Requirements of Process Modeling Languages - Results from an Empirical Investigation

The majority of large and mid-sized companies are active in Business Process Management (BPM). Documenting business processes is a key task of BPM, but the variety of process modeling languages makes it difficult to determine ‘the best’ one. Basically, the suitability of a process modeling language depends on the companies’ requirements. In this paper we adopt a bird’s eye view on the issue: By an empirical investigation of 130 public companies from all over the world and any sector, we gather the common requirements of process modeling languages and use them to assess the most popular ones (i.e., BPMN, UML Activity Diagrams, Event-driven Process Chains). Our results show that these languages are (1) equally expressive and (2) presumably equally understandable concerning the common core notion of ‘business process’; thus, they can be used interchangeably. However, the BPMN is the most complex process modeling language.

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