Process Innovation as Creative Problem-Solving: An Experimental Study of Textual Descriptions and Diagrams (Extended Abstract)

Supporting business and systems analysts with process models in idea generation tasks has been a longstanding topic of interest. In the study we summarize in this extended abstract, we examined how process models support process re-design tasks where analysts attempt to generate ideas about novel ways in which organizational processes can be executed. Through an experiment we compared how two types of models about organizational processes – textual and diagrammatical – assist novice analysts in developing innovative solutions to process redesign tasks. The results from our study indicate that diagrams are superior to textual process descriptions regarding the appropriateness of process redesign ideas and tend to produce ideas with higher originality and impact, while the sheer amount of ideas does not vary significantly. Process diagrams also change the focus of the redesign ideas ideas related to information systems improvements increase, while ideas related to data flow enhancements in a process decrease. The work summarized in this extended abstract has been published in [FR16].