Paper: Evidence that virtual worlds improve business process elicitation

Our paper "Virtual Business Role-play: Leveraging Familiar Environments to Prime Stakeholder Memory during Process Elicitation," has been accepted for CaISE 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden.  This paper is a product of an Honours thesis by my student Joel Harman, in collaboration with Stefanie Rinderle-Ma (Uni. Vienna), Daniel Johnson (QUT) and Udo Kannengiesser (Metasonic GmbH).  

The paper is stored here at QUT eprints, contact me on r.brown@qut.edu.au if you want a pdf copy.

Abstract. Business process models have traditionally been an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach for process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions as they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. Empirical data obtained in this study suggests that this approach may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.

Not only is this is a great achievement by Joel, CaISE is a very competitive conference, but the preliminary evidence is very encouraging.  Virtual worlds do indeed work well as a process elicitation tool, especially, we believe, for naive stakeholders.

Ross

Paper: Virtual worlds as a model-view approach to the communication of business processes models

A paper by my PhD student Hanwen Guo has just been accepted for the CAiSE 2012 Forum (old ERA A). The paper can be found here.

Well done Hanwen!

Title: Virtual worlds as a model-view approach to the communication of business processes models.

Abstract: The improvement and optimization of business processes is one of the top priorities in an organization. Although process analysis methods are mature today, business analysts and stakeholders are still hampered by communication issues. That is, analysts cannot effectively obtain accurate business requirements from stakeholders, and stakeholders are often confused about analytic results offered by analysts. We argue that using a virtual world to model a business process can benefit communication activities. We believe that virtual worlds can be used as an efficient model-view approach, increasing the cognition of business requirements and analytic results, as well as the possibility of business plan validation. A healthcare case study is provided as an approach instance, illustrating how intuitive such an approach can be. As an exploration paper, we believe that this promising research can encourage people to investigate more research topics in the interdisciplinary area of information system, visualization and multi-user virtual worlds.