How much language is enough? Theoretical and practical use of the business process modeling notation

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235 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an increasingly important industry standard for the graphical representation of business processes. BPMN offers a wide range of modeling constructs, significantly more than other popular languages. However, not all of these constructs are equally important in practice as business analysts frequently use arbitrary subsets of BPMN. In this paper we investigate what these subsets are, and how they differ between academic, consulting, and general use of the language. We analyzed 120 BPMN diagrams using mathematical and statistical techniques. Our findings indicate that BPMN is used in groups of several, well-defined construct clusters, but less than 20% of its vocabulary is regularly used and some constructs did not occur in any of the models we analyzed. While the average model contains just 9 different BPMN constructs, models of this complexity have typically just 4-5 constructs in common, which means that only a small agreed subset of BPMN has emerged. Our findings have implications for the entire ecosystems of analysts and modelers in that they provide guidance on how to reduce language complexity, which should increase the ease and speed of process modeling.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvanced Information Systems Engineering - 20th International Conference, CAiSE 2008, Proceedings
Pages465-479
Number of pages15
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event20th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2008 - Montpellier, France
Duration: 16 Jun 200820 Jun 2008

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5074 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2008
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMontpellier
Period16/06/0820/06/08

Keywords

  • BPMN
  • Language analysis
  • Process modeling

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