Experiences from Selecting a BPM Notation for an Enterprise

Much research work in business process modeling (BPM) has been spent on determining which notation is most suitable for industrial practice. However, a lot of this work was performed in academic environments instead of industrial settings. This paper introduces and discusses a case of selecting a BPM notation for a medium-sized enterprise from utility industries. The steps taken in this decision making process include the analysis of requirements originating from regulation in the domain, a survey among the future users of the notation, and the evaluation of candidate notations by expert users. The main contributions of this paper are (1) a case study from energy industries showing issues and challenges when deciding on the most suitable notation, (2) a survey comparing the understandability of notations from the users’ perspective and (3) experiences from the decision making process.

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