Bringing Design Thinking to Business Process Modeling

Business process management is at the heart of organizations. It provides concepts and methods to capture, analyze and improve operational procedures in the daily business of organizations. The elicitation of process models is the first step in any process improvement project. Process models mediate communication between the different stakeholders involved, such as, for instance, business analysts, process participants, and software architects. Process models provide a shared understanding, so that everyone can contribute knowledge. Based on design thinking principles, this paper develops a method that aims at improving business process modeling. To achieve this goal, we introduce physical building blocks and methodological guidance to fundamentally change the way people interact with process models. Tangible prototypes have been successfully used in design thinking, and initial experiments show that a tangible toolset is a promising approach to improve business process modeling and comprehension. The focus of this paper is on the insights we got during the cooperative research project, i.e., the research path we took. Finally, we explain our research method and outline the next steps.