@article {453,
	title = {An Empirical Study on Consistency Management of Business and IT Process Models},
	year = {2012},
	institution = {Generative Software Development Laboratory},
	address = {Waterloo},
	abstract = {Process  models  support the transition from business requirements to IT
implementations.   Organizations   that  adopt  process  modeling  often
maintain  several  co-existing  models  of  the  same  business process.
These   models  target  different  abstraction  levels  and  stakeholder
perspectives.  Maintaining  consistency  among these models has become a
major  challenge  for  such  organizations.  Although  several  academic
works  have  discussed  this  challenge,  little empirical investigation
exists  on  how  people  perform process model consistency management in
practice.  This  paper  aims  to  address  this  lack  by  presenting an
in-depth  empirical  study  of  a  business-driven  engineering  process
deployed  at  a  large  company  in the banking sector. We analyzed more
than  70  business  process  models  developed by the company, including
their   change   history,  with  over  1000  change  requests.  We  also
interviewed  9  business  and  IT  practitioners  and  surveyed  23 such
practitioners   to   understand  concrete  difficulties  in  consistency
management,   the  rationales  for  the  specification-to-implementation
refinements  found  in the models, strategies that the practitioners use
to  detect  and fix inconsistencies, and how tools could help with these
tasks.  Our  contributions  are  1)  an  account of how business process
models  co-evolve  and how their consistency is maintained in a concrete
industrial  setting;  2)  a  set  of  recurrent  patterns used to refine
business-level  process  specifications  into  IT-level models, and 3) a
set  of  findings  that  confirm  or  contradict  conventional wisdom on
process model consistency management found in the literature.
},
	issn = {GSDLAB-TR 2012-03-22},
	attachments = {http://gsd.uwaterloo.ca/sites/default/files/2011-TR-empirical_study_bpm.pdf},
	author = {Branco, Moises and Xiong, Yingfei and Krzysztof Czarnecki and K{\"u}ster, Jochen M. and Voelzer, Hagen}
}