Impact of Granularity on Adjustment Behavior in Adaptive Reuse of Business Process Models

Business process diagrams as exteriorized forms of distributed organizational knowledge can be valuable assets when shared and reused in similar process design tasks. However, little empirical research has been conducted to shed light on the cognitive processes involved during the adaptation of retrieved process models. We hypothesize that model granularity has significant effects on human adjustment behavior irrespective of the editing distances between reuse and solution models. The results of our laboratory experiment, which is dimensioned according to real-world cases, contribute to a more specific classification of adaptation operations and their cognitive efforts, and refine the notion of process similarity. This study follows up on our former research work by amending minor flaws in the experiment setup; it now provides a comprehensive analytical apparatus for further replicated tests as the predictive power of our explorative study, regarding e.g. varied business contexts and task dimensions, remains limited.