Modelling the business processes of an organisation offers benefits such as improved communication, increased understanding of processes, support for change management and gaining of competitive advantage over other organisations. However, Business Process Modelling (BPM) in large projects often needs to be carried out collaboratively in a team environment. The benefits of collaborative modelling are a reduced workload for modellers and improved quality, readability and accuracy of models.The result is also increased understanding of the processes amongst team members. Traditional technologies and BPM tools have several usability problems and often do not allow for effective collaboration and integration of business process models.Touchscreens are becoming the standardised modality of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs. This paper investigates the use of collaborative business process modelling (CBPM) software and hardware for improving the usability of CBPM projects. A field study comprised of two assignments was carried out to evaluate the difficulties of CBPM with traditional BPM tools running on desktop PCs. A BPM software prototype was then designed which allows the drawing of business process (BP) models using touch and also enables the synchronous display of the process model on multiple tablet PCs.

The purpose of this study was to investigate approaches (techniques and technologies) for the coordination of collaborative tasks using synchronous gesture manipulation. Business Process Modelling (BPM) tasks are often performed in teams of modellers who need to collaborate with each other in order to coordinate and integrate their individual contributions into the various process models in a co-located environment. These collaborative BPM tasks were used as a case study in order to develop the artifact (the BPM-Touch approach) as a proof of concept. The BPM-Touch approach allows for the coordination and collaboration of BPM tasks in co-located modelling teams using synchronous gesture manipulation approaches. The Design Science Research (DSR) methodology was used and several cycles of developing and evaluating the artifact took place. This paper reports on the last cycle and set of evaluations. The proposed approach was implemented in a BPM software package in order to provide empirical validation. Usability evaluations of the software were undertaken with both students and BPM professionals as participants. The empirical results of the evaluations revealed that the participants found the approach to be effective and rated the usability and satisfaction of the collaboration and gesture manipulation aspects of the software positively.