We have just recently published a new journal paper in the Information Systems Journal on our virtual worlds elicitation work in BPM – “Augmenting process elicitation with visual priming: An empirical exploration of user behaviour and modelling outcomes.”

QUT Eprints is here, with Journal DOI.  The work was performed by my PhD student Joel Harman along with my collaborators at QUT, Metasonic and University of Vienna.

Business process models have become an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach to process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions similarly to how they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. An empirical investigation comparing both the modelling outputs and participant behaviour of this virtual world role-play elicitor with an S-BPM process modelling tool found that while the modelling approaches of the two groups varied greatly, the virtual world elicitor may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.