Designing Process Modeling Tools to Facilitate Semantic Standardization: Increasing the Speed of Innovation in a Digital World

Abstract

Business process management (BPM) projects are increasing in size and becoming ever more complex. With companies being subject to increasing degrees of competition and a more dynamic market environment, it is crucial to implement organizational changes rapidly in order to remain innovative and competitive. BPM projects are an important tool to achieve this, yet they are often delayed or fail completely. Frequently they suffer from a high degree of heterogeneity resulting from huge project teams modeling hundreds of processes. Modeling conventions can help harmonize process models, yet they are hard to develop and enforce in large teams. Building modeling tools such that modelers must comply with conventions can alleviate these problems. In this chapter, I present five design principles for such tools and one prototypical implementation, the icebricks modeling tool.