Design Themes

There were two primary areas that directed the design of our final solution.

Enabling intuitive workflow modeling that leads to the creation of palpable visualizations

Business process modeling entails the communication of both high-level understanding and more granular information about implementation specification and logic. These areas are not mutually exclusive yet we observed a disconnect between these two levels of magnification in the work practices of business process modelers. In particular, SAP tool users often have to create the visual model with tools such as ARIS or Visio, and then find themselves redefining the model in Guided Procedure based on loose interpretations of the flow diagram. Such extra steps introduce not only inefficiency, but also the possibility of misconception when a different person, who usually turns out to be the developers, does the interpretation of the models. The frustration about these disparate interpretations was expressed both by the business process experts and the developers.

Our user research revealed that this problem has its origin in the diverged needs from two different audiences: the end-users and the developers. Therefore, we believe that enabling business process experts to model composite applications directly will enhance the expert's role as a broker between the end-users and the system they utilize. Such a modeling tool should allow the user to specify enough information for implementation. The tool should also produce a visualization of the process and workflow that business users can identify with.

Promoting business process changes and validating potential solutions before deployment

One of the key responsibilities of business process expert is to gain the stakeholders support on business process change. During our contextual inquiry sessions, the business process experts often expressed that the biggest challenge is in managing human dynamics and fostering adaptation of business process change. People have the tendency to resist changing their current workflow unless the benefit of change is made obvious. Hence, enormous amount of effort is focused on communicating the to-be business process to the stakeholders through various means of visualization, prototypes, and comprehensive documentation. We believe that it is essential for the system to provide some solutions in alleviating the amount of extra work that has to be done for the business process expert to create convincing communicational deliverables.