Sometimes Less is More: Are Process Modeling Languages Overly Complex?

zur Muehlen, Michael and Recker, Jan C. and Indulska, Marta (2007) Sometimes Less is More: Are Process Modeling Languages Overly Complex?. In Taveter, Kuldar and Gasevic, Dragan, Eds. Proceedings 3rd International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for The Enterprise, Annapolis, Maryland.

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Abstract

Modern business process modeling languages such as BPMN or EPC provide users with more constructs to represent real world situations than their predecessors such as IDEF or Petri Nets. But this apparent increase in expressiveness is accompanied by an increase in language complexity. In practice many organizations choose to only use a subset of the available modeling constructs. Using a well-established ontology-based theory of representation, we analyze how this voluntary restriction affects the expressiveness and complexity of the resulting modeling vocabulary. We compare our empirical findings with two notation sets of the popular language BPMN – the core and full set. Our findings indicate that users are willing to accept ambiguity among modeling constructs and that the full element set of BPMN adds little expressiveness at the expense of considerably decreased ontological clarity. The findings are a first step towards an understanding of an optimal cost-effectiveness ratio for process modeling languages- both in theory and practice.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Status:	Published
Keywords:	process modelling, complexity, BPMN, Bunge-Wand-Weber
Subjects:	280000 Information, Computing and Communication Sciences > 280100 Information Systems > 280111 Conceptual Modelling
ID Code:	12269
Deposited By:	Recker, Jan
Deposited On:	30 January 2008
Alternative Locations:	http://oxygen.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/VORTE/
Copyright Owner:	Copyright 2007 IEEE
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