Model as you do : engaging an S-BPM vendor on process modelling in 3D virtual worlds

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time-consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting J. Harman (&) Science and Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St., Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia e-mail: joel.harman@connect.qut.edu.au R. Brown Information Systems School, Science and Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St., Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia e-mail: r.brown@qut.edu.au U. Kannengiesser Metasonic GmbH, Münchner Straße 29, 85276 Pfaffenhofen, Germany e-mail: udo.kannengiesser@metasonic.de N. Meyer Research Development, Metasonic GmbH, Münchner Straße 29, 85276 Pfaffenhofen, Germany e-mail: nils.meyer@metasonic.de T. Rothschädl Ruxit, Blütenstraße 14, 4040 Linz, Austria e-mail: Thomas.rothschaedl@ruxit.com © The Author(s) 2015 A. Fleischmann et al. (eds.), S-BPM in the Wild, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17542-3_7 113 process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation and took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and of Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept. 7.1 Metasonic Engages QUT June 2013 Metasonic GmbH, a German business process management vendor, has implemented a complete process management suite calledMetasonic Suite and a process elicitation tool called Metasonic Touch, developed from a previous university research project (Oppl and Stary 2011). Metasonic sought to engage with researchers at QUT to explore new areas of innovation around the effectiveness of their software tools. After a brief phone call with Dr. Albert Fleischmann, director and co-founder ofMetasonic, Dr. Ross Brown pitched the idea of using virtual worlds in the task of process elicitation.Metasonic accepted this proposal, a scholarshipwas offered to QUT by the company, and an IT Honours student, Joel Harman, was taken on in December 2013 to begin the twelve-month-long research project. Process model elicitation still poses a huge challenge with respect to the quality of the resulting process models, independently of whether the information was gathered from interviews (Kabicher and Rinderle-Ma 2011), by exploiting existing data sources (Dunkl 2013), or by process mining (Bose et al. 2013). Subjectoriented BPM (S-BPM) seeks to assist this process by providing a methodology that presents process models in a manner analogous to natural language features, namely, subject, object and predicate constructs from the stakeholder’s perspective (Fleischmann et al. 2012). This enables users to be engaged more effectively via a simple and intuitive process representation and via the implementation of usercentred elicitation hardware and software. The goal of the proposed research was to use 3D virtual worlds as a means of extracting process information from stakeholders in line with S-BPM concepts. Rather than use traditional modelling elicitation techniques which heavily tax the analyst (such as interviews), or using an abstract representation and interface, such as the Metasonic touch (Oppl and Stary 2011), QUT wished to explore the idea of using 3D virtual world models of workplaces as elicitation environments. Such an approach was designed with the intention to reduce the training time and complexity of modelling by providing a more natural modelling interface. To achieve this goal, a 3D virtual world was constructed which closely matched a typical office environment. Users were then able to interact with objects in this virtual world to complete tasks as they normally would in reality. As users perform actions within the virtual world, a process model begins to develop automatically, thus the term model as you do. Once the process is completed, the model can be exported and given to analysts without stakeholders ever needing to understand the underlying grammar of the model. An overview diagram of this concept is shown in Fig. 7.1. 114 J. Harman et al.