Success Factors for Process Modeling Projects: An Empirical Analysis

Business process modeling is one of the most crucial activities of BPM and enables companies to realize various benefits in terms of communication, coordination, and distribution of organizational knowledge. While numerous techniques support process modeling, companies frequently face challenges when adopting BPM to their organization. Existing techniques are often modified or replaced by self-developed approaches so that companies cannot fully exploit the benefits of standardization. To explore the current state of the art in process modeling as well as emerging challenges and potential success factors, we conducted a large-scale quantitative study. We received feedback from 314 respondents who completed the survey between July 2 and September 6, 2017. Thus, our study provides in-depth insights into the status quo of process modeling and allows us to provide three major contributions. Our study suggests that the success of process modeling projects depends on four major factors, which we extracted using exploratory factor analysis. We found employee education, management involvement, usability of project results, and the companies’ degree of process orientation to be decisive for the success of a process modeling project. We conclude this report with a summary of results and present potential avenues for future research. We thereby emphasize the need of quantitative and qualitative insights to process modeling in practice is needed to strengthen the quality of process modeling in practice and to be able to react quickly to changing conditions, attitudes, and possible constraints that practitioners face