An Empirical Investigation of the Cultural Impacts on the Business Process Concepts’ Representations

Abstract

Business Process Diagrams serve several purposes, including process analysis, process-related communication, and process automation. Considering communication, modelers must ensure that all participants understand a process diagram and the corresponding notation in the same way. With globalization, this might get challenging, since different cultural environments may imply implicitly different meanings to specified symbols, whereas the same concepts may be associated with different representations. Thus, our efforts are directed towards investigating the intuitiveness of common Business Process Concepts’ representations. In this manner, we performed empirical research on a sample of novice modelers in two cultural environments, who were instructed to design graphical representations for the defined concepts. Our findings show which Business Process Concepts’ representations are intuitive to novice modelers and how the cultural background impacts it.