Collaborative business engineering with animated electronic meetings

In an action research study at the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, a collaborative business engineering approach was employed to explore the joint application of group support systems and animation techniques to support stakeholder involvement in organizational change processes. Stakeholders constructed and evaluated static and dynamic models of the police force's current and future work processes. Findings illustrate the complimentary potential of the two technologies to support stakeholder involvement in terms of efficiency, resulting model quality, and stakeholder satisfaction with process and technologies. The study illustrates the value of an incremental modeling strategy, the involvement of a substantial number of stakeholders, and the need to keep the momentum in the process. Issues for further research concern the development of a collaborative modeling environment that allows for group enabled model construction and viewing and the automatic transformation between different types of models.