mainstream. Online Computing Reviews Service
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