Bringing Design Thinking to Business Process Modeling

Abstract

Business processmanagement is at the heart of organizations. It provides concepts andmethods to capture, analyze and improve operational procedures in the daily business of organizations. The elicitation of process models is the first step in any process improvement project. Processmodels mediate communication between the different stakeholders involved, such as, for instance, business analysts, process participants, and software architects. Process models provide a shared understand- ing, so that everyone can contribute knowledge. Based on design thinking principles, this paper develops a method that aims at improving business process modeling. To achieve this goal, we introduce physical building blocks and methodological guidance to fundamentally change theway peo- ple interact with process models. Tangible prototypes have been successfully used in design thinking, and initial experiments show that a tangible toolset is a promis- ing approach to improve business process modeling and comprehension. The focus of this paper is on the insights we got during the cooperative research project, i.e., the research path we took. Finally, we explain our research method and outline the next steps.