Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Virtual World for Subject-Oriented Business Process Modelling

Abstract

Business processes and employees are the heart and soul of an organisation. Efficient and effective business processes are critical and a fast adaption to changes is vital. Business process modelling captures the way an organisation executes business processes and provides a framework to improve these business processes. As business processes span across diverse departments or organisations, modelling requires communication and collaboration of distributed individuals, also called domain experts. Subject-oriented business process modelling (S-BPM) is based on a simple notation that enables domain experts to capture models of business processes without support of a business analyst. S-BPM notation is based on natural language sentence structure: subject, predicate, and object. While common BPM techniques see modelling of business processes as flow of activities; S-BPM is moving the subject (domain expert) to the focus of attention. Virtual worlds offer new opportunities to communicate and collaborate together and find application in various areas like e-commerce, social, business or education. Successful practice of business process modelling in virtual worlds provides a basis to build the first virtual world for collaborative learning S-BPM. The literature review investigates how business process modeling is performed in the real world and in virtual worlds. Based on the result of the literature review a virtual world was designed, in which two to four users can learn S-BPM notation by modelling a given business process. This business process is a procurement process, i.e. acquiring needed materials externally from a vendor, and involves four subjects, i.e. warehouse, purchasing department, accounting and vendor. The learning process consists of three tasks. The first task is the subject selection. Users choose the subject they would like to model. A subject can only be assigned to one user and all user need to choose at least one subject. Based on the subject selection, users can view the business process description of the chosen subject. This concept foster communication between users, as only with collaboration the second task, modelling the Subject Interaction Diagram, can be successfully completed. The last task is modelling the Subject Behaviour Diagram. Therefore, each user models the internal behaviour of the chosen subject from task 1. All the tasks are supported with various concepts, like simulation, colour coding, spatially separating tasks and interior that represents the subject’s environment. An evaluation with students from FH Joanneum shows that the virtual world is a platform, where geographically dispersed people can learn S-BPM any time. Although usability and immersion need to be improved and some developed concepts that should support the learning process were not accepted as expected, this virtual world is a basis for a learning platform for S-BPM.