Preparing Graphical Representations of Business Processes and Making Inferences from Them (original) (raw)

Business Process Management in the Classroom

Journal of Cases on Information Technology, 2017

Organizations are increasingly adopting Business Process Management (BPM) approaches growing the need for BPM expertise in the industry (Bandara et al., 2010). This has resulted in growing demand for college graduates who have a thorough knowledge of business processes (Lee, 2008). Hadidi (2014) pointed out that development of courses and programs in BPM area has received huge consideration in academia during recent times. This paper presents a classroom activities for teaching Business Process Management using a paper-based simulation game conducted as part of an undergraduate IS course. The paper discusses various class activities involved such as execution of the simulation game, creation of graphical representations of processes followed in the game, and creation of Business Process models using Microsoft Visio software. A post-test survey was conducted to evaluate the understanding of BPM concepts learned and analyze the effectiveness of the simulation game. The paper concludes...

The Effect of Business Process Representation Type on Assessment of Business and Control Risks: Diagrams versus Narratives

Issues in Accounting Education, 2012

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandates the assessment of internal controls over financial reporting and many organizations are using diagrams to express their internal control processes. While educators regularly stress the effectiveness of diagrammatic representation of process information over textual representation, no prior study has offered convincing evidence that diagrammatic representation leads to improved performance. In an experiment, we examine students' performance on a business process risk and control assessment task using two informationally equivalent methods that are commonly taught in the classroom to document business processes: descriptive narrative (hereafter, textual) and diagrammatic. We also examine whether students' academic achievement and perceptions of their ability (self-efficacy) affect performance by type of representation. First, we find that while the method of representation has no effect on students' accuracy, those receiving the textual representation were more efficient and had a greater weighted-average performance than those receiving the diagrammatic representation. Second, we find academic achievement increases students' accuracy, decreases their efficiency, and has no effect on their weighted-average performance. Third, we find self-efficacy has no effect on students' accuracy, has no effect on their efficiency, and decreases their weighted-average performance. Finally, we find that both self-efficacy and academic achievement interact with the type of representation to affect students' performance. Implications for education and practice are discussed.

Information Systems modelling from Flowcharts to process model

2013

Business process modelling has always been at the core of both organizational design and information system. Business process modelling aims for the transformation of business perspective of enterprise into IT perspective, which require business process model of the possible set of business process operation of the enterprise. Business process model provides the comprehensive understanding of a process through which an enterprise can be analyzed and integrated, which necessitate the importance of modelling correctly. With the existence of variety of business process modelling language we have to perform the evaluation of various business process modelling languages for accessing the acceptability criteria according to specialized needs of the enterprise business process operation as each and every modelling language has its own perspective and represent different features of the processes. This paper presents the review of five popular modelling languages which are widely used today.

A visual analysis of the process of process modeling

Information Systems and e-Business Management, Vol 13(1), p. 147-190, 2015

The construction of business process models has become an important requisite in the analysis and optimization of processes. The success of the analysis and optimization efforts heavily depends on the quality of the models. Therefore, a research domain emerged that studies the process of process modeling. This paper contributes to this research by presenting a way of visualizing the different steps a modeler undertakes to construct a process model, in a so-called PPMChart. The graphical representation lowers the cognitive efforts to discover properties of the modeling process, which facilitates the research and the development of theory, training and tool support for improving model quality. The paper contains an extensive overview of applications of the tool that demonstrate its usefulness for research and practice and discusses the observations from the visualization in relation to other work. The visualization was evaluated through a qualitative study that confirmed its usefulness and added value compared to the Dotted Chart on which the visualization was inspired.

Are Non-Experts Able to Comprehend Business Process Models - Study Insights Involving Novices and Experts

ArXiv, 2021

The comprehension of business process models is crucial for enterprises. Prior research has shown that children as well as adolescents perceive and interpret graphical representations in a different manner compared to grown-ups. To evaluate this, observations in the context of business process models are presented in this paper obtained from a study on visual literacy in cultural education. We demonstrate that adolescents without expertise in process model comprehension are able to correctly interpret business process models expressed in terms of BPMN 2.0. In a comprehensive study, n = 205 learners (i.e., pupils at the age of 15) needed to answer questions related to process models they were confronted with, reflecting different levels of complexity. In addition, process models were created with varying styles of element labels. Study results indicate that an abstract description (i.e., using only alphabetic letters) of process models is understood more easily compared to concrete o...

Applicability of Process Maps for Simulation Modeling in Business Process Change Projects

Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management, 2006

There are several techniques and tools that attempt to effectively represent different modeling perspectives according to business process modeling purpose and goals. One of widely used techniques for process modeling is process maps. The technique is based on flowcharts and one of its most important advantages, that is extremely important in early phases of business process change projects, is that models are easily understandable to all members of a project group. It is believed that this technique can provide only basic facilities in representing processes and is inappropriate for simulation. The main objective of this paper is to show that process maps have all elements required for simulation and that they have some other benefits, very important for business process renovation, that are discussed in the paper.

Business process management: a missing link in business education

Business Process Management Journal, 2012

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the inadequacies of current business education in the context of “process”. It presents an analysis of the background to business processes in historical perspective and posits the significance of business management for today's business education. It argues the importance of business processes and business process management (BPM) in the context of the current and emerging information technologies (IT) and business education and highlights its ability to offer a missing link between business, IT and strategy.Design/methodology/approachThe approach involves analysis and review of the literature and analysis of secondary data.FindingsEven though business processes have been the subject of formal study from multiple perspectives for a long time, since the start of industrial age, processes still are not well understood, left unmanaged and poorly executed. With business schools teaching primarily function specific and narrow and IT sch...

The use of fisheye view visualizations in understanding business process

Data flow diagrams (DFDs) are commonly used models for representing business processes. The traditional presentation of DFDs provides separate views of major system processes from views of their subprocesses. This separates the details of the low-level system activities from their context. Although this separation can reduce information overload, it can degrade the viewers' understanding of the overall system. Fisheye views are one method of information presentation that emphasizes local detail while providing overall context clues, and are used in different contexts to alleviate such degradation effects.