Challenging the Philosophical Foundations of ... - Semantic Scholar

CHALLENGING THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODELING ORGANIZATIONAL REALITY: THE CASE OF PROCESS MODELING Completed Research Paper

Kai Riemer The University of Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia [email protected]

Robert B. Johnston University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland [email protected]

Dirk Hovorka Bond University Gold Coast, QLD, Australia [email protected]

Marta Indulska The University of Queensland St. Lucia, QLD, Australia [email protected] Abstract

Representing organizational reality in conceptual models is an important part of IS practice. In this paper we expose and challenge the taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin common accounts of conceptual modeling, using process modeling as an example. We argue that, due to an implicit commitment to a dualist ontology and representationalist epistemology, much literature regards the elicitation and representation of reality in the course of modeling as largely unproblematic. We draw on Martin Heidegger’s holistic philosophy to give an alternative analysis that brings to the fore challenges in 1) eliciting knowledge of routine activities, 2) capturing knowledge from domain experts and 3) representing organizational reality in authentic ways. As a result we come to see modeling as a practice that performs particular realities rather than simply representing a given reality. We hope to initiate a critical discussion on the implications of the current philosophical grounding of conceptual modeling. Keywords: Philosophy, Conceptual modeling, Heidegger, Expertise, Process modeling

Thirty Fourth International Conference on Information Systems, Milan 2013

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Breakthrough Ideas in IS

Introduction Representing organizational reality in conceptual models is an important part of Information Systems (IS) practice (e.g. Wand and Weber 2002; Weber 1997). Such models are considered a crucial input to information systems development, knowledge management, business process management and broader organizational engineering practices. Conceptual modeling can take different forms depending on the part of organizational reality that is modeled, such as information objects, systems architectures or business processes. Conceptual modeling has gained significant attention in the IS literature with a view to developing methods and representation languages that support modeling activities in practice (e.g. Becker et al. 2000; zur Muehlen and Indulska 2010). The aim of our critical polemic (Stahl 2013) is to question some of the core philosophical assumptions that underpin the representation of organizational reality in symbolic or graphical models in this domain. We take as an example the practice of process modeling (PM). PM refers to the modeling of organizational activity systems intended to capture the ways in which work is carried out in what is referred to as a business process. PM is viewed as an important activity in the context of business process management where it is seen as an important success factor (Bandara et al. 2005). While many facets of process modeling have been explored in prior research, the knowledge elicitation aspect of PM is largely considered as unproblematic, as a task of simply communicating mental representations between organizational personnel and the modeling expert, or as the analysis of work objects (e.g. Dean et al. 1994). In particular, two important questions regarding the ability to accurately encapsulate organizational reality with a model remain relatively unstudied or unanswered. First is the question of whether knowledge elicitation from organizational stakeholders or the process environment can give authentic access to, and thus accurately capture, the as-is processes by which organizations operate. Second is the question of whether representation itself, as presented in modeling grammars, notations and software tools, can actually encapsulate the situated social and material dynamics of organizational practices. In this paper we argue that knowledge elicitation and representation are frequently taken as unproblematic due to deep and largely unexamined ontological and epistemological commitments held within the field. Hence, we invite the reader to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie the dominant conception of process modeling. To this end, we focus our gaze on the existing ontological and epistemological grounding of common process modeling practice as presented in the literature. We then present an alternative grounding which enables a deeper understanding of PM capabilities, as well as exposing its limitations. We begin by providing background on PM in Information Systems and a brief overview of existing PM research. This provides the background for an analysis of the ontological commitments widely assumed in the literature. In doing so, we highlight implicit epistemological assumptions about the nature of knowledge and expertise and the resulting implications for eliciting such knowledge from process stakeholders. In a second step we question the ontological grounding of PM in a cognitivist and dualist worldview. We subsequently present an alternative ontological and epistemological foundation drawn from the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1927; 1962). We contrast the existing grounding with this alternative philosophical foundation. This leads us to argue that 1) people are unable to easily and completely articulate everyday, routine practices as they are grounded in tacit and embodied knowledge, 2) that expertise cannot be fully expressed and captured as a set of rules, that 3) routine work is heavily situated in a material and social environment which cannot be authentically captured by abstract symbolic representations. With our analysis we contribute to the conference track through “questioning the fundamental assumptions of established theories and frameworks” - in this case the practice of organizational modeling, as represented by PM. Our analysis thus presents an “alternative interpretation of the meaning and significance of prevailing thought” in this field. More specifically, we contribute to the literature an analysis of the philosophical foundations of process modeling exposing taken-for-granted assumptions of its efficacy for elicitation of situated action and the translation into symbolic representation of such action. We bring to PM the kind of critical appraisal of the philosophical underpinning that has already been applied to the field of knowledge management (Brown and Duguid 2001; Orlikowski 2002) and has

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Riemer et al. / Challenging the Philosophical Foundations of Modeling Organizational Reality

resulted in more nuanced teaching and practice. Consequently, we aim to open up a space for future discourse and research into the nature, role and limitations of organizational modeling in general and process modeling in particular, and to encourage the IS discipline to engage with and keep questioning its own tacitly held philosophical assumptions about organizational reality, as well as its own practices. While any comprehensive account of an alternative approach to process modeling is beyond the scope of this article, we will present normative implications that follow directly from our analysis, which we hope will present avenues for future research and inform PM pedagogy.

Background: Process Modeling in the Literature The aim of process modeling is to capture and represent in a graphical model the routine activities performed by people that comprise the processes of an organization. As such, PM is intended to capture how people engage in their work, how they create, manipulate and process documents and other work objects (for example implements and products), utilize software, make decisions and treat exceptions in order to perform organizational tasks.

The Role of Process Modeling For decades organizations have invested in initiatives intended to capture their as-is processes despite the resource-intensive nature of process modeling. Such investments are considered necessary because business process models are considered to be a fundamental prerequisite for Business Process Management (BPM) activities (Indulska et al. 2009), as well as a key instrument for analysis and design of Process-Aware Information Systems (Dumas et al. 2005). The main aim of process models within these contexts lies in facilitating a (sufficiently) complete and accurate snapshot of relevant organizational practices. In the context of BPM, for example, once an organization has representations of its as-is processes, it is then able to apply a plethora of process improvement approaches to improve the performance of the processes along a number of different dimensions, including cost, time, quality, flexibility, and compliance. The expectation is that organizations who model their as-is processes develop improved requirements specifications, have an increased ability to improve processes, and an improved understanding of organizational operations (Indulska et al. 2009). Conversely, without such process representations, the organization would lack a consistent understanding of the relevant activities and any suggested improvements may be misguided. One caveat on the use of process models for these purposes is that it is not sufficient for organizations just to engage in some form of process modeling – the rationale is that the outcome of the process modeling act, the actual model, should represent the organizational practice as comprehensively and correctly as possible. Just as process improvement without an understanding of the current practice is risky, so is process improvement based on a process model that does not faithfully represent what occurs in practice. Despite the potential dangers of using low-quality process models as a basis for such improvement initiatives, comparatively little work exists that details how to best carry out the actual activity of modeling a process in practice. Existing guidelines for process modeling tend to focus on the model creation aspects of the activity, such as on the correct use of grammars and languages (e.g. Becker et al. 2000). Different facets of process modeling have been investigated in the literature, including work on the representational capabilities of modeling notations (e.g. among many others see Recker et al. 2010; Recker et al. 2009), on methods of process model verification (e.g. Mendling and Van Der Aalst 2007), as well as on actual applications of PM in the field (Becker-Kornstaedt 2001; Crabtree et al. 2009; Hickey and Davis 2004). At the same time, some studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that practitioners suffer from a lack of guidance for capturing organizational knowledge in as-is models (Indulska et al. 2006). Hence, while the model creation part of process modeling is well-researched, the knowledge elicitation part, how knowledge regarding organizational practices is elicited from stakeholders, is comparatively under-represented. We argue that this is due to the fact that the elicitation of process knowledge from organizational stakeholders is taken as largely unproblematic. At the same time, we argue that there is a need for researchers to present more sophisticated and accurate accounts of how process modeling occurs in


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practice and what challenges are presented by eliciting knowledge about organizational practice. A small number of studies exist that explicitly or at least implicitly characterize the knowledge-elicitation and acquisition aspect of PM, most notably research into group support for modeling and collaborative PM (Rittgen 2009a; Ssebuggwawo et al. 2009). We draw on this literature in the next section to outline how the activity of process modeling is commonly characterized.

Characterization of Process Modeling Practice in the Literature Process modeling is portrayed in the literature as largely a matter of eliciting knowledge from individuals by way of communication: “as a communicative process in which the modelers participate” (Ssebuggwawo et al. 2009, 2). Rittgen (2009c) argues that modeling amounts to “eliciting individual views [,] “extracting” the relevant knowledge from the respective participant and making sure that it is correctly reflected in the model” (p.2). Modeling is described as a “structured conversation” (Rittgen 2009b) and “a view elicitation and integration exercise” (Dean et al. 1994, 217). More specifically it has been argued that the modeler aims to elicit from the functional personnel (the organizational participants) their different viewpoints (Meire et al. 2007) or their internal mental models of the activities performed as part of the business process (Dean et al. 1994). Accordingly, conceptual modeling has been defined as “focusing on capturing and representing certain aspects of human perceptions of the real world” (Wand et al. 1999). It is implied in this view that “functional personnel have different mental models of process components (…) [that] vary in not only their scope and detail, but also in how well they represent the domain” (Dean et al. 1994, 216). It is further assumed that different people are knowledgeable in different areas of the business practice and that “understanding tends to be distributed across a number of individuals” (Dean et al. 2000, 111). Consequently, in order to elicit knowledge about the entire as-is business process a group of practitioners must be interrogated: thus process modeling has been described as a collaborative activity involving multiple people (Dean et al. 2000; den Hengst 2005; Rittgen 2009b). Moreover, modeling involves different roles. Besides the most experienced and senior functional personnel who contribute their domain knowledge about the business practice, the modeling experts also contribute their analytical knowledge of eliciting and representing the process in the resulting model (Rittgen 2009c). Furthermore, it seems to be more or less taken for granted that modeling is carried out in interviews or modeling sessions, where people come together in one place, such as a meeting room (den Hengst 2005; Rittgen 2009a). Some authors are more specific, stipulating that “… analysts typically interview individuals or use structured methods of eliciting information from groups” (Pendergast et al. 1999, 357), and that “models have traditionally been developed by analysts who perform serial interviews with single users or small groups” (Dean et al. 2000, 110) or in “model development meetings” (Dean et al. 2000). In essence, knowledge elicitation happens in conversations where the modeling expert tries to elicit the mental model of the domain expert by asking questions, and subsequently translating that interpretation into graphical form. In addition, conversational knowledge extraction is often complemented by identifying the key objects and their properties and interpreting how people use them in carrying out their activities (e.g. artifacts, software products, or documents).

Exposing the existing philosophical Foundation In this section we expose the assumptions underlying how process modeling is portrayed in the literature as outlined in the previous section. This will lead to a brief account of the cognitivist foundation of PM, which is based on what is commonly known as the Cartesian dualist worldview (Orlikowski 2010).

Assumptions underlying the common Practice of Process Modeling The literature presents the knowledge acquisition part of process modeling as a communication and representational process. Accounts of this process are informed by a set of taken-for-granted philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and ultimately human existence and the nature of the world (ontology): 1) The way in which knowledge elicitation is characterized presumes that people already possess a mental representation of their work environment and how they perform activities. Implicit in this

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2)

3) 4)

5) 6)

assumption is an ontological position that stipulates that there is an independently existing world external to the human actor, about which one holds an internal mental representation. By stressing the role of domain experts as the target subjects for knowledge elicitation activities, it is assumed that senior, long-tenured personnel (i.e. experts) possess the most comprehensive knowledge about the business process in the form of more complete and more accurate mental models. It is at least implicitly assumed that such knowledge is accessible and can be externalized during the process modeling activity. It should be possible for the process modeler to elicit such knowledge from the domain expert and create a (partial) process representation without the modeling expert having to have much knowledge of the domain. Frequently this is the assumption when external consultants are called to an organization to carry out process modeling. It is assumed that, as people carry the internal, mental representations of their work activities with them, the necessary knowledge elicitation work can be carried out in interviews or group sessions outside of their particular workplace, such as in meeting rooms. It is commonly assumed that the world that is being modeled is made up of self-sufficient, independently existing things with properties that stand in interaction with each other. The model then captures an abstracted representation of this world.

These assumptions can be traced back to a cognitivist, dualist philosophical position, commonly known as the Cartesian worldview, which we describe briefly in the following section.

Cognitivist philosophical Grounding of Process Modeling The above account of process modeling will sound plausible and familiar to many readers. The reason is that it rests on a deeply ingrained and taken-for-granted understanding of the relation between humans and the world made explicit in the work of Descartes (1644, 2010), and later refined by many other thinkers (e.g. Hume 1740, 2009). It has given rise to a set of beliefs that have entered everyday and scientific ontological and epistemological understanding, commonly referred to as the Cartesian worldview (for a review see Scada 2004). The Cartesian worldview is useful to us in many ways because it is the basis of the rational scientific attitude that has dominated Western thought since the enlightenment (Spinosa et al., 1997). Because we grow up with this view, it appears self-evident. At the same time however, this view has largely crowded out any other way of seeing the world. The Cartesian worldview rests on a dualism that stresses the distinction between the external and the internal world (Dreyfus 1991). It places human subjects vis-à-vis an ‘external’ world that is made up of objects with properties (Weber 2012). As humans we take in this external world via our bodily senses and hold in our mind an internal representation of the (objects in the) outside world (Dourish 2001; Simon 1996). The mind is the substance that turns the external world of initially meaningless substances into the meaningful world that we experience. Hence, the Cartesian view posits a mind “in here” reflecting on, and directing the body to act upon, a world “out there”. The Cartesian worldview gains its most explicit expression in the various disciplines within Cognitive Science (Gardner 1985) that assert that human intelligent action is a matter of manipulating mental representations of the world (Johnson-Laird 1993). Based on our mental representation of the external world we are able to formulate intentions and plans, make decisions and execute actions in the world with our bodies. On this account, knowledge about the world is the basis and precursor for our acting in the world. Quite logically, the more comprehensive and accurate is our knowledge (representation) of the world the more expertly we are able to perform actions in the world. The activity of as-is process modeling then logically becomes a matter of capturing a domain expert’s mental model of their every-day tasks and activities, as well as the things they draw on to perform such tasks. Since domain experts are not modeling experts, such knowledge transfers are therefore performed by modeling expert and domain expert communicating in interview situations, often complemented by examining directly certain objects from the user’s world, e.g. via document analysis. Finally, a more general engagement with the literature on conceptual modeling reveals that the field has strong cognitivist foundations (Everman 2005) and is firmly grounded in (often implicit, but sometimes explicit) ontological commitments of the thing-property kind (Bunge 1977; Weber 1997; Weber 2012). For


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example, a significant body of research exists that draws on such ontologies for supporting the act of reality representation in conceptual models (for an overview see Everman 2005).

Challenging the Philosophical Foundation Despite its prevalence in modern Western thought and its dominance in theorizing in many academic disciplines, including Information Systems, the Cartesian worldview has been challenged by a school of continental philosophy that has its roots in the seminal works of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. We will introduce Heidegger’s ontological and epistemological position as an alternative philosophical position in order to challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions that the broader IS discipline holds about process modeling practice. Related critiques have been undertaken in knowledge management (Brown and Duguid 2001; Butler and Murphy 2007; Orlikowski 2002) using the notion of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge (Polanyi 1967) and phenomenology. There the focus is on sharing and storage of knowledge. The socially embedding and emergent nature of knowledge has also been discussed (Holmström and Sawyer 2011) in the broader disciplinary context of requirements engineering using Social Construction of Technology (SCOT). In contrast, our focus is on the adequacy of standard knowledge elicitation practices for capturing operational activity to produce abstract conceptual models. Because the aim of as-is process modeling is to capture human routine activity in everyday (work) practices, we use Heidegger’s philosophy, which is firmly grounded on understanding everyday human experience and action. It is thus an appropriate foundation for critically questioning the practice of process modeling. Due to its ubiquity, the Cartesian worldview appears self-evident and tends to be largely invisible; it is thus difficult to challenge (Spinosa et al. 1997). In the following we present Heidegger’s worldview so that the gestalt shift that Heidegger’s holistic philosophy involves can prepare the way for making our main argument. We draw on Heidegger’s original work and the work by Heidegger scholar Hubert L. Dreyfus, in particular his 1991 commentary and his 2007 lectures (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 2007), as well as selected further secondary sources (Blattner 2006; Dreyfus and Wrathall 2008; Harman 2010; Riemer and Johnston 2011; Riemer and Johnston 2013; Taylor 2006).

Overview of Heidegger’s Ontology The traditional topic of ontology has been to elaborate and categorize the kinds of entities there are in the world (e.g. Bunge 1977; Weber 1997; Weber 2012). Heidegger’s innovation in Being and Time (1927; 1962) is to ask an entirely new question: what are the kinds of ways that entities can be in the world? Heidegger argues that this question can only be answered by first examining the peculiar way of being of that entity for which being is an issue. This being Heidegger calls Dasein. For Heidegger the way of being of humans (Dasein) is engagement in practices. The unique mode of (human) existence is to be such-andsuch by doing such-and-such. For instance, a doctor not only practices medicine but is a doctor because s/he practices medicine. Dasein is not an individual person who gives a mental account of his/her own experiences; Dasein denotes the being of humans, whose mode of existence is distinct from that of other entities, namely to be engaged in practices that at the same time constitute what they do and who they are. Heidegger then defines two other ways that entities can be on the basis of how they show up for Dasein in the course of such practices. The first way of being he calls ready-to-hand, which means that an entity (for example a tool) is encountered in fluent use as a means for a practice. A carpenter who is engaging in hammering encounters a hammer not as an object with properties, but as a ready-to-hand means both for doing what carpenters do (hammering nails) and for being what a carpenter is (a craftsman). On the other hand, entities may show up for Dasein as present-at-hand when they are encountered in a more distanced reflective way (for instance as objects of curiosity; in a first encounter; when giving an account of them; and when attending to their construction). In this case the entity is an object of attention that makes its presence known through its properties rather than through its use in practices. In the same way, in a certain sense, humans have a substantial existence as physical bodies and humans can encounter their own bodily movements and mental activities as present-at-hand behaviors, actions, and goals. In this way Heidegger recovers the subject/object dualism of traditional philosophy, which he sees as a

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derivative way that humans can relate to objects and their own acting in the world through reflecting mindfully on them.

Engagement with the World and the Nature of Knowledge and Expertise Heidegger demonstrates by analyzing a series of everyday phenomena that in our everyday business we do not encounter the world as (a collection of) objects with properties but as a holistic, situated means, or what Heidegger calls an in-order-to (Heidegger 1962, 98). In that sense, a hammer is not encountered as a wooden shank with a metal blob but as a ‘to-put-nails-in’, a word processor is not seen as a software artifact with a set of features, but encountered practically as a ‘to-write-letters’, ‘to-capture-ideas’, ‘to-edita-memo’, depending on its place in a practice and the situation. Hence, our everyday world “is not grasped thematically“ (Heidegger 1962, 98) or consciously because our understanding for dealing with it is not one that resides in the mind, but a primordial one of the nature of an embodied skill, best described as knowhow as opposed to know-that (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2005). Heidegger has coined the term equipment to refer to such entities that are encountered practically and holistically, but not reflectively. It is important to note that equipment is used by Heidegger in a specialized way not to be confused with the everyday connotation of a material implement: his equipment is a holistic concept, where material entities and the social performance of work are bound up in the act of what is referred to as absorbed coping. The natural way of being of equipment is readiness-to-hand. Equipment, at the most basic level, is encountered in a practical, absorbed and even invisible way (Heidegger 1988), as it must “withdraw [zurückziehen] to be ready-to-hand quite authentically” (Heidegger 1962, 98). Almost paradoxically, equipment is truly encountered as what it is only when it is not experienced at all. In fact, for one to actually work with equipment effectively one must stop noticing, paying attention, staring at the thing, forget oneself and fall into a state of absorbed coping with the task at hand. A writer engaged with writing a text with a word processor will, if everything goes well, not experience the computer or the keyboard or the word processing program, but will be fully engaged with writing the text. If equipment were present as an object, use would involve a constant series of translations between representations of the task in the mind and the tool in the world through continual plan building and execution (Suchman 2007). It has been argued that such an approach to action is highly burdensome cognitively and conducive only to a faltering beginners performance (Dreyfus 1996; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1996). In general, our engagement with our everyday, familiar world happens in this way: if everything goes well we just “do” - we are absorbed with “what” we are dealing with, without having to think or reflect on the “how” of our doings. In the same way, we do not normally hold a representation of our work as distinct tasks with steps and rules for their performance. Humans do have the capacity to reflect on and make the world show up as present-at-hand. However, in these circumstances our objects of attention (e.g. tools or tasks) are not typically fully present-at-hand, but rather unready-to-hand. For example, this happens in cases of “breakdown” (Harman 2010, 19; Winograd and Flores 1987, 36) when something goes wrong or when we are asked to talk about our otherwise ready-to-hand practices. Dreyfus (1991) explains that what shows up are certain aspects of the use situation that are relative to our involvement in the referential whole, such as ‘the software is too slow’ or ‘this doesn’t work that way’. These situational aspects are not independent properties of a tool or task, because properties are meant to be situation independent. Important in this account is that any encounter with and reflecting upon our social world only ever occurs from within this world. Heidegger denotes this as being-in-the-world to capture that Dasein is always involved with the entities that make up the material and social world and, at the same time, this very involvement is what constitutes Dasein. Consequently, we are always coming from somewhere and thus bringing some perspective (Schatzki 2010) to every situation. The consequence is that any dealing with the entities in the world (either equipment or objects) is given meaning by the background of our existing tacit practices (Taylor 2006). Moreover, we are always in a situation and cannot stand outside the world and view activity from nowhere. This follows from the conception of Dasein as the being that actively uses the world as equipment rather than as an object of detached reflection. Even as we inspect an object or reflect on a task, such activities are always done against the background of the existing practice and its equipment, which influence what shows up in a situation. Heidegger points out that it is only through our (tacit) experience of equipment ready-to-hand in practical activity that objects and their properties can be intelligible to us at all.


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Consequently, for Heidegger being is grounded in intelligibility, not substantiality. Being is not the selfsufficiency of the existence of substances “out-there” defined by properties. Heidegger’s innovation is to recognize that there is always already a holism of equipment and practices (in other words, a world) that forms a background on the basis of which we understand any entities or phenomena in the world. This holistic background is always there for us but rarely seen; it “is so pervasive as to be both nearest to us and farthest away” (Dreyfus 1991, p. 22). It lends intelligibility to objects and equally to our own actions in the world. For example, in order to grasp what a word processor is and skillfully reflect on it or talk about it, we have to assume an abundance of background knowledge and acquaintance with numerous shared understandings including computers, printers, keyboards, the significance of text and written expressions in our culture, standards in paper sizes, font types, margins as well as how they potentially reference and bear on each other. At the same time ‘writing’ as an activity equally draws on this holistic background for how we already tacitly understand it and thus for what it is. Hence, Heidegger shows that the world is a holism, a nexus of holistic practices, whereby parts of this holism, which are encountered by us as subjects and objects, are what they are not through their properties, but defined by their place in these holistic practices. A doctor can only exist in a practice of medicine, a metal-blob-wooden-shank object is only a hammer in a practice where there are nails, wood, and structures built from wood. The above examples further expose the nature of knowledge in Heidegger’s philosophy. In essence, Heidegger’s analysis rejects the dualism between knowing and being: being is not what is given prior to our knowing ‘it’. Humans are not first and foremost subjects that need to get to know the world ‘out there’. Rather, the being of entities is grounded in our practical understanding of, and familiarity with, the world of which we are an integral part. Therefore, any entities in this world, such as things or tasks, are not pregiven for us to know; their being arises from how we ‘know’ them practically (or performatively), and we know them for what they allow us to do within our practices. Such an account closes the traditional chasm between ontology and epistemology into a unified onto-epistemology (Orlikowski 2006), as being and knowing are both enacted in practice. This account further reverses the taken-for-granted temporal order of knowing and doing that is formalized in cognitivism: in Heidegger doing is a precursor for knowing. Any knowledge is entangled with and founded upon our practical engagement with the world. Any act of reflecting is then an abstraction on the basis of our prior practical familiarity with (the aspects of) the world we are reflecting on. This has further implications for the nature of expertise and what it means to be an expert. Hubert Dreyfus (1996; 2010), drawing on both Heidegger and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945, 2003), describes the steps involved in the acquisition of skill from novice to expert. When someone is new to carrying out a task or is acquiring a skill for using a new tool they will do so by consciously following instructions that consist of rules or principles that are largely de-contextualized. With practice they will gradually begin to notice more and more meaningful additional aspects of different contexts and determine their own more specialized rules for responding to these situational nuances. However, eventually the number of situational elements and rules for responding becomes overwhelming. As a result, advancing to a stage of competence depends on noticing which aspects of situations have proven important in past performances and using these most important aspects as the basis for rule following or explicit decision-making. Finally, an expert comes to discern whole families of situations on the basis of what has or has not worked over an extended history of practical engagement, and over time “rules and principles will gradually be replaced by situational discriminations accompanied by associated responses” (Dreyfus 2010, 3). In doing so, one acquires skills and habitual ways of carrying out the task or using the new tool, characterized by “immediate intuitive response to each situation which is characteristic of expertise” (p. 4). It is important to note here that this is not simply a process of internalizing formerly explicit rules and principles. Rather, the expert gains from experience a repertoire of relevant fine-grained distinctions between situations that immediately elicit un-reflected responses. A true expert is able to respond to each unique situation and do the appropriate thing as judged by other experts in the practice, an ability that cannot be captured in any set of explicit rules. Rather than responding to it as an instance of a general situation to which rules apply, the expert responds to the situation holistically. There is not even a need to force upon the process an analytical separation between situation and action response since experts encounter situations already in terms of the actions they demand. Expertise on this account operates on know-how and embodied skill, or precisely what Polanyi (1967) termed tacit knowledge, while the performance of novices and advanced beginners is characterized by theory-based acting (know-that) that can be rather cognitively burdensome (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2005). Even competent performances

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that are more automatic still depend on responding to typical aspects of typical situations. Thus true expertise on this account is not accessible reflectively and cannot be translated into and expressed as an explicit set of rules in principle. We would like to point out that this is a basic, every-day phenomenon, experienced in such mundane activities as driving a car, getting dressed or baking that perfect cake (Sutton 2001).

Summary of the Differences between the two philosophical Positions Having laid out a Heideggerian understanding of the nature of the world, human engagement in and with this world, as well as the nature of expertise, we now summarize briefly the differences between this position and the Cartesian worldview. These observations will form a basis for proposing an alternative foundation for understanding process modeling in the next section. 1) Human acting in the world: While the cognitivist, Cartesian tradition stresses deliberation upon mental representation as the modus operandi of human acting in the world, Heidegger’s phenomenology demonstrates that most human engagement with the world is based on embodied skill. Rather than having to mediate action through representations of the world, human everyday acting in the world is characterized by skillful coping with the ready-to-hand environment, a significant part of which remains withdrawn from attention and deliberation. 2) Nature of knowledge: According to the Cartesian worldview, knowledge is possessed by the individual and knowledge about the world is the basis for and is a necessary precursor to acting in the world. Moreover, knowledge has the form of rules for acting in response to perceived properties of the external world. Such knowledge is taken to be explicit (declarative) or at least it can be made explicit. In contrast, Heidegger posits that our knowledge of our acting in the world and dealing with its entities is largely tacit, embodied, situational, and holistic. Knowledge on this account is not something possessed by an individual; rather knowing happens through acting in a social, cultural, practical, and material context and knowing and doing are co-constitutive (Orlikowski 2002). 3) Nature of expertise: On the Cartesian view to be an expert means to possess comprehensive and accurate representations of the world and the ability to detect and manipulate situations in the world based on such representations in order to achieve one’s goals. In effect the expert possesses an elaborate hierarchical system of rules for reacting to a wide variety of situations. In contrast, expertise on a Heideggerian account is precisely characterized by the ability to know how to respond to the uniqueness of individual situations without having to fall back to representational, rule-based action. Experts do not just respond to situations by detecting a hierarchy of aspects of situations and associated rule-like responses, but engage with each situation holistically on its own merits based on having honed a tacit understanding of what matters in a given situations and thus what response is appropriate. 4) Knowledge sharing and transfer: On the Cartesian position, any knowledge, because it is available as a representation in the mind, should in principle be transferrable between individuals through communication in one way or another. However, Heidegger posits that our understanding and interpretation of phenomena or entities in the world does not lie in the individual mind, but is coconstituted with the world of practices: thus knowledge is not something that can be unproblematically transferred between individuals, but can only be fully shared on a common background built through participation in shared practices and situations (Brown and Duguid 2001). Any activities or entities are always understood on the background of our (social) taken-for-granted familiarity with the world. 5) Humans’ relation to the “world”: The Cartesian position posits an “external” world that exists independently of our human enterprise. Subjects’ minds, assumed separated from this world, perceive and learn about this world and have their own internal mental world of representation and personal beliefs about this world. In stark contrast, for Heidegger, human existence and the world of human enterprise are co-constituted. People are an integral part of the world; they do not normally carry an internal model of the world as the basis of their acting in the world, but are who they are only through their place in (the practices of) the world. Moreover this world is always social, as the background that makes the world intelligible is always by its practical nature shared and not something that resides in the individual. 6) Nature of the world: From the previous point follows the last difference. The Cartesian worldview assumes a world that is populated by self-sufficient entities with properties in which subjects and


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objects exist independently. In contrast, the world in Heidegger’s ontology is a holism, a nexus of holistic practices in which objects and subjects are co-constitutively implicated, much as articulated in recent works on sociomateriality (Orlikowski 2007; 2010). We now show that process modeling shows up quite differently on a Heideggerian philosophy. By presenting Heidegger’s philosophy as an alternative foundation to the Cartesian philosophical tradition that underpins common articulations of process modeling practice in the extant literature, we advocate that it is necessary for the discipline to begin a discourse about the challenges of process modeling specifically, and conceptual modeling more generally, by rethinking its philosophical foundations.

Revisiting Process Modeling on a Heideggerian Foundation Having juxtaposed the traditional dualist, cognitivist position with Heidegger’s holistic, phenomenological onto-epistemology, we will now more explicitly question process-modeling as espoused practice, as presented in textbooks and summarized earlier, on the basis of this alternative foundation. This will allow us to expose a number of challenges that come to the fore once we rethink the nature of the world, human engagement with the world, and the nature of knowledge and expertise. We organize our analysis along the six differences described above: 1) Human acting in the world: Much of what constitutes routine action is not cognitively accessible. Typically, people do not possess a full present-at-hand interpretation of their (work) practices, but this is precisely what is assumed and required in interview-based as-is process modeling. People will only be able to give partial, incomplete and unready-to-hand accounts of their otherwise ready-tohand activities and work environments. It is a widely known phenomenon that people have problems talking about what they do, and that users do not always “see” software features and are unable to talk about their use of software features (e.g. Coughlan et al. 2003). While these phenomena might be attributed to various features of human cognition, Heidegger reinterprets them as the product of our normal way of being in the world. Current accounts of process modeling practice are thus challenged, as people will only be able to provide incomplete accounts of how they perform their routine work. Even with triangulation of knowledge elicited from a number of process modeling session participants, an incomplete account is likely to result. 2) Nature of knowledge: Know-how regarding the performance of routine activity is largely embodied and tacit. The more expert someone is in their practice the more embodied will be their skill. Experts have made tacit a large part of the routine work they do. It is likely that they take for granted, and may not even talk about, the most basic recurring activities they perform in their work, instead giving elaborate accounts of exceptions and special cases that are the parts that are ‘front-of-mind’. Hence, the ‘as-is’ model tries to capture precisely what will in practice likely be left out. Current accounts of process modeling practice are thus challenged, as domain experts might take for granted, and are unable to recount, the most routine aspects of their work. 3) Nature of expertise: True experts can act appropriately even in completely novel situations without reflecting or following any explicit rules. Such knowledge is tacit, situated and derives from individual experience of a vast array of unique situations and outcomes. Current accounts of process modeling practice are thus challenged, as true expert ways of acting on Dreyfus’ account cannot be made explicit as a set of typical rule-based responses to situations. Thus process models can at best capture competent performances, in Dreyfus’ terminology. 4) Knowledge sharing and transfer: Given that the world is intelligible to us on a tacit background, process modeling cannot simply be the transfer of knowledge between domain expert and modeler. In fact, any utterances by the domain expert need to be treated as interpretations grounded in their own contextual background. For example, when domain experts provide verbal accounts of their work they do so on the basis of their tacit familiarity with their own workplace, its culture, ‘normal’ appropriate ways of doing things (i.e. norms), and other taken-for-granted particularities, which are not explicitly recounted and thus not part of the narrative. In order to understand in a nuanced way what is said and how it is meant, one needs to share to a sufficient extent this background. Current accounts of process modeling practice are thus challenged when modeler and domain experts do not sufficiently share the same background, as misunderstandings arise and important subtleties go unnoticed.

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5) Human relation to “world”: People do not carry in their heads an internal model of their world. But interview sessions create an artificial environment where the domain experts are outside of the normal work environments in which they interact with the relevant equipment for performing activities. As human practice is situated in a material and social sense (being-in-the-world), any recount will be incomplete and inaccurate to the extent that people often need to use the material world and perform certain activities in order to be able to recall their performance. However, this is precisely what is supposed to be captured in as-is modeling, as process models aim to capture how routine, repetitive, every-day activities are performed. Current accounts of process modeling practice are thus challenged; the material and social aspects of routine work are at risk of being left out during interview-based modeling sessions because people are unable to fully recount routine use of their material and social work environment unless they are actually interacting with it. 6) Nature of the “world”: Creating a model of the processes which constitute some part of organizational reality as a representation of reality assumes firstly an ontological position of a clearly separable world of subjects, objects and activities. Secondly, it assumes that there is an “ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent” (Barad 2007, 46); in other words, that modeling can be done from a position outside of the world it tries to represent. These assumptions are untenable on a Heideggerian philosophy. First, our analysis suggest that the objective of PM - comprehensively representing organizational reality - is not possible when this reality is taken to be a holism, rather than a collection of independently existing objects with properties. Second, process modeling itself must be seen as a practice, tightly interwoven with background assumptions within organizations about what is considered a process, a task, an exception, an evaluation, a model, as well as what these models are for, for example as tools of managerial practice. Current accounts or process modeling practice are thus challenged, as modeling languages cannot claim to represent an objectively existing reality of clearly separable entities and task sequences. Rather, it needs to be taken as a perspectival and potentially value-laden practice that makes deliberate simplifications for the sake of analysis from a specific viewpoint and therefore cannot authentically grasp the holistic reality of local practices.

Discussion Process modeling is obviously useful, otherwise it would not be widely applied by organizations. Process modeling is an essential input to practices such as IS development and business process management. Having challenged its orthodox foundation, we come to see it in a new light. On a Heideggerian account process modeling is undertaken to make present-at-hand an otherwise ready-to-hand work practice. This brings to the fore its role and potential usefulness in a new way, but simultaneously raises fundamental questions regarding how process modeling is conceptualized in the literature, the limits of process modeling in practice, and the potentially political role of process modeling in organizations. On the one hand, we can see the usefulness of process modeling as an activity that is deliberately performed from outside of a practice: Making present-at-hand those aspects of the work practice that would remain withdrawn otherwise, and are thus invisible during day-to-day work performances, can act as a catalyst for change by members inside the practice. It enables them to bring certain aspects of the practice to the fore, to make them an object of reflection and thus change and hopefully improve the way routine work is performed. Without severe breakdowns, which would make routine activity unready-tohand, such reflection does not normally occur, as it is neither required nor useful under normal circumstances for expert members inside the practice to thematize their practices. We can thus interpret a process modeling initiative as a deliberate breakdown episode that invites reflection on routine activity performance. We acknowledge that experienced process modeling practitioners will be tacitly familiar with this view of process modeling. On the other hand, against Heidegger’s holistic ontology, we can also now see clearly major shortcomings in how PM is commonly presented in the literature. Process modeling cannot be understood simply as eliciting pre-existing present-at-hand representations of activities from people’s minds. If process modeling is to fulfill the aim of making present what isn’t, it needs to aim to gain access to practitioners’ know-how in ways other than by simply interviewing domain experts. At the same time, it also becomes obvious that process models can never fully represent organizational reality in comprehensive, objective and authentic ways. Rather, process modeling must be understood for


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what it is - a practice that aims to create specific simplifications of organizational reality for specific purposes by specific stakeholders, frequently management. The act of modeling thus highlights certain aspects of the world in favor of other aspects that are obscured or deliberately silenced. Therefore, models are not just approximations of organizational reality (the approximate nature of modeling is accepted in the traditional view) but value-laden renderings of reality. In the language of agential realism, process modeling can be interpreted as a material-discursive apparatus that performs a certain agential cut (Barad 2007); it thus performs a certain reality -ironically by way of claiming to represent reality itself -= that is laden with specific intentions and values. We argue that by bringing to the fore the ontological underpinnings of modeling it becomes clear that by engaging in PM one is adopting and buying into a specific worldview that tends to perform and bring about certain realities, rather than simply representing organizational reality objectively. Hence, a more critical reading highlights PM as a potentially political activity of subjecting a work practice to the values and worldview of particular managerial, consulting or technical practices whose particular professional orientation is to concentrate on certain circumscribed aspects of the work practice (such as standardized task sequences) with a view to bringing about particular effect (such as efficiency gains), at the expense of sidelining local sense-making and situated viewpoints. This is not to say that all processmodeling projects openly follow such agendas, as modeling can serve many purposes. But our analysis brings to the fore that by its very nature process modeling carries ontological commitments to a world of clearly separable entities, tasks and work objects with a particular concentration on clearly defined inputs and outputs, which are deeply embedded in a managerial approach to the organization of work and indeed in a wider worldview permeating Western thinking (Spinosa et al. 1997). In practical terms, such assumptions become inscribed into PM practice, whereby the “historic conditions under which particular technologies emerge and develop, and the forms by which they have become institutionally and socially embedded, often coalesce in ways that can make technology a recalcitrant ally” (Kallinikos 2004, 141). In other words, tools supporting PM practice bring with them a certain view of the world that might prevent modelers from moving past the standard assumptions of PM practice, and constrain the ways reality can be captured in symbolic representations. Consequently, when process models are subsequently used in organizational redesign and associated systems development projects, this might amount to replacing tacit expert knowledge with standardized rule-based activity, precisely because the method enacts a certain viewpoint and values about the nature of reality. PM as a method may “see” and capture precisely what particular stakeholders want to see. A critical account of PM warns of the danger that by using models to represent reality, the organization might ultimately bring about a simplified reality that complies with a particular and necessarily incomplete perspective on what is of value to the functioning and survival of an organization: see Scott (1999) for a series of illustrative examples. In view of this, it is not surprising that model-driven system development and redesign activities often lead to a lack of acceptance and subsequent user resistance (Lapointe and Rivard 2005; Pinsonneault and Rivard 1998). The reason might be that precisely what was meaningful and made sense to users in the field was silenced during the act of modeling and subsequent model-based redesign activity. The solution presented to them as the result is thus the outcome more of the attitude of managerial practice (as enacted in the act of modeling) rather than that of a meaningful representation and analysis of the organizational reality as experienced by the users. Thus, the critical perspective emphasizes that modeling practice always performs specific realities rather that representing reality. In summary, our analysis highlights both the distinct usefulness of process modeling in making present certain aspects of local practices for the purpose of reflection and change, and also brings to the fore the ontological commitments and political nature of modeling in simplifying and achieving efficiency gains at the expense of local view points. While our analysis quite naturally leads to a critical view of PM we do not advocate throwing out the baby with the bathwater by discrediting the idea of process modeling in total. Rather, in the next section we outline implications of our analysis, which we hope will lead to a more balanced view of PM in academic research and PM education. Our analysis is summarized in table 1, which depicts a comparison of the assumptions of the dominant Cartesian and the alternative Heideggarian worldview, as well as the implications for common PM practice.



Implications We argue that it is important for the Information Systems field to be aware of the philosophical underpinnings of organizational modeling and to engage in a discourse about its appropriate role and function in organizational life, its politics, and the implications of basing practices of process modeling on specific worldviews. In what follows we outline a set of implications that follow from our analysis, again organized along the six aspects exposed above. While we acknowledge that experienced process-modeling practitioners will be (at least tacitly) familiar with these implications, this work is intended to spur renewed academic discussion and research, as well as to inform IS pedagogy and the training of modeling professionals. 1) We have argued with our analysis that people will only be able to provide incomplete accounts of how they perform routine work. It follows that interviews alone, even with triangulation of various sources, are insufficient for eliciting knowledge on routine activity performance. Rather, observational methods or similar approaches, such as organizational or business ethnography (Ybema and Yanow 2009) might prove useful complements. 2) We have further argued that domain experts take for granted and have embodied the performance of routine parts of their work. It follows that modelers need to be mindful of the role and importance of tacit knowledge in routine work in the form of skill and know how and that recall of routine work will always be incomplete. It is thus useful to draw on proficient novices as informants, as they still have a largely explicit understanding of how they perform activities (Reimers et al. 2013). 3) We have argued that true expertise and expert knowledge cannot be captured in process models. It follows that process modelers should be mindful that process models at best capture competent rulebased responses to generic situations. At the same time, managers need to recognize that it might be dangerous or sub-optimal to automate less than expert processes, if too much faith is placed in the model as a representation of actual activity performance. 4) We have argued that process modelers and informants have to share to a certain extent a common background in order to engage in effective communication. It follows that in order to achieve a basic level of shared sense making, modelers need to gain at least ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) in the local practice. In other words, to overcome the communication gap (Charaf et al. 2013) modelers must spend time to gain familiarity with and to some extent an ‘inside view’ of the practice. 5) We have argued with our analysis that informants are likely to have problems describing how they draw on and use their material environment, such as work objects, tools and software applications. It follows that in order to model these aspects of routine activity performance process modeling should not be undertaken outside of the workplace, because activity is always locally situated (Suchman 2007). Rather, informants should be observed in situ and interrogated about the significance of performing situated actions while they interact with their work environment. 6) We have argued with our analysis that process modeling cannot claim to truly represent organizational reality but that models are always a perspectival partial view created for a certain, often managerial, purpose. It follows that process modelers need to be mindful that modeling and modeling tools carry certain ontological commitments and produce partial and potentially political perspectives of activity performance. In summary we argue that process modeling itself must be understood as a situated practice, a practice for modeling another practice, which engages in abstracting organizational reality rather than objectively representing it. A functional account of this practice would emphasize that its usefulness is greatest when a modeler tries to understand as authentically as possible the work practice (e.g. through user observations in situ) to then leave out those details that are unimportant for modeling purposes. However, our analysis further indicates that only experts from within the work practice will know authentically what is important for the practice, which provides further challenges. In any case, modeling cannot simply be seen as the creation of a symbolic representation isomorphic to entities in the world (such as activities, tasks, goals etc.), but can at best be understood as a joint interpretation between modeling expert and informants, preferably on a shared background - a joint act of making present what normally remains withdrawn - which is always done for a certain purpose that dictates what is left out.

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Table 1: Summary of our comparative analysis Common PM practice

Underlying assumptions

Cartesian worldview

Heideggerian worldview

Exposed process modeling problem

Implications for PM practice and pedagogy

Practitioners elicit knowledge about routine activity performance.

Knowledge of business practices is unproblematically available from individual operatives.

Human acting in the world is based on deliberation on internal representations of the external world.

Human everyday acting in the world is characterized by engaged, absorbed coping.

People cannot access cognitively in full how they perform routine activities.

Interviews should be complemented with observations when eliciting knowledge about routine activity performance.

Functional personnel provide accounts of how they perform activities.

Knowledge about the performance of activities can be made explicit.

Such knowledge is an explicit hierarchy of rules for actions in situations (know that).

Knowledge of how routine activities are performed is embodied (know-how).

Eliciting knowledge is difficult, as people take for granted aspects of routine work and have problems talking about it.

Modelers must be mindful that recall of routine activity performance is always incomplete. It is useful to draw on proficient novices who still have a largely explicit understanding of the work (Reimers et. al 2013).

Knowledge is elicited from domain experts.

Experts know best how routine activities are performed.

Experts possess the most comprehensive mental models of the work environment and hierarchy of rules about how activities are performed.

True expertise is based on a sense of what is meaningful and important in particular unique circumstances (knowhow); experts do not follow rules but deal with situations holistically.

It is impossible to capture true expertise and expert know-how in process models, since such knowledge cannot be broken into rules.

Modelers must be mindful that models at best capture competent rule-based responses to generic situations. Managers should recognize the dangers of automating less than expert processes.

Knowledge is elicited mainly by way of communication.

Modeling is based on a separation of roles between domain expert and modeler, where knowledge is transferred from expert to the modeler.

Knowledge is explicit and located in individual minds. It can be shared as explicit rules.

Knowing is embedded in social practices; entities and phenomena are only intelligible against a background of routinized practices.

Knowledge cannot be transferred unproblematically; utterances are only intelligible if domain expert and modeler share a background.

Modelers need to gain at least ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) in the local practice to achieve a basic level of shared sense making.

Modeling is typically done in interviews and meeting sessions.

Knowledge elicitation can happen outside of the work environment, as people carry a mental model of their (work) environment and practices.

Knowledge about one’s work does not depend on the environment or situation; people carry such knowledge in the mind.

Human existence and the world are co-constituted; people are an integral part of the world. Knowledge about work situations depends on those situations.

When modeling happens outside of the workplace material aspects are inaccessible. People are unable to fully recount routine use of their work environment.

Modeling activity should be carried out in situ, where people can be observed in interaction with their material environment (Suchman 2007).

Knowledge about activity performance is represented as discrete and defined steps in process models.

The world is composed of independently existing entities; work practices consist of collections of separate yet interconnected tasks that can be represented in models.

The world is made of things with properties that interact to bring about distinct world states.

The world is holistic; parts are defined by their place in the holism. People, artifacts, actions, etc. draw their identities and meaning from their place in local practice holisms.

Modeling languages assume ontological separateness of entities and thus cannot grasp the holistic nature of practices in authentic ways.

Modelers must be aware that modeling methods and tools carry certain ontological commitments and always produce only a partial and potentially political perspective of activity.



Conclusion Our objective in this article was to question the predominant philosophical assumptions of modeling and representing organizational reality in graphical abstractions, which is a practice salient in the Information Systems field. We have drawn on process modeling as a typical example. Our aim was to subject these assumptions to a substantive critique based on an alternative ontological and epistemological grounding. We have demonstrated that the literature portrays process modeling as a largely de-situated act of communicating mental representations about independently existing objects with properties. This conception is grounded in a cognitivist worldview that does not capture the embodied skill and expertise which underlie organizational realities and which hides the political agendas that models may serve. We have presented an alternative philosophical foundation aligned with the phenomenology of everyday dealings of humans with their sociomaterial world as expounded in Martin Heidegger’s critique of the dualist philosophy tradition. We posit that Heidegger’s position forms a suitable basis for questioning the foundations of process modeling because it offers a coherent understanding of everyday human engagement with organizational settings, which is precisely the object of process modeling. On a positive note, our analysis exposes the aim of process modeling as precisely to make present-at-hand those parts of a work practice that would normally remain withdrawn from actors inside the practice. This requires a balancing act between authenticity and abstraction (Reimers et al. 2013; Waller et al. 2008): On the one hand, process modeling needs to take seriously the situatedness of organizational practices and the tacitness of expert know-how. In order to get acquainted with a practice in an authentic way, one needs to gain deep access to the practice or, in the extreme case, make it ready-to-hand. On the other hand, modeling in its quest to make present-at-hand the practice in a complete and correct way needs to maintain a certain distance and abstraction from the situatedness of the practice. This tension between the lived experience of the world and the need to create a removed abstraction about the world challenges the taken for granted assumptions of process elicitation from experts. We expect that experienced and effective modeling practitioners would understand this trade-off between closeness and distance, at least in a tacit and unthematized way. Our contribution here is to provide detailed conceptual tools that can enable the transfer of this expert understanding to the PM research literature, and enable dissemination of a more refined and nuanced understanding true to the phenomena of capturing organizational practice in model representations. In particular, our Heideggerian account encourages an understanding of process modeling as a practice for making other practices present-athand in a structured way, rather than an activity that seeks to capture in the model an independent, objective reality or a mental representation thereof. On a more critical note, our analysis further shows that this practice takes into the field certain ontological commitments about the nature of the world that it is aiming to represent. Our contribution here is to demonstrate that inherent in the standard notion of representation is an understanding of the world as consisting of separate, yet interacting entities such as actors, objects, tasks and processes, that are precisely of such a nature that allows representation in an abstracted way. Our analysis using Heidegger’s ontology shows that if the world is understood as a holism, such representations cannot claim to correspond with organizational reality in any absolute way. Rather, they have to be taken as the outcome of a political practice that brings to the fore some aspects, but takes out of view others. On this view model creation is a performative activity heavily freighted with linguistic subtlety, interpretation, tinkering with elicitation techniques, discrimination between noise and signal and finally, “being convinced about what one sees” (Barad 2007, 51). The work has practical significance also. Firstly, in order to educate students we need to be able to portray and convey the characteristics of modeling practice in a way that does justice to the phenomenon in the world. Secondly, in order to carry out empirical research into modeling practice we need a conceptualization of the subject matter that reflects what actually happens. Thirdly, creators and users of models should be aware of the inherent limits and the ontological assumptions that are tacitly enacted when engaging in modeling. This is not to suggest that modeling is without merit but rather that models are perspectival simplifications with inherent limits, often for a managerial-political purpose. As approximations, greater attention is warranted to the points where models may fail (e.g. risk), to where gaps in the models may exist (e.g. exception handling) and to the diminishing returns of model refinement.



While it is beyond the scope of this article to attempt any comprehensive reformulation of process modeling on the basis of our Heideggerian philosophical grounding, we have however derived from our analysis a set of implications with practical relevance. We hope that our analysis will renew and broaden the debate about ontological and epistemological assumptions in process modeling specifically, and organizational modeling more generally, with the aim to open up a space for future (empirical) research into and theorizing of modeling practice. Whereas other, neighboring disciplines such as knowledge management have for some time questioned the cognitivist, representationalist view of knowledge and knowledge elicitation (c.f. Brown and Duguid 2001; Orlikowski 2002; Sutton 2001), we argue that a similar discourse is needed in the IS discipline and conceptual modeling field.

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