Human-centered process engineering based on content analysis and process view aggregation

Abstract

In the context of business process modeling, the transformation of process information elicited from process participants into process models often remains a black box. This paper presents a method that supports the designer to extract a formal business process model from natural language captured in written form in a transparent and traceable way. To-do's of process participants are examined by means of the qualitative content analysis in order to identify essential process elements and to handle different levels of abstraction and labels used for describing operations. Results of the analysis serve as the basis for shaping process view logs which can be aggregated and merged into entire process models. The conduction of the method is described in a case study. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.