Cognitive Style and Business Process Model Understanding

Several factors influence the level of business process model understanding. In this paper, we investigate two personal factors that potentially relate to this level: a reader's cognitive style and theoretical knowledge on business process (BP) modeling. An experiment with 183 graduate students was conducted to explore their differences in cognitive styles using Cognitive Style Index (CSI) and how these relate to their scores in process model understandability. We used two real-life BPMN collaboration diagrams as our process models in our experiment. The results indicate a significant difference between intuitive and analytic students with respect to the level of BP model understandability. The relation between students' theoretical BP modeling and notation competency, and their level of model understanding is also found significant.

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