When Research Meets Practice: Tangible Business Process Modeling at Work

We have created a modeling approach used by people in organizations to create and discuss business process models that represent their working procedures. This is an alternative to established approaches in which process modeling experts create business process models for the organization based on input from domain experts. We have changed this by empowering the domain experts to model their business processes themselves. This approach consists of a simple to use haptic toolset and the facilitation for its application. In the first stage of research, we showed that our approach, called tangible business process modeling (t.BPM), can be used to co-create process models with novice modelers. In a subsequent laboratory experiment, we found that t.BPM is superior to interviews for process elicitation because people are more engaged with the modeling task and the result is better validated. Furthermore, people have more fun and develop a better understanding of the process. In current research, we developed and assessed the idea of t.BPM for application in professional environments. We are seeking to change the state of business by showing the feasibility of t.BPM for real modeling projects. We investigated when and how to apply t.BPM correctly. In doing so, we were able to show that t.BPM is mature enough to compete with established workshop techniques.