Articulation of work process models for organizational alignment and informed information system design
Introduction
Changes to business processes have an impact on how people work and collaborate within organizations. Being able to quickly adapt business processes to external or internal influencing factors is crucial in the present ever-changing business environment. Remaining competitive in such environments, which are characterized by highly dynamic market requirements and increased employee mobility, is dependent on being able to acquire knowledge about work processes and their context from experienced workers [1] and represent it in a way that makes it accessible for and adaptable to future work situations and new employees [62]. Representing work processes through conceptual modeling is a recognized means of making them visible and adaptable to changing organizational or business requirements, particularly by using them to design and configure information systems (IS) [6]. Failing to involve operative personnel in projects affecting work processes and IS results in ignorance [33] and ultimately leads to ineffectiveness and unclear responsibilities [61].
The existing literature (e.g., [24], [50]) shows that this challenge can be met by involving operative staff in conceptual modeling activities, but also indicates that such an approach introduces challenges in the process of modeling that have to be addressed methodologically. People operatively involved in work processes (referred to as “actors” in the following) are domain experts with extensive knowledge about their respective roles in a work process, but normally have little methodological knowledge about modeling [51]. Their role in traditional IS-oriented modeling approaches is thus widely reduced to providers of domain knowledge for expert modelers [46]. An expert-mediated approach of representing work process knowledge in conceptual models bears the risk of introducing the expert modeler's own bias regarding which information should be represented in the model and the interpretation of vague or conflicting statements provided by the actors [20]. This not only negatively affects actors’ ability to interpret the information represented in a model [33], but also leaves unresolved potential misconceptions or conflicting understanding of work among the involved actors [24], [47]. The aim of this article is to introduce a model elicitation approach, which is driven by actors and allows them to articulate and align their views on a work process, and still leads to a syntactically correct and semantically sound process model for further processing in IS.
From a practical perspective, organizations would benefit from such an approach as it supports operative staff to align conflicting understandings and resolve misconceptions about their work. This reduces the effects of unforeseen contingencies [65] and allows to identify potential for improvement in the overall work process [15]. As the work process usually is shaped and supported by IS, these aligned views should be reflected in the models used to design these systems to appropriately support the work process [42].
Involving actors in modeling activities has been addressed in several fields of research. In the field of system dynamics, approaches such as those of Vennix et al. [68] or Franco and Rouwette [17] focus on involving actors and resolving conflicting viewpoints as noted above. The resulting models, however, are not intended for the development of socio-technical support in IS. Research in the area of business process modeling shows that established formal modeling languages such as Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) [70] are used for modeling driven by actors (e.g., [40]), but lead to the sacrifice of formal correctness and semantic completeness for usability [48], which makes them of limited use for further processing. A third strain of research in the area of socio-technical system design focuses on collaboratively capturing information about work processes from actors by providing notations explicitly tailored for understandability and easy use (e.g., [2], [25], [29]), while still maintaining a link toward technical interpretability of the created models. The task of transforming these models to representations that can be processed in IS, however, is left to expert modelers (e.g., [58]). Margaria et al. [41] argue in favor of a simple modeling approach that allows actors to create directly executable role-based workflow models and present a framework on how this aim can be achieved with modeling support tools. Fahland and Weidlich [10] and Kabicher and Rinderle-Ma [35] argue in favor of approaching actors with a case- or scenario-based approach to modeling, respectively, in which elicitation focused on capturing case-based process fragments, which are later (semi-)automatically aggregated to form a complete model of the process.
All of the aforementioned approaches aim at facilitating work modeling by actors without formal process modeling experiences. They either focus on supporting actors’ needs in a collaborative modeling process or aim at producing executable models that can be processed directly in IS. The challenges addressed in both areas are of high relevance for the aim of involving actors in IS design, but have not yet been addressed in an integrated approach. This article addresses this issue and introduces a methodology to facilitate actors’ collaborative articulating of their work processes. It furthermore presents a support tool for conflict resolution and model elaboration, leading to formally correct models that are necessary for technical processing in IS.
Collaborative articulation of work process models should lead to common ground [5] for all involved actors and serve as an agreed-upon basis for further use. This is necessary, because actors’ mental models of how they contribute to a work process and how they interact with each other can be assumed to be inconsistent [65]. This eventually leads to problems in collaboration [68]. Existing work on collaborative conceptual modeling hardly addresses explicitly the differences in how people perceive collaborative work processes [52]. Also, no account is given on how to resolve these differences to an extent that allows reaching common ground on how to collaborate [57]. The methodology presented in this article contributes to this area of research by introducing a modeling method that makes visible differences in understanding and requires resolving them to be able to finish the modeling process.
The research reported on in this article methodologically follows a design science approach [26]. The modeling approach and the proposed tools are to be considered the designed artifacts. Although involving operatively active people in the work process modeling for the sake of IS design has been recognized as a relevant field of study, the rationale of this study is that no approach so far has addressed how to support the process of articulating and aligning potentially conflicting views on work processes while still maintaining a model representation that can be directly processed in IS. The contribution of this study is a methodology that enables nonexpert modelers to collaboratively create conceptual models of a shared work process by articulating and aligning their individual views on the work process. The resulting models are technically interpretable in IS. The methodology is supported by a set of tools that facilitate articulation, alignment, and conceptual modeling to achieve these ends. Research rigor is ensured by deriving the designed artifacts’ requirements from the relevant literature in the fields of articulation support in collaborative settings and conceptual modeling support for inexperienced modelers. This brings together the research domains that are relevant as indicated in the design rationale. The artifact design process solely is based on these requirements. Consequently, evaluation in this article focuses on assessing whether these requirements have been met. A case study has been conducted to evaluate the designed artifacts in the intended field of application, and to identify the potential advantages and areas of improvement for the results presented.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we elaborate on the question of how conceptual modeling can be adopted for articulation support. In Section 3, the methodology designed to meet these requirements is introduced and described in detail. A brief description of the tools that have been developed to support the different methodological phases closes Section 3. In Section 4, the case study used to examine if the proposed modeling approach meets the identified requirements is presented. The article concludes with an account of the limitations of the presented research and a discussion on the potential for future methodological and technical developments.
Section snippets
Conceptual modeling for articulation support
Representing the procedural aspects of work in conceptual models is one prerequisite for informed IS design [6]. Commonly adopted modeling languages such as BPMN [70] and event-driven process chain (EPC) [44] provide constructs to describe the activities that constitute a work process and their causal relationships. Most of these modeling languages aim at representing models for further processing by means of technology (such as simulation or workflow execution; see [6]). Conceptualizing work
Articulation support
The proposed modeling procedure comprises three phases to address the aforementioned ARs. These phases involve multiple steps that are shown in Fig. 2. The articulation process starts with a “setting-the-stage” phase, in which a concept map of the work context is created collaboratively. This is to achieve a common understanding of the relevant concepts and the scope of the process. This map serves as a peripheral artifact during the following phases, acting as a point of reference whenever
Organizational alignment – a case study
Section 3 introduced a methodology to support the process of collaboratively articulating knowledge about work in organizations as a design artifact. The evaluation of this artifact with respect to the requirements identified in Section 2 is described in this section. The primary aim is to contribute to articulating different views on a work process and facilitate the alignment of different views. This implies the existence of a shared work context in which different views in collaborative work
Conclusions
This article has proposed a methodology that enables people, who are not expert modelers, to articulate and negotiate their use of work processes in the form of collaboratively created conceptual models. The design of the methodology prioritizes ease of use and understandability over semantic completeness during articulation. Elaborating these models toward a representation of the process in all its variations is done in a separate phase. The methodology builds upon two compatible modeling
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Mr Simon Vogl for his contributions to the technical developments reported in this article, and the participants of the case study for their contributions to the workshops. Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This study was financially supported by the European Commission within the PEOPLE IAPP program under grant agreement No. 286083 (IANES).
Stefan Oppl is an assistant professor at the Department of Business Information Systems – Communications Engineering, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He holds an MSc degree in computer science and an MBA. He received his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna in 2010. He has been working as a researcher at the Kepler University of Linz since 2003. During the early years of his career, he worked in the area of context-aware group support and mobile learning
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Stefan Oppl is an assistant professor at the Department of Business Information Systems – Communications Engineering, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He holds an MSc degree in computer science and an MBA. He received his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna in 2010. He has been working as a researcher at the Kepler University of Linz since 2003. During the early years of his career, he worked in the area of context-aware group support and mobile learning support systems. Stefan Oppl has been developing means to support collaborative work and knowledge externalization and alignment processes in organizational settings since 2006. He has been involved in several national and EU-founded research projects, and is currently the coordinator and lead scientist of the EU FP7-founded research project IANES (www.ianes.eu). He has also coordinated the Leonardo-da-Vinci Transfer-of-Innovation project FARAW (www.faraw.eu) and the Erasmus Intensive Programme SURGEOM (www.surgeom.eu).