Workflow Management versus Case Handling: Results from a Controlled Software Experiment

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has become an important instrument for improving process performance. When considering its use, however, enterprises typically have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative reports. What is still missing and what is also demanded by IT decision makers are quantitative evaluations based on empirical and experimental research. This paper picks up this demand and illustrates how experimental research can be applied in the BPM field. The conducted experiment compares efforts for implementing a sample business process either based on standard workflow technology or on a case handling system. We motivate and describe the experiment design, discuss threats for the validity of experiment results (as well as risk mitigations), and present experiment results. In general, more experimental research is needed in order to obtain more valid data on the various aspects and effects of BPM technology and tools.