How Social Distance of Process Designers Affects the Process of Process Modeling: Insights From a Controlled Experiment

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems
(PAISs) by enterprises has resulted in large process model collections. Usually, process models are created either by in-house domain experts or external consultants. Thereby, high model quality is crucial, i.e., process models should be syntactically correct and sound, and also reflect the real business processes properly. While numerous guidelines exist for creating correct and sound process models, there is only little work dealing with cognitive aspects affecting process modeling. This paper addresses this gap
and presents a controlled experiment using construal level
theory. We investigate the influence the social distance of a process designer to the modeled domain has on the creation
of process models. In particular, we are able to show significant differences between high and low social distance in respect to model quality and granularity. The results may help enterprises to compose adequate teams for creating or optimizing business process models.