DBIS-Kolloquium, Barbara Weber - Universität Innsbruck, Ort: O27/545, Zeit: 11:00 Uhr, Datum: 20. April 2012

Process modeling has gained increasing importance for documenting business operations and automating workflow execution. However, process models display a wide range of quality problems impeding their comprehensibility and consequently hampering their maintainability. Literature reports, for example, error rates between 10% and 20% in industrial process model collections. Moreover, non-intention-revealing or inconsistent naming, redundant process fragments, and overly large and unnecessarily complex process models are typical quality problems which can be observed in existing process model collections. These problems have resulted in vivid research with the goal of obtaining a better understanding of factors influencing the quality of process models.

Existing research mostly focuses on the product or outcome of process modeling. In constrast, our research aims at taking a closer look on how process models are created which we call the process of process modeling. Obviously , factors influencing this process of process modeling eventually have an impact on the quality of its outcome (i.e., the resulting process model) and the incurred cost of its creation.

Since 2010 we have conducted modeling sessions with 400 students and organized modeling sessions with experts from industry and academia to better understand how business process models are created. This talk will report on some of the findings obtained so far on the process of process modeling and will outline future plans for research.