Improving the Quality of Business Process Models Using Gamification

Informally, business processes can be described as the way in which companies do their work. The act of business process modeling consists of making these business processes explicit using a process modeling language and a modeling method that prescribes rules for the use of the former. This can be done, e.g., to gain an as-is understanding of how an organization works or to detect – and eventually implement – potentials for the improvement of processes regarding performance indicators such as time and cost.  In most organizations, business processes are typically modeled by a small number of expert modelers according to the information provided by process stakeholders through, e.g., questionnaires. However, a large variety of publications has argued or shown that it might be beneficial to involve these stakeholders actively into the modeling process rather than confining them to passivity, as only in this way it becomes possible to leverage the whole breadth and depth of their domain expertise and ideas for process improvement. Unfortunately, this may be difficult to achieve due to underdeveloped process modeling skills and process modeling tools that are difficult to use for novice modelers. Furthermore, the question arises how these stakeholders can be motivated to invest time and effort into modeling processes in addition to actually executing them. For all of these problems, gamification – the use of game design elements within a non-game context – may be a valuable tool that can help with their mitigation: games are fun and thus motivate to playing them intrinsically, are often designed to teach certain skills through increasingly difficult challenges and provide clear immediate feedback about how the player is doing. These observations can be adapted to business process modeling and the quality of the resulting models. This thesis will need to examine the relationship between gamification and business process modeling, highlight potential benefits and risks, develop a concept for how an existing process modeling tool can be enriched with game-like features, and finally bring everything together in the form of a prototypical implementation. As an option, this could result in a publication at a scientific conference.