BookChap: A concept for collaborative business process modeling in interactive spaces

Have had a book chapter accepted.  Product of work with my friends Alex Nolte, at Bochum and Craig Ainsworth, at Middlesex University. Book chapter can be found here. 

Abstract: Analyzing and redesigning business processes is a complex task. It requires the collaboration of multiple actors such as process stakeholders, domain experts and others. Current approaches mainly focus on collaborative modeling workshops where participants verbally contribute their perspective on a process along with ideas on how to potentially improve it. These workshops are supported by modeling experts who facilitate the workshop, and modelers who translate participants’ verbal contributions into representations of a modeling notation and integrate them into a process model. This setting however limits participation to verbal contributions and therefore negatively affects their motivation to contribute during a workshop since they will mostly have to wait until they are allowed to contribute. Unpleasant experiences in the course of participation can cause reluctance when everyday work practice has to be changed in accordance with the results of a workshop. Furthermore, this setting makes workshop outcomes strongly dependent on facilitators and modelers since they handle all the changes that are potentially applied to a process. Interactive technology such as smartphones, tablets, digital tabletops and interactive walls provide the opportunity for participants to directly interact with process models thus potentially increasing their motivation to contribute. Interactive spaces where different interactive technologies are combined also allow for orchestrating collaboration since it is possible to form breakout groups on demand or work on a process model in solitude before coming back together. Consequently, these possibilities support the balance between the impact of facilitators and modelers on the one side and the influence of the participants on the other side. In this paper we will describe an approach that combines different modes of collaboration using different interactive devices in order to not only increase the quality of process models but also increase the involvement of participants and make workshops a more efficient and motivating experience.