User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First

Solutions

Catharina Zollweg

and Stefan Zander

Siemens AG, Carl-Benz-Straße 22, 60386 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Hochschule Darmstadt, University of Applied Sciences, Sch

offerstrasse 8B, 64295 Darmstadt, Germany

Keywords:

Business Process Modeling, Business Process Transformation, Digitalization, User-centered Design,

Contextual Design, User Research, BPMN.

Abstract:

The deployment of user-centered design methods such as contextual design in business process digitalizations

is still at its beginning, in particular in conjunction with business process modeling techniques. Since their col-

laborative deployment is not a straightforward endeavor, this paper discusses challenges and ﬁrst solutions in

conducting contextual inquiry in combination with business process modeling. The challenges were acquired

through observations in ﬁeld studies and their validity is corroborated through a literature study of relevant and

related works. This paper’s main intention is to provide practical support and motivate the use of user-centered

design methods in business process transformations.

1 INTRODUCTION

The continuously increasing global competition

forces industrial companies to drive organizational

changes and innovations forward (Richter et al.,

2017). In this context, the digitalization of business

processes along the value chain is taking on a signif-

icant role; it is an essential step in the digital trans-

formation of companies (Binner, 2018) and requires

both, an active participation of users in digitalization

processes (Eller, 2009; Hanser et al., 2020) as well

as an understanding of the end-to-end process and

its steps through a formal speciﬁcation (Fleischmann

et al., 2018) to achieve a sustainable outcome.

To ensure the latter and avoid the risk of an in-

complete understanding of the process, process mod-

eling techniques and standards such as BPMN are

often used (de la Vara and S

anchez, 2008). Busi-

ness process modeling contributes to a coherent and

clear visualization of the individual process steps,

the resources involved as well as the data and infor-

mation ﬂows (Owen and Raj, 2003). It also facili-

tates the identiﬁcation of weak points and establishes

a communication basis between users

and develop-

ers (Staud, 2017), which makes it possible not only to

digitize but also to optimize the process as part of the

transformation (Indulska et al., 2009).

We denote these as process stakeholders

1.1 Motivation and Research Design

While business process modelling is an established

approach in creating formal and executable speciﬁ-

cations of business processes, it lacks user-centric

aspects that are needed for a successful transforma-

tion. We introduced contextual design concepts such

as contextual inquiry (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997)

into the digitalization of business processes in or-

der to ﬁnd out whether we could ascertain an im-

provement in transformation quality and process us-

ability (Zollweg and Zander, 2020). Contextual in-

quiry is a user research method in which a researcher

conducts a combination of observation with semi-

structured interview techniques in the user’s work-

ing environment to exploratively collect qualitative

data (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997). Therefore, the use

of contextual inquiry helps to analyze and understand

processes within their environment, to identify the in-

dividual process steps and to realize the digitization

according to user-centered design principles (Vilpola

et al., 2006).

Our work is built on the hypothesis that a com-

bination of contextual inquiry and business process

modeling helps, on the one hand, to identify and con-

sider individual and personal aspects and, on the other

hand, to gain in-depth process knowledge that enables

a holistic view of the process in the context of busi-

ness process transformations. We tested our hypoth-

Zollweg, C. and Zander, S.

User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First Solutions.

DOI: 10.5220/0010604801510159

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B 2021), pages 151-159

ISBN: 978-989-758-527-2

151

esis in a ﬁeld study (described in Section 1.2) which

revealed that the combination of contextual inquiry

and process modeling using BPMN was proven to

be successful for the digitalization of business pro-

cesses (Zollweg, 2020). However, the ﬁeld study also

revealed that integrating contextual design methods in

business process modelling is not a straightforward

process and poses a number of challenges.

In this paper, we report on such challenges to-

gether with ﬁrst solutions on how to address these.

Our ﬁndings were corroborated with the relevant lit-

erature in order to ensure their validity. We argue that

despite these challenges, a combination of contex-

tual inquiry and business process modelling can make

substantial contributions in successful and sustainable

business process transformations since a user-centric

approach not only promotes acceptance of the digi-

tal solution by employees, but also ensures that all

individual perspectives are perceived and integrated

into the digitized process (Eller, 2009; Hanser et al.,

2020).

1.2 Field Study

The ﬁeld study played a central part in our research

design as it allowed us to test our hypothesis and

evaluate our observations and ﬁndings. The study

includes the transformation of an analog distribution

process into a digitized and digitally integrated pro-

cess within a large world-wide operating manufac-

turing company. In the course of this process digi-

tization, a mobile application was implemented that

enables employees to digitally complete a previously

manually ﬁlled out data sheet via tablets.

Manually recored data was transferred in a fur-

ther step to the SAP system, which serves as a com-

mon database and manages information, material, and

value ﬂows in the factory. This manual data record-

ing lead to the situation that data had to be transferred

twice, which created an immense source of errors and

required a lot of time. It also led to a inconsistencies,

which meant that information could not be distributed

to all the involved departments in a timely manner.

The main goals of the transformation were to

ensure traceability and transparency among material

movements and states, minimize errors, save time by

eliminating manual operations, and increase the over-

all process efﬁciency. To ensure that the mobile appli-

cation contains all the functionalities relevant to the

process and meets the requirements of the employees,

several contextual inquiries were carried out as part

of the requirements analysis. The contextual inquiry

was conducted by two people, an employee from the

IT department who was responsible for the implemen-

tation and the employee who initiated the transforma-

tion process. The total duration of the contextual in-

quiry was approximately one hour. During this time,

the entire process was observed and the process steps

that required further clariﬁcation were repeated.

After the conduction of the contextual inquiry the

collected data was structured and analyzed and a pro-

cess model of the current process was created using

BPMN. The process model was analyzed, functional

and non-functional requirements were formulated and

a business process model of the optimized process

was created. Based on these requirements, a proto-

type was designed, tested, and implemented.

Usability tests were conducted by 10 users us-

ing a Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire

(PSSUQ) (Lewis, 1992) to evaluate the digitized pro-

cess. The questionnaire consisted of 16 questions,

divided in the categories: functionality, simplicity of

use, learnability, effectiveness, user satisfaction and

error handling. With an overall PSSUQ score of

1.575, the result of the PSSUQ was rated as positive

(cf. (Sauro and Lewis, 2012)).

The positive result conﬁrms the hypothesis that

an improvement in process usability can be achieved

by combining contextual inquiry and business process

modeling.

2 BACKGROUND

2.1 Business Processes Digitalization

Organizations face the challenge of designing their

business processes in such a way that they can be

adapted quickly and ﬂexibly to the market situa-

tion (Christ, 2015). The digitalization or partial dig-

italization of business processes enables companies

to increase process agility and thus react ﬂexibly

and quickly to changes in the operating environment.

Another beneﬁcial aspect of digitized business pro-

cesses is the increase in efﬁciency, since digital pro-

cesses contribute directly or supportively to value cre-

ation (Wolan, 2020). In addition, the reduction of

manual data transfers in digitized business processes

reduces errors (Appelfeller and Feldmann, 2018) and

also leads to the elimination of time-consuming me-

dia discontinuities. Digital processes can standard-

ize IT systems and ensure more performant and struc-

tured data capture and processing. In addition, not

only vertical process transparency is increased, but

also the horizontal overview of all business processes

is improved and process standardization is simpli-

ﬁed (Wolan, 2020; Appelfeller and Feldmann, 2018).

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

152

2.2 Usability Engineering, Usability and

User Research

The variety of deﬁnitions of usability is extensive and

the understanding of it can differ depending on the

perspective (Eller, 2009). Consequently, an exact in-

terpretation of the term usability always depends on

the context of its use. The term user experience of-

ten appears in connection with usability. There is no

universally valid deﬁnition for it either, but many dif-

ferent approaches to deﬁning it. In some cases, user

experience is used synonymously with the term us-

ability (cf. (Richter and Fl

uckiger, 2013)). Other def-

initions clearly distinguish between the two terms.

According to the standard DIN EN ISO 9241 210,

User Experience includes the perceptions, emotions,

and physiological and psychological reactions of the

user that occur before, after, and during the use of a

software product. User experience is understood as

a consequence of the design, functionality, and per-

formance characteristics of a product. In addition,

the user’s knowledge, skills, and brand perception can

play a role in the user experience of a software prod-

uct (of Standardization, 1999).

The positive effects of usability have been proven

in many studies, thus conﬁrming its relevance as a

success and quality feature of software products (Sef-

fah and Metzker, 2009; Mao et al., 2005). If soft-

ware products can demonstrate a high level of usabil-

ity, users are encouraged to work more effectively and

efﬁciently, which in turn has a positive effect on their

productivity. According to the ISO standard, users,

their tasks, and the work and application environ-

ment should be included in the development process

as early as possible (ISO13407:1999, ).

While the relevance of usability has been recog-

nized, its integration into the software development

process proves problematic for many companies (Fis-

cher et al., 2011). Reasons for this were investigated

many times, since they are however not topic of this

work, they are not further addressed here.

In the context of usability engineering, it is im-

portant to explore the needs and the speciﬁc appli-

cation contexts of the users (Seffah and Metzker,

2009). The goal of usability engineering is to re-

duce the functionality of a software product to an op-

timal minimum and to avoid unnecessary complex-

ity (Burmester, 2008). To achieve this goal, different

user research methods can be applied. As the elabo-

rated challenges in this paper are based on the combi-

nation of the methods contextual inquiry and process

modeling both methods are brieﬂy described in the

next section.

2.3 Contextual Inquiry

The method contextual inquiry is a part of the con-

textual design methodology, which includes various

ethnographic methods (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997).

Within the implementation process, the researcher

conducts an observation and a semi-structured inter-

view in the user’s work environment to collect qual-

itative data (Savarit, 2020). The contextual inquiry

method aims to analyze and understand the user and

their needs before the development of a new product

begins (Rosenbaum et al., 2000). Therefore, it is rec-

ommended to perform this method at the beginning

of a project (cf. (Savarit, 2020; Holtzblatt and Beyer,

1997; Coble et al., 1995)).

The method takes an observational approach in

which the researcher explores all aspects of the em-

ployee’s environment as well as his or her activities.

This allows the researcher to obtain personal infor-

mation about the user (Savarit, 2020). In addition,

this approach provides valuable insights that would

be overlooked in a laboratory or unfamiliar environ-

ment, or would be difﬁcult for users to communicate

during an interview (cf. (Coble et al., 1995)). Ac-

cording to this, the completeness and correctness of

the data collected is not dependent on how willing the

employee being observed is to provide information.

Another advantage of this method is that one has ac-

cess to the real environment in which the product will

later be used and can come to understand the user in

his familiar environment, where he feels most com-

fortable. Moreover, the researcher is able to register

unpredictable procedures and identify possible difﬁ-

culties (cf. (Richter and Fl

uckiger, 2013)).

By conducting a semi-structured interview along-

side the observation, the observer can use speciﬁc

questions to ensure that the observed phenomena are

properly understood and interpreted. The interview

questions serve as a guideline during the inquiry and

allow participants to answer them freely with the aim

to reach a so-called “story-telling mode”. It allows the

moderator to follow interesting leads and dig deeper

in case something interesting or unexpected emerges

during an interview situation.

Despite its many advantages, conducting the user

research method contextual inquiry is challenging

which will be further elaborated on in Section 3.

2.4 Process Modeling

The modeling of business processes is a prerequisite

for their digitalization and automation. It is intended

to formalize a company’s business processes and to

capture the context in which they are executed (Sharp

User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First Solutions

153

and McDermott, 2009). Business process modeling

can also be applied to understand the process and ver-

ify that the understanding corresponds to that of the

people who execute and participate in the process on

a daily basis (Dumas et al., 2013).

Various modeling languages can be used for pro-

cess modeling (Fleischmann et al., 2018). BPMN is

the most widely used modeling notation for mapping

business processes (Fleischmann et al., 2018). One

objective of BPMN is simplicity, which nevertheless

does not entail any restriction in the representation of

complex business processes (OMG, 2011). Another

objective and also an advantage of BPMN is that it

is a standardization approach to the mapping of pro-

cesses, which deﬁnes formats that are intended to en-

able an exchange across system boundaries (Bayer

and K

uhn, 2013). It is also used to establish a ba-

sis for communication between the project partici-

pants (Murzek et al., 2013). Due to the fact that the

notation comprises a high number of language ele-

ments, its use is suitable for many different applica-

tion areas (Fleischmann et al., 2018). The large num-

ber of elements also makes it possible to represent

even complex dependencies in a compact manner. An

advantage of BPMN that is particularly important for

the digitalization of business processes is the possibil-

ity of representing communication processes between

actors (Allweyer, 2020).

3 CHALLENGES

This section’s intent is twofold:

(a) The ﬁrst part introduces the user-centered require-

ments speciﬁcation process – a workﬂow used to

acquire, analyze, and document stakeholder re-

quirements.

(b) The second part elaborates on the main chal-

lenges that need to be addressed when combining

the user research method contextual inquiry with

business process modeling for process digitaliza-

tion.

Before a business process can be implementation,

it needs to be formally speciﬁed and user-centric re-

quirements need to be acquired, documented and an-

alyzed. This workﬂow, which we denoted as user-

centered requirements speciﬁcation process, consists

of four phases: (i) preparation, (ii) inquiry and obser-

vation, (iii) data analysis, and (iv) requirements spec-

iﬁcation. During the preparation phase, stakeholders

are identiﬁed, the project scope is deﬁned and the

contextual inquiry is prepared. The inquiry and ob-

servation phase comprises the actual execution of the

contextual inquiry together with preceding observa-

tions. During the analysis phase, the collected obser-

vation and interview insights are analyzed and struc-

tured. The requirement speciﬁcation phase transfers

the insights into a business process model and thus in-

tegrates the results of the contextual inquiry into busi-

ness process modeling.

We describe the challenges of each phase in sepa-

rate subsections the order of which correspond to their

chronological order in the user-centered requirements

speciﬁcation process.

They have been observed through ﬁeld studies in a

business process digitalization of a large world-wide

operating manufacturing company and their validity

was counterchecked with related and relevant works

(see Section 4).

3.1 Preparation

The goal of the preparation phase is to identify the

stakeholders, set the project scope, prepare the inter-

view questions, and set the objectives of the contex-

tual inquiry.

One challenge during the preparation phase is to

identify all stakeholders that are directly or indirectly

associated with a process and have an interest in the

problem and its solution (Mitroff and Mason, 1983).

A successful solution is only possible if all relevant

stakeholders are identiﬁed and their opinions, expec-

tations, and requirements are integrated and reﬂected

in the business process transformation (Adelakun and

Jennex, 2002). A stakeholder analysis helps in iden-

tifying relevant stakeholders but poses further chal-

lenges to the team (Jepsen and Eskerod, 2009).

Ascertaining the relevance and importance of pro-

cess stakeholders is one of the main challenges, as

their roles often become clearer as the project pro-

gresses.

A detailed stakeholder analysis is a crucial but

time- and resource consuming task. Therefore, it can

be challenging to decide whether to make a thorough

analysis or to keep the costs small (cf. (Jepsen and

Eskerod, 2009)).

Since stakeholders are usually employed in differ-

ent departments, a lack of common understanding and

knowledge can lead to team dysfunctionality and thus

an incomplete or inaccurate capture of user require-

ments (Nelson and Cooprider, 1996). A terminologi-

cal reconciliation is thus both essential and challeng-

ing as the semantics of relevant terms is determined

by the working contexts of the participants.

A frequent situation an inquiry team is often con-

fronted with is the necessity to prepare and formulate

concrete but open interview questions without having

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

154

detailed knowledge about the business case in which a

business process is embedded in. This in turn makes it

difﬁcult to determine the usefulness of speciﬁc inter-

view points beforehand and prioritize them appropri-

ately. However, in order to conduct a successful and

insightful interview, it is crucial to deﬁne the inter-

view objectives as well as the stereotypes that serve as

the primary personas; ﬁrst solutions to this challenge

such as formulating hypothesis that reﬂect research

objectives will be introduced in Section 4.

Another challenge identiﬁed during our ﬁeld study

is to prepare for how to approach the employees as

their attitude towards the business process transfor-

mation is unpredictable. The moderator must remain

neutral in any case, no matter what attitude of the par-

ticipants she encounters.

3.2 Interview and Observation

This phase comprises the execution of the contex-

tual inquiry, which includes the observation and the

semi-structured interview. In this phase, the data for

the business process analysis including the different

operands and artifacts as well as details regarding the

process environment are collected.

As outlined in the previous section, it is often im-

possible to predict the participants’ reactions during a

contextual inquiry correctly. Therefore, the modera-

tor should expect that views, objectives, and expec-

tations may differ signiﬁcantly among the different

stereotypes. In addition, the moderator has to show a

neutral, constructive, and professional behavior dur-

ing the interview conduction. The importance of so-

cial and soft skills in moderation situations has been

addressed sufﬁciently in the related literature, which

will be further elaborated in the discussion section.

People sometimes have difﬁculties in explaining

their tasks verbally accurate since they use their own

(technical or specialized) wording, which differs from

the terminology used in another department, or they

disregard allegedly trivial things, which are impor-

tant for a process formalization. A multitude of the

daily routines are done habitually and often uncon-

sciously (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997). Hence, it re-

quires thorough preparation and observational tasks

before conducting the interview. Moreover, tasks, ini-

tially considered simple or straightforward often re-

veal to be more complex when going into detail and

require a substantial amount of time in order to reach

a common understanding and shared agreement. This

in turn makes it necessary to plan sufﬁciently.

It is recommended to record the interview and

complement audio and video recordings with impor-

tant aspects of the environment in the form of digital

photos (Holtzblatt et al., 2005). In addition, partic-

ipants may feel disturbed by the camera and behave

differently (Holtzblatt et al., 2005). If possible, a sec-

ond person should monitor the interview simultane-

ously and speciﬁcally focus on emotional reactions

and body language of the participants. This observ-

ing person could also support the moderator in case

an interesting lead or follow-up questions emerge.

In order to obtain a complete and thorough spec-

iﬁcation of the requirements, the investigation team

must focus on detailed documentation of the inter-

views, because even with comparatively small busi-

ness processes, the amount of data can grow enor-

mously.

3.3 Data Analysis

The data analysis phase aims to structure and ana-

lyze the data collected during the contextual inquiry

in order to identify important aspects for the business

process digitization. The outcome and success of the

data analysis highly depends on the quality, consis-

tency, and completeness of acquired interview data. It

is therefore important to plan data acquisition means

beforehand and as thorough as possible.

One of the challenges during the data analysis is

that not only data from the interview but also from

the observation where collected during the inquiry

conduction phase. People do not talk about “obvi-

ous” or trivial things, as in most cases these are rou-

tine tasks that require little to no cognitive stimulus.

People often neglect to communicate those informa-

tion but they are elementary in the data analysis and

the requirements speciﬁcation phase. The challenge

thereby is to combine observational with articulated

interview data in a consistent and coherent manner

wherefore it is necessary to record them in a struc-

tured and systematic manner together with meta data

(provenance, conﬁdence, trustworthiness etc). Also,

conclusions drawn from the acquired data should be

reﬂected with stereotypes to validate their correctness

and appropriateness. It is sometimes observable, in

particular if the inquiry team has little detailed knowl-

edge about the business process, that relevant ques-

tions or issues arise during the data analysis phase.

As a consequence, parts of the interview need to be

retaken since things that seemed trivial or obvious

were initially not documented in detail. This leads

to a high expenditure of time and resources (cf. (Vi-

itanen, 2011)).

Since the amount of acquired data increases with

the complexity and scope of the observed process,

difﬁculties in structuring and analyzing the data are

likely to emerge (Kujala, 2003). In addition to that,

User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First Solutions

155

the contextual design guidelines do not provide any

recommendations regarding supplemental or substi-

tutional tools, which leads to the team having to orga-

nize itself (Kujala, 2003).

Another challenge is to extract and reconstruct

problems from the acquired data (Zollweg, 2020). It

was observable that participants were not aware about

problems before talking about them or analyzing the

data. However, there are no guidelines or recommen-

dations regarding the selection and usage of data anal-

ysis tools and methodologies. This is one of the most

critical aspects in this phase and requires both techno-

logical and methodological knowledge by the inquiry

team (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997; Kujala, 2003).

3.4 Requirements Speciﬁcation

The requirements speciﬁcation phase aims to create

a business process model from the data collected and

analysed during the contextual inquiry and the data

analysis. The business process model helps to re-

ﬂect the business environment in which the process

takes place as well as the process itself and therefore

is of high importance for the requirements speciﬁca-

tion (cf. (de la Vara and S

anchez, 2008)). The busi-

ness process model using BPMN serves as a basis for

further discussions regarding the process transforma-

tion(cf. (Murzek et al., 2013)).

An interesting observation in our study was that

the process modeling revealed details that were not

“visible” when conducting contextual inquiry alone.

Business process modeling has also helped in other

studies to provide a large amount of detail that could

not be identiﬁed with the use of another requirements

engineering approach (cf. (Cardoso et al., 2009)).

Although process modeling with BPMN in the re-

quirement speciﬁcation phase has many advantages

(see Section 2.4), full-ﬂedged knowledge about the

modeling primitives of the BPMN notation and its

associated rules and semantic is required among the

team (OMG, 2011). Consequently, project members

need to be familiar with this kind of modeling lan-

guage in addition to their technical and professional

skills. While the ﬂexibility of BPMN provides the

ability to model many different processes, it also leads

to a level of complexity that can be challenging for

users (Fleischmann et al., 2018). The interpretation

of models becomes more complex due to the variety

of different ways in which similar processes can be

modeled (Aagesen and Krogstie, 2015).

Like any modeling language, BPMN has its limi-

tations, which might impact result depending on the

business process being modeled (cf. (Recker et al.,

2006)). Due to those limitations the modeling of case-

based business processes, which are highly variable

from case to case and thus difﬁcult to predict, be-

come very complex and difﬁcult to understand using

BPMN (cf. (Recker et al., 2006)). Additionally, the

lack of a representation of states using BPMN, leads

to difﬁculties in the representation of control ﬂow pat-

terns (Wohed et al., 2005). The ﬂexible semantics of

lanes and pools in BPMN leads to them being used to

represent different real-world constructs and thus be-

coming ambiguous (cf. (Recker et al., 2006; Recker,

2008)). This in turn can lead to problems in the com-

mon understanding of the model. Another deﬁciency

of BPMN is that the ability to represent business-

oriented aspects such as business rules and business

data is very limited (B

orger, 2012)).

4 DISCUSSION

In the Discussion section, we present ﬁrst solutions on

how to address the challenges outlined in the previous

section. These solutions were discovered from a ﬁeld

study in real-world business process transformations

(see Section 1.2). Empirical evidence for the stated

solutions is derived from the related literature, i.e., the

observations are validated through a literature study.

This section also discusses related works and incor-

porates their ﬁndings in the respective paragraphs of

each phase.

An important task in the preparation phase is to

set priorities and focal points for conducting the Con-

textual Inquiry in order to obtain a clear understand-

ing of the process to be digitized (McDonald et al.,

2006). There are difﬁculties in preparing for inter-

views, as it is sometimes not possible to determine

and prioritize the expedience of certain aspects in ad-

vance. Various published guidelines and templates

(cf. (Courage and Baxter, 2005; Wilson, 2013; Kallio

et al., 2016)) provide support in formulating speciﬁc

interview questions and setting realistic objectives.

Another technique that is considered helpful is that of

using meta concepts or categories for formulating in-

terview questions (cf. (Richter and Fl

uckiger, 2013)).

Examples of such categories are roles distribution, re-

sponsibilities and communication, while others could

refer to strategies, artifacts, social and cultural effects

and working environments. An up front system con-

text analysis (Pohl and Rupp, 2011) would also be

helpful in getting a knowledge base for the formula-

tion of interview questions.

Another important task is to conduct a stake-

holder analysis beforehand in order to identify all

relevant stakeholders and to evaluate and understand

them and their importance to the project (Brugha and

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

156

Varvasovszky, 2000). A stakeholder analysis also

helps to gain an understanding about the extrinsic

and intrinsic motivation of the relevant people and

their attitude towards the business process transfor-

mation (Schmeer, 1999).

Since it is difﬁcult to predict the participants’

reactions or feelings before conducting the inter-

view, a pilot test should always be conducted before-

hand (Turner III, 2010). A pilot test also helps in

discovering discrepancies and inconsistencies as well

as structural and logical ﬂaws. It is also possible

to ﬁnd out whether the prepared interview questions

and objectives are sufﬁcient or need to be enhanced

(cf. (Van Teijlingen et al., 2010)).

The participants’ reactions and feelings towards

the process digitalization can never be fully antici-

pated wherefore the moderator should respond neu-

trally and empathically to all reactions and attitudes

(cf. (Preim and Dachselt, 2015)). Moreover, the re-

searchers’ appearance must be neutral, constructive

and sympathetic in any case to ensure that the partic-

ipants do not feel uncomfortable by her or the inter-

view situation, which would bias the result (cf. (Chle-

bek, 2011)). Our observations conﬁrmed the expe-

riences reported in the relevant literature, that it is

important that moderator and participants are on par

with each other and that a substantial amount of un-

derstanding towards the participants and their work-

ing environments is needed for the successful execu-

tion of user research (cf. (Batinic, 2008; Heimsoeth,

2015; Weber, 2017; Wright and McCarthy, 2008)).

Sufﬁciently scheduled time slots for conducting

the interviews proved to be very important, as tasks

initially classiﬁed as simple turned out to be more

complex and difﬁcult to understand. Furthermore,

time constraints may affect the quality of the survey

and can lead to incomplete results (Neumeier, 2017).

This in return has a negative impact of the success

of the data analysis, which highly depends on the

quality and completeness of the acquired interview

data (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997). A detailed docu-

mentation of the contextual inquiry is therefore neces-

sary in order to reconstruct the process retrospectively

as best as possible and to have a complete and thor-

ough speciﬁcation of the user-centric requirements.

In order to avoid increased time and costs due to

the repetition of interview sequences, a focus group

interview can be conducted in addition to the con-

textual inquiry, in which as many different aspects as

possible are collected (cf.(Schulz, 2012)). Further-

more, it should be checked whether all relevant stake-

holders have been identiﬁed correctly and the system

context analysis has been accomplished completely.

After completing the data analysis phase it is rec-

ommendable to reﬂect and discuss extracted prob-

lems with the responsible persons and to validate pre-

taken assumptions. If that validation is relinquished,

data analysis results and requirements might be com-

promised or inaccurate, rendering the process digi-

talization unsuccessful. These validating iterations

are therefore an integral part in the contextual design

speciﬁcation but makes its conduction time- and cost-

intensive (cf. (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997)).

Since BPMN has become a standard and estab-

lished itself in industrial practice, a profound knowl-

edge of BPMN within the project team is a funda-

mental prerequisite for being able to use the model-

ing language during a business process transforma-

tion. To counteract the complexity and the associ-

ated difﬁculty in understanding the model-theoretic

semantics, a reduced language scope is used in prac-

tice (Recker, 2008). Sometimes, the pragmatic under-

standing of a model is given more importance than the

syntactic correctness, which leads to the fact that syn-

tactically incorrect models are designed knowingly

(cf. (Wesenberg, 2011)). Since business process mod-

eling in the digitalization of business processes is used

to establish a common understanding of the process,

a less complex process model that may not be en-

tirely syntactically correct serves the purpose far bet-

ter than a highly complex model that is, in conse-

quence, difﬁcult to understand. The question in this

case is whether self-designed workarounds to over-

come the weaknesses of BPMN are a real problem

or whether this approach is better suited than trying

to design an all-encompassing language (cf. (Aagesen

and Krogstie, 2015)).

Another way to bridge the gap between what

should be modeled and what is possible with BPMN

is to combine BPMN with other approaches to elim-

inate the identiﬁed weaknesses depending on the use

case; Aagsen and Krogsite present various possible

extensions and recommended solutions for this pur-

pose (cf. (Aagesen and Krogstie, 2015)).

5 CONCLUSION

Successful business process digitalizations require

user involvement as well as a thorough, detailed, and

formalized speciﬁcation of process constituents. The

latter is usually done using BPMN while for the in-

volvement of users, we introduced the user-research

method contextual design. Although both methods

cover different aspects in business process digitaliza-

tions, their combination and interplay is not a straight-

forward task. This paper therefore presented chal-

lenges that need to be addressed when combining

User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First Solutions

157

both methods for successful business process trans-

formations. The challenges together with recom-

mendations on how to address them were acquired

through a ﬁeld study conducted in a large, world-wide

operating manufacturing company and validated by a

study of the related literature.

Since our study covers a comparably low-volume

business process digitalization, future work should

validated the challenges explored during a large-

scaled process. The variety of available modeling lan-

guages as well as a combination of BPMN with other

methods and their integration into the software devel-

opment process, especially into requirements analy-

sis, also offers many future research topics. More

work also needs to be done in supporting organiza-

tions to adopt such a user-centered methodology by

providing additional guidelines and case studies.

REFERENCES

Aagesen, G. and Krogstie, J. (2015). Bpmn 2.0 for model-

ing business processes. Handbook on Business Pro-

cess Management 1: Introduction, Methods, and In-

formation Systems, pages 219–250.

Adelakun, O. and Jennex, M. (2002). Stakeholder process

approach to information systems evaluation. AMCIS

2002 Proceedings, page 164.

Allweyer, T. (2020). BPMN 2.0 - Business Process Model

and Notation: Einf

uhrung in den Standard f

ur die

Gesch

aftsprozessmodellierung. Books on Demand.

Appelfeller, W. and Feldmann, C. (2018). Stufen-

weise Transformation der Elemente des digitalen Un-

ternehmens, pages 19–192. Springer Berlin Heidel-

berg, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Batinic, A. (2008). Medienpsychologie. Springer-

Lehrbuch.

Bayer, F. and K

uhn, H. (2013). Prozessmanagement f

Experten: Impulse f

ur aktuelle und wiederkehrende

Themen. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Binner, H. F. (2018). Organisation 4.0: Mito-

konﬁgurationsmanagement.

orger, E. (2012). Approaches to modeling business pro-

cesses: a critical analysis of bpmn, workﬂow patterns

and yawl. Software & Systems Modeling, 11(3):305–

318.

Brugha, R. and Varvasovszky, Z. (2000). Stakeholder analy-

sis: a review. Health Policy and Planning, 15(3):239–

246.

Burmester, M. (2008). Usability-Engineering, pages 321–

358. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Cardoso, E. C. S., Almeida, J. P. A., and Guizzardi, G.

(2009). Requirements engineering based on busi-

ness process models: A case study. In 2009 13th

Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference

Workshops, pages 320–327. IEEE.

Chlebek, P. (2011). Praxis der User Interface-Entwicklung:

Informationsstrukturen, Designpatterns, Vorgehens-

muster. Vieweg + Teubner Praxis. Vieweg+Teubner

Verlag.

Christ, J. P. (2015). Wo es heute in den Unternehmen

“brennt”, pages 7–28. Springer Fachmedien Wies-

baden, Wiesbaden.

Coble, J., Mafﬁtt, J., Orland, M., and Kahn, M. (1995).

Contextual inquiry: discovering physicians’ true

needs. Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Appli-

cations in Medical Care, pages 469—473.

Courage, C. and Baxter, K. (2005). Understanding your

users: A practical guide to user requirements meth-

ods, tools, and techniques. Gulf Professional Publish-

ing.

de la Vara, J. L. and S

anchez, J. (2008). Improving re-

quirements analysis through business process mod-

elling: A participative approach. In Abramowicz, W.

and Fensel, D., editors, Business Information Systems,

pages 165–176, Berlin, Heidelberg. Springer Berlin

Heidelberg.

Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., and Reijers, H. A.

(2013). Essential Process Modeling, pages 63–96.

Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Eller, B. (2009). Usability engineering in der anwen-

dungsentwicklung.

Fischer, H., Nebe, C., and Klompmaker, F. (2011). A holis-

tic model for integrating usability engineering and

software engineering enriched with marketing activ-

ities. Human Centered Design.

Fleischmann, A., Oppl, S., Schmidt, W., and Stary, C.

(2018). Ganzheitliche digitalisierung von prozessen.

Hanser, F., Sch

oning, S., and Alford, G. (2020). User re-

search in pharma r&d: Contextual inquiry for the elic-

itation of user needs in a chemistry laboratory for ana-

lytical method development within a corporate contin-

uous manufacturing organization. Journal of Business

Chemistry, pages 151–190.

Heimsoeth, A. (2015). Interview mit marie nauheimer: “zu

einer guten selbstf

uhrung geh

oren disziplin, durchset-

zungsverm

ogen, optimismus und empathie”. In Chef-

sache Kopf, pages 147–151. Springer.

Holtzblatt, K. and Beyer, H. (1997). Contextual De-

sign: Deﬁning Customer-Centered Systems. Interac-

tive Technologies. Elsevier Science.

Holtzblatt, K., Wendell, J., and Wood, S. (2005). Rapid

Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Tech-

niques for User-Centered Design. Interactive Tech-

nologies. Elsevier Science.

Indulska, M., Green, P., Recker, J., and Rosemann, M.

(2009). Business process modeling: Perceived bene-

ﬁts. In International Conference on Conceptual Mod-

eling, pages 458–471. Springer.

ISO13407:1999. ISO 13407:1999 Human-centred design

processes for interactive systems; International Orga-

nization of Standardization.

Jepsen, A. L. and Eskerod, P. (2009). Stakeholder analysis

in projects: Challenges in using current guidelines in

the real world. International journal of project man-

agement, 27(4):335–343.

ICE-B 2021 - 18th International Conference on e-Business

158

Kallio, H., Pietil

a, A.-M., Johnson, M., and Kangas-

niemi, M. (2016). Systematic methodological re-

view: developing a framework for a qualitative semi-

structured interview guide. Journal of advanced nurs-

ing, 72(12):2954–2965.

Kujala, S. (2003). User involvement: A review of the ben-

eﬁts and challenges. Behaviour & Information Tech-

nology, 22:1 – 16.

Lewis, J. R. (1992). Psychometric evaluation of the post-

study system usability questionnaire: The pssuq. Pro-

ceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meet-

ing, 36(16):1259–1260.

Mao, J.-Y., Vredenburg, K., Smith, P. W., and Carey, T.

(2005). The state of user-centered design practice.

Communications of the ACM, 48(3):105–109.

McDonald, S., Monahan, K., and Cockton, G. (2006). Mod-

iﬁed contextual design as a ﬁeld evaluation method.

NordiCHI ’06, pages 437–440, New York, NY, USA.

Association for Computing Machinery.

Mitroff, I. I. and Mason, R. O. (1983). Can we design sys-

tems for managing messes? or, why so many manage-

ment information systems are uniformative. Account-

ing, Organizations and Society, 8(2):195 – 203.

Murzek, M., Rausch, T., and K

uhn, H. (2013). BPMN als

Bestandteil der BPMS-Modellierungsmethode, pages

93–113.

Nelson, K. M. and Cooprider, J. G. (1996). The contribution

of shared knowledge to is group performance. MIS

Quarterly, 20(4):409–432.

Neumeier, A. (2017). Wert der digitalisierung – erfol-

greiche auswahl von digitalisierungsprojekten. HMD

Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, 54(3):338–350.

of Standardization, I. O. (1999). Iso 9241-210:2019(en).

ergonomics of human-system interaction part 210:

Human-centred design for interactive systems.

OMG (2011). Business Process Model and Notation

(BPMN), Version 2.0.

Owen, M. and Raj, J. (2003). Bpmn and business process

management: Introduction to the new business pro-

cess modeling standard. Technical report.

Pohl, K. and Rupp, C. (2011). Basiswissen Requirements

Engineering - Aus- und Weiterbildung zum ”Certiﬁed

Professional for Requirements Engineering”; Foun-

dation Level nach IREB-Standard (3., korrigierte Au-

ﬂage). dpunkt.verlag.

Preim, B. and Dachselt, R. (2015). Interaktive systeme. eX-

amen.press.

Recker, J. (2008). Bpmn modeling – who, where, how and

why. 5.

Recker, J., Indulska, M., Green, P., et al. (2006). How good

is bpmn really? insights from theory and practice.

Richter, A., Vodanovich, S., Steinh

user, M., and Hannola,

L. (2017). It on the shop ﬂoor - challenges of the digi-

talization of manufacturing companies. In Bled eCon-

ference.

Richter, M. and Fl

uckiger, M. D. (2013). Usability engi-

neering kompakt. IT kompakt.

Rosenbaum, S., Rohn, J. A., and Humburg, J. (2000).

A toolkit for strategic usability: Results from work-

shops, panels, and surveys. CHI ’00, pages 337–344,

New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Ma-

chinery.

Sauro, J. and Lewis, J. R. (2012). Chapter 8 - standardized

usability questionnaires. In Sauro, J. and Lewis, J. R.,

editors, Quantifying the User Experience, pages 185 –

240. Morgan Kaufmann, Boston.

Savarit, E. (2020). Collecting Qualitative Data, pages 153–

182. Apress, Berkeley, CA.

Schmeer, K. (1999). Guidelines for conducting a stake-

holder analysis. PHR, Abt Associates.

Schulz, M. (2012). Quick and easy!? fokusgruppen in

der angewandten sozialwissenschaft. Fokusgruppen

in der empirischen Sozialwissenschaft, pages 9–22.

Seffah, A. and Metzker, E. (2009). Adoption-centric usabil-

ity engineering.

Sharp, A. and McDermott, P. (2009). Workﬂow Modeling:

Tools for Process Improvement and Applications De-

velopment. Artech House.

Staud, J. (2017). Gesch

aftsprozesse und ihre Modellierung

mit der Methode Business Process Model and Nota-

tion (BPMN 2.0). tredition.

Turner III, D. W. (2010). Qualitative interview design: A

practical guide for novice investigators. The qualita-

tive report, 15(3):754.

Van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., et al. (2010). The im-

portance of pilot studies. Social research update,

35(4):49–59.

Viitanen, J. (2011). Contextual inquiry method for user-

centred clinical it system design. Studies in health

technology and informatics, 169:965.

Vilpola, I., V

anen-Vainio-Mattila, K., and Salmimaa, T.

(2006). Applying contextual design to erp system im-

plementation. In CHI’06 extended abstracts on Hu-

man factors in computing systems, pages 147–152.

Weber, M. (2017). User research erfolgreich im projekt

platzieren. In Hess, S. and Fischer, H., editors, Men-

sch und Computer 2017 - Usability Professionals, Re-

gensburg. Gesellschaft f

ur Informatik e.V.

Wesenberg, H. (2011). Enterprise modeling in an agile

world. In IFIP Working Conference on The Practice

of Enterprise Modeling, pages 126–130. Springer.

Wilson, C. (2013). Interview techniques for UX practition-

ers: A user-centered design method. Newnes.

Wohed, P., Aalst, W., Dumas, M., Ter, A., and Russell, N.

(2005). Pattern-based Analysis of BPMN - An exten-

sive evaluation of the Control-ﬂow, the Data and the

Resource Perspectives.

Wolan, M. (2020). Digitale Transformation im k

unstlich

intelligenten Zeitalter. Springer Fachmedien Wies-

baden, Wiesbaden.

Wright, P. and McCarthy, J. (2008). Empathy and experi-

ence in hci. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference

on human factors in computing systems, pages 637–

646.

Zollweg, C. (2020). Contextual design und prozessmodel-

lierung in der anforderungsanalyse zu rdigitalisierung

von gesch

aftsprozessen.

Zollweg, C. and Zander, S. (2020). User research in der

digitalisierung von gesch

aftsprozessen. Zeitschrift f

wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb, 115(7-8):534–539.

User-centric Business Process Transformations: Challenges and First Solutions

159