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Information Systems and e-Business Management

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01-02-2015 | Original Article

A visual analysis of the process of process modeling

Authors: Jan Claes, Irene Vanderfeesten, Jakob Pinggera, Hajo A. Reijers, Barbara Weber, Geert Poels

Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management | Issue 1/2015

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Abstract

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 process of process modeling Chart. 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.

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Available only for authorised users

An overview of these modeling sessions can be consulted at http://bpm.q-e.at/experiments.

The only implementation of the Dotted Chart we are aware of, is the Dotted Chart Analysis plug-in in the process mining framework ProM.

Note that this is only possible when there is a fixed, known set of possible occurring operations, which is the case in the study of the PPM.

For readers that are familiar with process mining: this is the trace identifier in the event log.

Due to a misalignment, this is not visible in a typical Dotted Chart without zooming in (this might be an unintentional bug).

The PPMChart Analysis plug-in for ProM 6 can be downloaded at http://www.janclaes.info/plugins.php.

The ProM tool can be downloaded at http://www.promtools.org.

The xes file format of ProM is described at http://www.xes-standard.org.

Both case descriptions can be downloaded from http://bpm.q-e.at/experiment/Pre-Flight.

Case description can be downloaded from http://bpm.q-e.at/experiment/MortgageEindhoven.

We are aware of the fact the models are unreadable. This does not prevent to judge the structure of the models. The process models can be downloaded in high resolution from http://www.janclaes.info/papers/PPMISeB.

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Title: A visual analysis of the process of process modeling
Authors: Jan Claes
Irene Vanderfeesten
Jakob Pinggera
Hajo A. Reijers
Barbara Weber
Geert Poels
Publication date: 01-02-2015
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management / Issue 1/2015
Print ISSN: 1617-9846
Electronic ISSN: 1617-9854
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-014-0245-4

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