Model While You Work: Towards Effective and Playful Acquisition of Stakeholder Processes

The ability to capture individual process behavior and cover it in form of an equivalent operation support is the basis for organizational adaptation in a highly dynamic business environment. Agile process management and resilient learning are typical examples in that context. Traditional mechanisms capturing process behavior employ an external person, such as a consultant, in order to examine workplace designs and to model business processes. However, the increasing prevalence of stakeholder involvement in workplace design and interactive workflow arrangement has prompted the investigation of instant capture-and-process mechanisms. Their main benefit stems from the capability to support work model articulation and recall, an important feature in stakeholder-driven development of heterogeneous environments. Among the perceived disadvantages of existing process capture-and-process mechanisms are poor performance in seamless execution, and difficulty of use in terms of notations. In this paper we describe an instant capture-and-process mechanism based on subject-orientation: Model While You Work. Experiences with the corresponding tool UeberModel indicate that the perceived disadvantages associated with externally moderated mechanisms can be largely overcome due to its adjacency to actual work procedures, qualifying this approach for distributed process capturing and processing.