Article

How Much Language Is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation

Authors:

Michael Zur Muehlen,

Jan ReckerAuthors Info & Claims

CAiSE '08: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering

Pages 465 - 479

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69534-9_35

Published: 16 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important industry standard for the graphical representation of business processes. BPMN offers a wide range of modeling constructs, significantly more than other popular languages. However, not all of these constructs are equally important in practice as business analysts frequently use arbitrary subsets of BPMN. In this paper we investigate what these subsets are, and how they differ between academic, consulting, and general use of the language. We analyzed 120 BPMN diagrams using mathematical and statistical techniques. Our findings indicate that BPMN is used in groups of several, well-defined construct clusters, but less than 20% of its vocabulary is regularly used and some constructs did not occur in any of the models we analyzed. While the average model contains just 9 different BPMN constructs, models of this complexity have typically just 4-5 constructs in common, which means that only a small agreed subset of BPMN has emerged. Our findings have implications for the entire ecosystems of analysts and modelers in that they provide guidance on how to reduce language complexity, which should increase the ease and speed of process modeling.

References

[1]

BPMI.org, OMG: Business Process Modeling Notation Specification. Final Adopted Specification. Object Management Group (2006), http://www.bpmn.org

[2]

Fowler, M.: UML Distilled: A Brief Guide To The Standard Object Modelling Language, 3rd edn. Addison-Wesley Longman, Boston, Massachusetts (2004).

[3]

Siau, K., Cao, Q.: Unified Modeling Language: A Complexity Analysis. Journal of Database Management 12, 26-34 (2001).

[4]

Rosemann, M., Recker, J., Indulska, M., Green, P.: A Study of the Evolution of the Representational Capabilities of Process Modeling Grammars. In: Dubois, E., Pohl, K. (eds.) CAiSE 2006. LNCS, vol. 4001, pp. 447-461. Springer, Heidelberg (2006).

[5]

Siau, K., Erickson, J., Lee, L.Y.: Theoretical vs. Practical Complexity: The Case of UML. Journal of Database Management 16, 40-57 (2005).

[6]

Kobryn, C.: UML 2001: A Standardization Odyssey. Communications of the ACM 42, 29-37 (1999).

[7]

Ouyang, C., Dumas, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Pattern-based Translation of BPMN Process Models to BPEL Web Services. International Journal of Web Services Research 5, 42-61 (2008).

[8]

Recker, J., Rosemann, M., Krogstie, J.: Ontology- versus Pattern-based Evaluation of Process Modeling Languages: A Comparison. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 20, 774-799 (2007).

[9]

Recker, J., Indulska, M., Rosemann, M., Green, P.: How Good is BPMN Really? Insights from Theory and Practice. In: Ljungberg, J., Andersson, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Information Systems. Association for Information Systems, Goeteborg, Sweden, pp. 1582-1593 (2006).

[10]

zur Muehlen, M., Ho, D.T.-Y.: Service Process Innovation: A Case Study of BPMN in Practice. In: Sprague Jr., R.H. (ed.) Proceedings of the 41th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii (2008).

[11]

Wahl, T., Sindre, G.: An Analytical Evaluation of BPMN Using a Semiotic Quality Framework. In: Siau, K. (ed.) Advanced Topics in Database Research, vol. 5, pp. 102- 113. Idea Group, Hershey, Pennsylvania (2006).

[12]

Barabási, A.-L., Bonabeau, E.: Scale-Free Networks. Scientific American 288, 50-59 (2003).

[13]

Li, W.: Random Texts Exhibit Zipf's-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 38, 1842-1845 (1992).

[14]

Zipf, G.K.: On the Dynamic Structure of Concert Programs. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41, 25-36 (1946).

[15]

Hamming, R.W.: Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes. Bell System Technical Journal 26, 147-160 (1950).

[16]

Rossi, M., Brinkkemper, S.: Complexity Metrics for Systems Development Methods and Techniques. Information Systems 21, 209-227 (1996).

Cited By

Campos ULopes AConte T(2020)Evolution of BPMN Models through e-VOL BPMNProceedings of the XIX Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3439961.3439983(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3439961.3439983
Ivanchikj ASerbout SPautasso CSyriani ESahraoui H(2020)From text to visual BPMN process modelsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3365438.3410990(229-239)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3365438.3410990
Venkatakumar HSchmidt WBetz S(2019)Subject-oriented specification of IoT scenariosProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management10.1145/3329007.3329011(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3329007.3329011
Show More Cited By

How Much Language Is Enough? Theoretical and Practical Use of the Business Process Modeling Notation
1. Applied computing
  1. Enterprise computing
2. Theory of computation

Recommendations

SBPMN - An easier business process modeling notation for business users

At the moment the notations for the modeling of business process is based in technical aspects. Therefore most notations are not understood by the business users due to the complexity of them. In this paper we present a notation that allows business ...
An Online Business Process Model-driven Generator of the Conceptual Database Model
WIMS '18: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics

The paper presents an online two-phase business process model-driven generator of the conceptual database model. The generator is implemented as a web-based, platform-independent tool, in contrast to the existing tools that are dependent on some ...
Querying business process models with VMQL
BMFA '13: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCHI Annual International Workshop on Behaviour Modelling - Foundations and Applications

The Visual Model Query Language (VMQL) has been invented with the objectives (1) to make it easier for modelers to query models effectively, and (2) to be universally applicable to all modeling languages. In previous work, we have applied VMQL to UML, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

CAiSE '08: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering

June 2008

586 pages

ISBN:9783540695332

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 16 June 2008

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

47
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Campos ULopes AConte T(2020)Evolution of BPMN Models through e-VOL BPMNProceedings of the XIX Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3439961.3439983(1-11)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3439961.3439983
Ivanchikj ASerbout SPautasso CSyriani ESahraoui H(2020)From text to visual BPMN process modelsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3365438.3410990(229-239)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3365438.3410990
Venkatakumar HSchmidt WBetz S(2019)Subject-oriented specification of IoT scenariosProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management10.1145/3329007.3329011(1-10)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3329007.3329011
Bazhenova EZerbato FOliboni BWeske M(2019)From BPMN process models to DMN decision modelsInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2019.02.00183:C(69-88)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.is.2019.02.001
Jošt GHeriă?Ko MPolană?Iă? G(2019)Theoretical foundations and implementation of business process diagrams' complexity management technique based on highlightsSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-017-0618-518:2(1079-1095)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-017-0618-5
Mendoza Vda Silveira DAlbuquerque MAraújo JHaddad HWainwright RChbeir R(2018)Verifying BPMN understandability with novice business managersProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3167132.3167139(94-101)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3167132.3167139
Geiger MHarrer SLenhard JWirtz G(2018)BPMN 2.0Future Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2017.01.00680:C(250-262)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.future.2017.01.006
Ferreira WBaldassarre MSoares S(2018)CodexComputer Standards & Interfaces10.1016/j.csi.2018.02.00359:C(35-44)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.csi.2018.02.003
Haisjackl CSoffer PLim SWeber B(2018)How do humans inspect BPMN modelsSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-016-0563-817:2(655-673)Online publication date: 1-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-016-0563-8
Honkisz KKluza KWiśniewski P(2018)A Concept for Generating Business Process Models from Natural Language DescriptionKnowledge Science, Engineering and Management10.1007/978-3-319-99365-2_8(91-103)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-99365-2_8
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents