Summary
Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a widely adopted practice information systems development. While intuitively many software professionals think about BPM as a way of representing all of the steps and details of a daily work execution, a significant portion of modeling is devoted to defining the broad outlines of a particular process and how improvements (like automation or worker support) made to its execution flow can align with an organization’s business strategy (so improve efficiency). Very pragmatically, business processes in their aggregated form (i.e., one entire business process represented by one black box element) do provide information on their scope (so can be seen as a tactical-level source of information) and, if mixed in a common representation with business objectives and goals, we can trace the impact of their reengineering or IT support on the overall organization strategy. Most of the work on the ability of novice modelers to represent a business process has focused on the earlier operational perspective rather than the latter tactical and strategic one. Evaluating the quality of higher-level representations is also, to a large extend, an open issue. This paper aims to overview the performance of novice modelers when representing such elements and tracing their strategic impact. To such an extent, a quasi-experiment is conducted. More specifically, subjects are given a complex case, and they have to draw a Business Use-Case Diagram which is a representation combining all of these elements. Results show that: (1) the proposed quality assessment is suitable when compared to a domain and modeling expert’s solution; (2) the cognitive style of modelers has no impact on the quality of the representations they produce.