A look into business process modeling guidelines through the lens of the technology acceptance model

Abstract

Business process modeling is one of the first steps towards achieving organizational goals in the requirements engineering phase. This is why business process modeling quality is an essential aspect for the development and technical support of any company. Modeling experts rely mainly on their personal experience, and the tacit knowledge. In order to help less experienced modelers, many authors have formulated modeling guidelines as a mean to achieve better model quality. Our research goal is to assess the acceptance of these guidelines for teaching purposes through a survey. To achieve this objective we investigate usefulness, ease of use and the intention to use of a collected set of pragmatic guidelines according to the technology acceptance model by means of a survey amongst Cuban PhD students. Results reveal the "best" and "worst" guidelines as perceived by novice modelers. We also witnessed that perceived ease of use has an important influence on the perceived usefulness, and, at the same time, both influence the novice modelers' intention to use the guidelines. This implies that to ensure usage of the guidelines by junior modelers, they should be understandable and their utility should be well-motivated.