On the Ability of Novice Modelers to Identify, Represent and Trace Strategic and Tactical Conceptual Elements in Business Process and Enterprise Modeling

Many software professionals think about Business Process Modeling (BPM) as a way of representing all of the steps and details of a daily work execution. BPM is nevertheless also devoted to defining the broad outlines of a particular process and how internal improvements (like automation or worker support) can align with an organization’s business strategy. Business processes in their aggregated form (i.e. one entire business process represented by one black box element) do provide information on their scope (so can be seen as a tactical-level source of information) and, if mixed in a common representation with business objectives and goals, we can trace the impact of their execution, reengineering or IT-support on the strategy. Most of the work on the ability of novice modelers to represent a business process has focused on the operational perspective rather than the latter tactical and strategic ones. Evaluating the quality of higher level representations is also, to a large extend, an open issue. This paper aims to overview the performance of novice modelers when representing such tactical-level elements and tracing their strategic impact through a quasi-experiment. More specifically, subjects are given a complex case and have to draw a Business Use-Case Diagram which is a representation combining all of these elements. Results show that: (1) the proposed quality assessment is suitable when compared to a domain and modeling expert’s solution; (2) the cognitive style of modelers has no impact on the quality of the representations they produce.