Virtual business role-play : leveraging familiar environments to prime stakeholder memory during process elicitation

Business process models have traditionally been an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach for process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions as they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. Empirical data obtained in this study suggests that this approach may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.

Augmenting process elicitation with visual priming: An empirical exploration of user behaviour and modelling outcomes

Business process models have become an effective way of examining business practices to identify areas for improvement. While common information gathering approaches are generally efficacious, they can be quite time consuming and have the risk of developing inaccuracies when information is forgotten or incorrectly interpreted by analysts. In this study, the potential of a role-playing approach to process elicitation and specification has been examined. This method allows stakeholders to enter a virtual world and role-play actions similarly to how they would in reality. As actions are completed, a model is automatically developed, removing the need for stakeholders to learn and understand a modelling grammar. An empirical investigation comparing both the modelling outputs and participant behaviour of this virtual world role-play elicitor with an S-BPM process modelling tool found that while the modelling approaches of the two groups varied greatly, the virtual world elicitor may not only improve both the number of individual process task steps remembered and the correctness of task ordering, but also provide a reduction in the time required for stakeholders to model a process view.

Augmenting and assisting model elicitation tasks with 3D virtual world context metadata

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Theories of situated cognition indicate that interactive 3D representations of real work environments engage and prime the cognitive state of the viewer. In this paper, our major contribution is to augment a previous process elicitation methodology with virtual world context metadata, drawn from a 3D simulation of the workplace. We present a conceptual and formal approach for representing this contextual metadata, integrated into a process similarity measure that provides hints for the business analyst to use in later modelling steps. Finally, we conclude with examples from two use cases to illustrate the potential abilities of this approach.

Model as you do : engaging an S-BPM vendor on process modelling in 3D virtual worlds

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Metasonic GmbH has developed a process elicitation tool for their process suite. As part of a research engagement with Metasonic, staff from QUT, Australia have developed a 3D virtual world approach to the same problem, viz. eliciting process models from stakeholders in an intuitive manner. This book chapter tells the story of how QUT staff developed a 3D Virtual World tool for process elicitation, took the outcomes of their research project to Metasonic for evaluation, and finally, Metasonic’s response to the initial proof of concept.

Virtual world cultural probe

We have developed a virtual world environment for eliciting expert information from stakeholders. The intention is that the virtual world prompts the user to remember more about their work processes. Our example shows a sparse visualisation of the University of Vienna Department of Computer Science, our collaborators in this project.

User-designer collaboration during the early stage of the product development process

As an understanding of users' tacit knowledge and latent needs embedded in user experience has played a critical role in product development, users’ direct involvement in design has become a necessary part of the design process. Various ways of accessing users' tacit knowledge and latent needs have been explored in the field of user-centred design, participatory design, and design for experiencing. User-designer collaboration has been used unconsciously by traditional designers to facilitate the transfer of users' tacit knowledge and to elicit new knowledge. However, what makes user-designer collaboration an effective strategy has rarely been reported on or explored. Therefore, interaction patterns between the users and the designers in three industry-supported user involvement cases were studied. In order to develop a coding system, collaboration was defined as a set of coordinated and joint problem solving activities, measured by the elicitation of new knowledge from collaboration. The analysis of interaction patterns in the user involvement cases revealed that allowing users to challenge or modify their contextual experiences facilitates the transfer of knowledge and new knowledge generation. It was concluded that users can be more effectively integrated into the product development process by employing collaboration strategies to intensify the depth of user involvement.

Elicitator : an expert elicitation tool for regression in ecology

Expert elicitation is the process of retrieving and quantifying expert knowledge in a particular domain. Such information is of particular value when the empirical data is expensive, limited, or unreliable. This paper describes a new software tool, called Elicitator, which assists in quantifying expert knowledge in a form suitable for use as a prior model in Bayesian regression. Potential environmental domains for applying this elicitation tool include habitat modeling, assessing detectability or eradication, ecological condition assessments, risk analysis, and quantifying inputs to complex models of ecological processes. The tool has been developed to be user-friendly, extensible, and facilitate consistent and repeatable elicitation of expert knowledge across these various domains. We demonstrate its application to elicitation for logistic regression in a geographically based ecological context. The underlying statistical methodology is also novel, utilizing an indirect elicitation approach to target expert knowledge on a case-by-case basis. For several elicitation sites (or cases), experts are asked simply to quantify their estimated ecological response (e.g. probability of presence), and its range of plausible values, after inspecting (habitat) covariates via GIS.

Expert elicitation and its interface with technology : a review with a view to designing Elicitator

Expert knowledge is valuable in many modelling endeavours, particularly where data is not extensive or sufficiently robust. In Bayesian statistics, expert opinion may be formulated as informative priors, to provide an honest reflection of the current state of knowledge, before updating this with new information. Technology is increasingly being exploited to help support the process of eliciting such information. This paper reviews the benefits that have been gained from utilizing technology in this way. These benefits can be structured within a six-step elicitation design framework proposed recently (Low Choy et al., 2009). We assume that the purpose of elicitation is to formulate a Bayesian statistical prior, either to provide a standalone expert-defined model, or for updating new data within a Bayesian analysis. We also assume that the model has been pre-specified before selecting the software. In this case, technology has the most to offer to: targeting what experts know (E2), eliciting and encoding expert opinions (E4), whilst enhancing accuracy (E5), and providing an effective and efficient protocol (E6). Benefits include: -providing an environment with familiar nuances (to make the expert comfortable) where experts can explore their knowledge from various perspectives (E2); -automating tedious or repetitive tasks, thereby minimizing calculation errors, as well as encouraging interaction between elicitors and experts (E5); -cognitive gains by educating users, enabling instant feedback (E2, E4-E5), and providing alternative methods of communicating assessments and feedback information, since experts think and learn differently; and -ensuring a repeatable and transparent protocol is used (E6).

Elicitator : a user-friendly, interactive tool to support scenario-based elicitation of expert knowledge

Expert elicitation is the process of determining what expert knowledge is relevant to support a quantitative analysis and then eliciting this information in a form that supports analysis or decision-making. The credibility of the overall analysis, therefore, relies on the credibility of the elicited knowledge. This, in turn, is determined by the rigor of the design and execution of the elicitation methodology, as well as by its clear communication to ensure transparency and repeatability. It is difficult to establish rigor when the elicitation methods are not documented, as often occurs in ecological research. In this chapter, we describe software that can be combined with a well-structured elicitation process to improve the rigor of expert elicitation and documentation of the results