Towards Increased Comparability of Business Process Models: Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Semantic Standardization Functionality

Business Process Management (BPM) has become a widespread practice in organizations. Companies use business process models to document their internal processes for training purposes, optimization, certification or requirements specification. However, as the modeling projects are often carried out by distributed teams of BPM experts, the resulting models may suffer from naming variability conflicts. Variability makes the created models difficult to understand, to automatically analyze and to re-use. In order to avoid these pitfalls, modeling guidelines, such as use of domain-specific glossary and verb-object phrase structures for element labels, were suggested. However, methodological and tool support is rarely provided. Moreover, no effectiveness studies of semantic standardization functionality were yet conducted. We close this research gap by presenting a strategy for the implementation of semantic standardization functionality and put particular attention on the evaluation of its implementation. As a result of the evaluation, we highlight design decisions, which have an effect on the comparability of process models. The study is of interest to both, academics and practitioners, who work in the area of process modeling and intend to increase process model comparability.