Constructing comparable business process models with domain specific languages - An empirical evaluation

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the semantic building block-based approach as a means for improving comparability in business process modelling. It is described whether and why the semantic building block-based approach reduces the variations in comparison to traditional modelling approaches. Our argumentation is grounded on the assumption that business process modelling projects in large organisations have to be conducted in a distributed manner. However, the goal of these projects is to integrate single models into a consistent process landscape. This allows the organisation to mine the processes for potential improvements. A lack of comparability could deteriorate the quality of the process landscape and the analysis performed on its basis. In a laboratory experiment the variations of distributed process modelling in the traditional and the building block-based approach have been compared. Results indicate that the semantic building block-based approach leads to considerably fewer variations between business process models and, thus, improves the comparability of them.