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

By M. Muehlen, J. Recker. International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2008

500 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/adf330df1e3d7981b39ffa8e4e12efd20047749f

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Citations in the corpus

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems (2012, background): “In this context, it is noteworthy to mention that, in practice, often only a small subset of the workflow patterns supported by YAWL is required [374].”
Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey (2013, background): “In fact, the OR-join semantics of [57] is not supported by any of the many tools claiming to support BPMN. Figure 18 illustrates the " vicious circle " paradox [66, 69].”
Untrusted Business Process Monitoring and Execution Using Blockchain (2016, methodology): “Our focus is not on supporting all elements of BPMN, but we start from the 5 basic control flow patterns [18], which are among the most frequently used elements in process models [25].”
Opportunities and constraints: the current struggle with BPMN (2010, methodology): “To answer these questions, in our study (zur Muehlen and Recker, 2008), we analyzed the frequency of occurrence of the different BPMN constructs in our sample of 120 BPMN models.”
Business Process Modeling- A Comparative Analysis (2009, background): “In fact, recent empirical studies show that users avoid the available multiplicity of constructs and instead tend to use a very restricted set of constructs (zur Muehlen and Recker, 2008).”