The usability of collaborative tools

What is it about?

Modelling the business processes of an organisation offers benefits such as improved communication, increased understanding of processes, support for change management and gaining of competitive advantage over other organisations. However, Business Process Modelling (BPM) in large projects often needs to be carried out collaboratively in a team environment. The benefits of collaborative modelling are a reduced workload for modellers and improved quality, readability and accuracy of models. The result is also increased understanding of the processes amongst team members. Traditional technologies and BPM tools have several usability problems and often do not allow for effective collaboration and integration of business process models. Touchscreens are becoming the standardised modality of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet PCs. This paper investigates the use of collaborative business process modelling (CBPM) software and hardware for improving the usability of CBPM projects. A field study comprised of two assignments was carried out to evaluate the difficulties of CBPM with traditional BPM tools running on desktop PCs. A BPM software prototype was then designed which allows the drawing of business process (BP) models using touch and also enables the synchronous display of the process model on multiple tablet PCs.

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