Facilitation methods for use with EMS tools to enable rapid development of high quality business process models

An electronic meeting system (EMS) designed to support construction of IDEFO models can effectively support groups for rapid development of models. Such an EMS tool enables more domain experts to directly and productively participate during model development than traditional approaches supported by single-user tools. Although previous research has demonstrated that EMS-IDEFO tools can used to rapidly develop some model content, the corresponding facilitation methods produced models that included far too many inputs, controls, outputs, and mechanisms arrows with unspecified sources or destinations. Since such dangling connections signify incompleteness, ambiguity, and inconsistency in the models, a better approach was sought. The paper reports research on modeling approaches for use with EMS that produced different levels of productivity and model quality. Although some approaches produced suboptimal quality, a more successful approach was derived. This approach, the top-down, integrated (TDI) approach, overcomes significant problems inherent in the other approaches. The TDI approach allows models to be developed two to three times faster than traditional modeling support and yet avoids model ambiguities and inconsistencies.