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Business Procedure Modelling and Digitization Toolbox
Master Thesis Software Systems Engineering
Kamalika Dutta Matriculation number 340841
August 30, 2016
Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz
Cooperation Systems, Fraunhofer FIT Information Systems, RWTH Aachen University
Prof. Dr. Thomas Rose
Risk Management and Decision Support, Fraunhofer FIT Information Systems, RWTH Aachen University
Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction...................................................................................................................................2 1.1
Motivation ..........................................................................................................................3
1.2
Research Goals ..................................................................................................................4
1.3
Definitions .........................................................................................................................5
1.4
Outline ...............................................................................................................................5
Chapter 2 ......................................................................................................................................... 7 Related Work ................................................................................................................................7 2.1
Examples of Digitally Enhanced Business Procedure Models........................................8
2.2
Survey of Modelling Techniques ......................................................................................9
2.3
Business Model Diagramming Tools .............................................................................12
2.4
Conclusions from Related Work....................................................................................12
Chapter 3 ....................................................................................................................................... 13 Concept .......................................................................................................................................13 3.1
Definitions .......................................................................................................................13
3.2
Solution ............................................................................................................................14
3.3
System Description..........................................................................................................16
3.3.1
System Functionality ................................................................................................................ 16
3.3.2
Architecture of Solution .......................................................................................................... 17
3.3.3
Use-cases .................................................................................................................................. 19
3.4
Target Users ....................................................................................................................22
3.5
Solution Summary ...........................................................................................................23
Chapter 4 ....................................................................................................................................... 24 Implementation ...........................................................................................................................24 4.1
Prototypes ........................................................................................................................24
4.1.1
Low-fidelity prototype.............................................................................................................. 24
4.1.2
Medium-fidelity prototype....................................................................................................... 27
4.2
Digitizer Application .......................................................................................................28
4.2.1
Modules ................................................................................................................................... 28
4.2.2
UML Class Diagram................................................................................................................ 29
4.2.3
Architecture of Application ..................................................................................................... 30
4.3
User Interface ..................................................................................................................31
4.4
Tools, Technologies and Frameworks ...........................................................................40
4.4.1
Implementation Concepts ....................................................................................................... 40
4.4.2
Tools ........................................................................................................................................ 42
4.4.3
Technologies and Frameworks ............................................................................................... 42
4.5
Implementation Summary ..............................................................................................44
Chapter 5 ....................................................................................................................................... 45 Evaluation ....................................................................................................................................45 5.1
Requirement and Functional Analysis ............................................................................46
5.2
Heuristic Evaluation ........................................................................................................47
5.3
User Study Tasks.............................................................................................................47
5.4
Cognitive Walkthrough ...................................................................................................49
5.5
Focus Group Workshop .................................................................................................49
5.6
Results of User Study and Feedback ..............................................................................50
5.6.1
Digitized BPMs........................................................................................................................ 50
5.6.2
User Feedback ......................................................................................................................... 53
5.7
Final Testing ....................................................................................................................57
5.8
Evaluation Summary .......................................................................................................58
Chapter 6 ....................................................................................................................................... 60 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................60 Chapter 7 ....................................................................................................................................... 62 Outlook .......................................................................................................................................62 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 65 Appendix A - Digitizer Project Structure ...................................................................................... 67 Appendix B - Digitizer Feedback Form ....................................................................................... 70 Appendix C - Digitizer Performance Tests .................................................................................. 73
Declaration I hereby declare with my signature that I have created all the content of this master thesis, ‘Business Procedure Modelling and Digitization Toolbox’ on my own, and that all additional sources of references have been cited truly.
Kamalika Dutta
Aachen, August 30, 2016
Abstract With the dawn of Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT), organisations across the spectrum of industries are gearing up for digital transformation and increasingly transcending from the physical world to the digital world. Social, mobile, real-time, and other disruptive technologies are necessitating bigger changes than anticipated and all traditional businesses run in the physical world need to make use of these technologies to their full potential. While such innovative technologies represent important triggers of innovation, only the incorporation of the digital technologies as services into the business models, can allow organisations to make a smooth transition into a digitized version of their businesses. The research in this field is underdeveloped and extant literature, lack practical approaches and tools. A shortcoming of today’s modelling tools is that they do not support users in adopting the recently available technologies. This master thesis aims at bridging the gap between businesses and the digital technology providers by providing one platform for both. It aims at building a recommendation tool that proposes digital services to enhance the existing business procedure models and generate digital business procedure models. As a prototype for conducting research, a web application called Digitizer has been developed. Digitizer is a business procedure modeling tool that lets the user draw a business procedure model, supports the association and mapping of business procedure elements to digital services, provides a set of digital services for every element and generates a final digital business procedure model. Digitizer allows service providers to make digital services directly available on this modelling platform, for businesses to incorporate them in their business procedure models. Digitizer was evaluated to prove that such a system is effective in facilitating the digitization of business procedure models, fulfilling the research goals set out to be achieved by the master thesis.
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Chapter 1 Introduction As businesses increasingly transcend from the physical world to the digital world, organizations need to change from traditional business models to digital business models. Organisations across the spectrum of industries are gearing up for this so-called digital transformation. With the dawn of Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT), there is a great need for businesses to make their services available on the various digital platforms. Digital transformation is driven partly by technology and partly by the evolution of customer behaviour. Social, mobile, real-time, and other disruptive technologies are making it possible to necessitate bigger changes than initially anticipated. Currently, several disruptive technologies are converging to form what venture capitalist Fred Wilson calls a Golden Triangle of Disruption (Wilson, 2009). It is defined by 1) real-time, 2) social media, and 3) mobile technology trends. Figure 1.1 illustrates The Golden Triangle of Disruption. The result of this intersection is completely altering how people connect, communicate, and discover information, which, in turn, affects the entire customer journey and life-cycle. Therefore, it can be seen how technology and customer behaviour are responsible for the digital wave in the industry.
Digitization — the adoption of disruptive and internet-connected digital technologies and systems by consumers and organisations — is a global phenomenon that touches every industry and very consumer in the world. For every industry, digitization changes the way products are made, sold, and distributed, as well as how companies are managed, and how and with whom they compete. For many industries, digitization is completely revolutionizing the way companies interact with their customers. While such innovative technologies represent important triggers of innovation, only the incorporation of the digital services into the business models can allow organisations to make a smooth transition into a digitized version of their services. Business Procedure Modelling (BPM) can therefore be considered a key driver for such innovation as visualised by Loos, Peter et al., (Loos et al., 2015, pp. 155 – 174) in figure 1.2.
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A shortcoming of today’s modelling tools is that they usually do not support users in adopting the recently available technologies. Instead, most of these tools merely focus on providing a repository of graphical symbols and advanced visualization techniques to facilitate understanding of the relationships between the various process elements. The remainder of the chapter further explains how this forms the central idea behind this master thesis.
Figure 1.1 (a) The Wheel of Disruption (Solis, Li, and Szymanski, 2014), (b) Golden Triangle of Disruption (Wilson, 2009)
Figure 1.2 BPM and Innovation (Loos et al., 2015, pp. 155 – 174)
1.1 Motivation As the digital age unfolds, companies face new strategic challenges in taking advantage of fast-moving technology innovations. Prior research shows that value comes not simply from adopting digital technology, but from using technology to transform the way a company does business. But while the term “digital
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transformation” is much in vogue, relatively less attention is paid to the design of business procedure models that make use of the available digital strategies. With recent advancements in IT technologies, there are tools and techniques now available to manage and process huge amount of data, the digital data, the digital resources that we built through Digitization process. With the right techniques and vision in place, it is possible to extract useful information from those digital resources. This has opened up new opportunities to expand the existing applications or processes to make use of the huge amount of digital resources and thereby improve their efficiency. For instance, there are applications that can be migrated from traditional infrastructure to Big Data based infrastructure, that can support parallel processing of the data by distributing the data across multiple machines. Businesses are able to use such technologies to mine the digital information they have, and change the way existing processes work, and finally improve the business. In a sense, they evolved their business models by using recent advancements in Information Technology. It has become a general strategy now for most industries now. This is what we can call Digitization. More formally, Digitization is the strategy of adopting recent technologies in IT to make the most of the digital resources available in the enterprise. Some of the benefits to adopt this digital services in evolving the business procedure models are:
Improve customer experience, productivity etc. Automation Ease of doing business Growth
As the world continues to digitize and grow in complexity, virtually every enterprise will inevitably feel the need to have an effective digital business procedure model, one that creates value by engaging customers and helping employees work smarter. The increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies, also referred to as Internet of Things, offers new business modelling opportunities, which often involve an ecosystem of technology partners. Hence, product-developing companies are required to look at business models beyond a firm-centric lens and respond to changed dynamics. However, despite the hype around this transformation the research on digital business models has been found to be rather underdeveloped. This provides a perfect opportunity to develop a toolbox that helps in generating digitally-enhanced business models. This gap in research calls for investigation into possible ways of developing a digitization toolbox.
1.2 Research Goals The research undertaken by this thesis addresses the need for a business procedure modelling framework that captures the specifics of digitization to enable managers to build digital business procedure models in a structured way from existing business procedure models. The main aim of this master thesis is to design and develop a business procedure modelling toolbox that supports digitization. The system must provide the functionality to convert a business procedure model into a digitized model. Therefore, the following research questions can be formulated: 1. How can a platform be developed for the conversion of traditional business procedure models into models enhanced by digital services?
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2. How can a toolbox be developed that supports the mapping of business procedure elements to digital services? 3. Can the gap between technology providers and business model designers be bridged effectively by providing one platform for both?
1.3 Definitions The aim of this thesis is to discuss the nature of business procedure models with the intention of understanding how they can be modelled so as to improve their effectiveness using the digital services. However, there is a potential for anybody who is not from a business background to confuse seemingly synonymous terms such as a business process, business model, process models, business process modelling, business procedure models and finally business procedure modelling. A process defines ‘what’ needs to be done and which roles are involved. A procedure defines ‘how’ to do the task and usually only applies to a single role. Business Process Models show the order in which Business Functions are carried out in response to a particular business trigger. Business Procedure Models show the details of how each Business Function within the Business Process is executed. Business Procedure models are ideal when we want to diagrammatically represent the step-by-step actions with a specific task. Formally, a Procedure Model is the definition of the order of execution of Mechanisms in order to carry out the Business Functions contained in a Business Process. The two main keywords or phrases in the title of the thesis are defined below:
Business Procedure Modelling, can be defined as the step by step procedural description of an enterprise’s business model from the perspective of functional hierarchy of one instance of its operation. A business procedure model is a workflow diagram that provides a comprehensive understanding of the workflow of business model.
Digitization, aka Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to enhance a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business (Gartner, Inc., 2012). Digitizing a BPM produces a digitally enhanced BPM in which each element is support by a corresponding digital service. For ease of reference, the term ‘Business Procedure Model’ and ‘Business Procedure Modelling’ shall referred to as BPM. Section 2.2 Survey of Modelling Techniques, provides brief descriptions and a comparison of the various tools for process modelling techniques with regard to the context of this work.
1.4 Outline This Master Thesis Report is divided into 7 chapters. The first chapter, Chapter 1 - Introduction introduces the background of the research, motivation and research goals. The Literature Survey and Investigation is explained in Chapter 2 - Related Work. The state of the art in Business Procedure Modelling has been
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described in detail. Chapter 3 - Concept describes a concept of the proposed solution to answer the research questions. It describes the proposed solution to the above mentioned research goals and discusses its conceptual details like system description, use-cases, target users etc. Chapter 4 - Implementation presents the details of the implementation of the solution. The prototypes, architecture, selected technologies and frameworks used are discussed and justification for the selection is provided. Chapter 5 - Evaluation describes the various methods of evaluation, employed to evaluate the implemented system. Finally, Chapter 6 Conclusion provides a discussion of the contributions of this master thesis. The conclusion summarises the master thesis and shows how the research goals and objectives of the thesis are met successfully. Finally, Chapter 7 - Outlook proposes directions for further development and provides an insightful outlook into related future work.
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Chapter 2 Related Work This section describes the most recent advances in the development of business procedure modelling, incorporating the newest ideas in both industry and academic research. Several different sources have been investigated. Namely journal articles, books, conference proceedings, corporate reports, theses, dissertations, magazines (technology and business) and last but not the least, articles on the Internet. With a scarcity of such tools, it was difficult to come up with an appropriate methodology to compare all the related work under a single framework. During the literature survey for the master thesis, few existing systems have been investigated closely. In academic research, there are several research groups in the major IT departments and Business schools of the world dedicated to the innovation of digitized business models. Center for Information Systems Research at MIT, (Werner, 2016) aims at studying the emerging IoT-enabled business models by looking at what drives IoT opportunities, the new capabilities required, and the investments that are required to succeed with an IoT-enabled business model. Recently in an article, Harvard Business Review (Bonnet and Westerman, 2015), wrote about how a lot of opportunities exist to profit from digital business models. However, it is not a good idea to start the digitization process with the technology but instead, start with how you can deliver greater value to customers through technology. This is because, building radically new ones can be expensive, difficult, and highly risky. This has greatly influenced the purpose of this master thesis. The master thesis aims at developing a system that would suggest digital services in order to digitally enhance an existing business procedure model. Another article by the Harvard Business Review (Libert, Wind, and Fenley, 2014), researched a simple way to characterize the different types of business today. They came up with a classification of four types of business models in today’s digital era namely, Asset Builders, Services Providers, Technology Creators and Network Orchestrators. Network Orchestrators create a network of peers in which the participants interact and share in the value creation. They may sell products or services, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, co-create and more. The article reports that the so-called ‘network orchestrator’ business model yields maximum revenue and profits. Tim Goodwin, a notable strategist calls this new breed of companies as ‘The interface owners.’ He writes that in this age, the customer interface is 7
everything and such companies create a customer interface for the already existing services and monetize on the customers’ attention. Thus such a network-orchestrating nature can be observed in most of today’s leading companies. This brings us to the importance business models that drives their success. Therefore, a need to convert traditional business procedure models to digital models demands attention. Digital services enhanced business models need to be generated from existing models that make full use of the disruptive technologies at our disposal. Available resources have been categorized into three subsections. Section 2.1 Examples of Digitally Enhanced Business Procedure Models, discusses the various available commercial applications that make use of a digitized business model. Section 2.2 Business Procedure Modelling Techniques, discusses the various modelling languages and techniques that can be used for business modelling. Section 2.3 Business Model Diagramming Tools, discusses the available online tools that can be used to generate business procedure models. Finally, section 2.4 Conclusions from Related Work, discusses the conclusions driven from the literature survey.
2.1 Examples of Digitally Enhanced Business Procedure Models This section shall describe the various examples of established business organisations that have used digital services to enhance traditional business models. Usually such applications involve massive collaborations in which the roles of a customer and provider are blurred. The customer would have a two-sided role of both a ‘consumer’ and ‘provider’. These include wildly popular taxi hiring service, Uber and the lodging service, Airbnb, among other companies. Such businesses can be categorised according to their domains, such as: Accommodation, Transport, Learning, Health etc. The transport and accommodation examples are elaborated further using real examples from successful businesses. Transport: Uber has a really interesting business model, one that demonstrates a perfect orchestration of several services. It began as a smartphone application. Clients make use of new technology, including smartphones, to request a ride from their current location. Drivers utilize GPS or similar navigational technology to locate clients and determine the best route to both retrieve these clients, and to deliver them to their desired destinations. The driver then picks up the client(s) from their predetermined locations. The client is then driven to their requested drop-off locations. A network service is used to arrange the various elements involved in this service. Driver payments and matching of customers, rides and drivers are performed by optimization algorithms, which analyses available data to generate the combination with the most efficient use of time and fuel, as well as to ensure that the ride is as pleasant as possible for the clients. The app allows its customers to track the progress of their reserved vehicles as they travel to them. Uber began as a black car service for 100 friends in San Francisco—everyone’s private driver. Today, it is a transportation network spanning 400 cities in 68 countries that delivers food and packages, as well as people, all at the push of a button. This master thesis derives a lot of motivation from the success of Uber and one will find references to Uber’s business procedure model as an example. Other examples include Lyft, Sidecar, BlaBlaCar. Accommodation: A very popular accommodation and lodging system that has been looked into is Airbnb. Airbnb is a community marketplace where guests can book spaces from hosts. Airbnb connects travellers with local hosts for lodging. Interested guests, lookup available spaces and contact their hosts using the Airbnb messaging system to confirm availability. They are then required to submit a reservation request as a
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confirmation of their interest. This caters to two types of customers. Firstly, it allows people to list available spaces in their homes and earn income in the form of rent. Secondly travellers can book unique home stays from local hosts, saving them money and giving them a chance to befriend the locals. Catering to the ondemand travel industry, Airbnb is present in over 190 countries across the world. Airbnb is already a multibillion-dollar company with a presence in over 190 countries across the world. Similar to how Airbnb digitized the hotel market and how Uber digitized the taxi market, today’s entrepreneurs are in the process of digitizing several existing businesses. Other popular companies include ecommerce giant Alibaba, grocery delivery service Instacart, behavioural health analytics and mental-health monitoring service Ginger.io, healthcare and insurance company Oscar etc.
2.2 Survey of Modelling Techniques This section reviews the various modelling languages available for business procedure modelling including Flow-charting, UML, IDEF0, IDEF3, Petri Nets. Curtis et al. (Curtis, Kellner, and Over, 1992) and Giaglis (Giaglis, 1999) have discussed in their works, how critical the modelling of a software systems is, when used for business organisations. More research followed and later Giaglis et al. (Giaglis, 2001) proposed an evaluation framework and a novel taxonomy of BPM and Information Systems Modelling techniques. Each technique is described with relevance to the purpose of this master thesis and the finally the chosen technique is adequately justified. Flow-charting: As defined by (Aguilar-Savén, 2004), a Flow Chart is defined as a formalised graphic representation of a program logic sequence, work or manufacturing process, organisation chart, or similar formalised structure (Lakin et al., 1996). It is a graphical representation in which symbols are used to represent such things as operations, data, flow direction, and equipment, for the definition, analysis, or solution of a problem. Flowcharts help to model the sequential flow of processes but is not suitable for representing a breakdown of activities. Flowcharting is one of the oldest and commonly used graphical modelling techniques that help in describing the overall structure of a system and trace the flow of information and work. Flowcharting is mostly used as a simple, graphical means of describing basic processes today and is no longer a very popular modelling technique or standard in any right. IIDEF Techniques (IDEF0, IDEF3, IDEF1x): A set of formal notations called the IDEF, that stands for Integration DEFinition, was developed for the purpose of representation and modelling of process of data structures. The IDEF suite consists of a number of independent techniques, the most popular being IDEF0 (Function Modelling), IDEF1x (Data Modelling), and IDEF3 (Process Description Capture) as discussed in (Giaglis, 1999). IDEF0 has been designed for the modeling the working of an organisation in terms of decisions, actions and activities. It concerns itself with the modelling of the functional aspects. According to (Giaglis, 1999), models using IDEF0 notation, are ineffective at representing the behavioural or informational modelling perspectives
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and IDEF3 overcomes this limitation to describe processes as ordered sequences of events or activities. The purpose of an IDEF3 model is providing a structured methodology for expressing the domain experts’ knowledge about the working of a particular system or organisation. IDEF1x was designed as a technique for modelling and analysis of data structures for the establishment of Information Systems requirements.
Petri Nets: A Petri Net is a tool for the study of systems using mathematical notations to represent the system as defined by (Peterson 1981). A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph. It represents transitions and places using nodes and pre-/post- conditions for transitions as directed arcs. Petri Nets were developed and since used predominantly for systems modelling and is therefore not suitable for business process modelling. Role Activity Diagramming: Role Activity Diagrams (RADs) are diagrammatic notations that are focused at modelling individual or group roles within a process. RADs help to model the component activities along with the interactions, external events and the logic that determines the activities that are executed by these roles and when. According to (Giaglis, 2001), RADs cannot accommodate the explicit depiction of and experimentation with other organisational perspectives, hence restricting their role to being mostly complementary in the context of business engineering. Data Flow Diagramming: Data Flow Diagramming (DFD) is a technique for graphically depicting the flow of data amongst external entities, internal processing steps, and data storage elements in a business process (Grigorova et al., 2005). DFDs are used for the documentation of systems by representing the flow of data into, around, and outside the system boundaries. This aspect makes DFDs comparable to flowcharts, differing from them mainly in the focus of analysis (DFDs focus on data, instead of activities and control). Entity-Relationship Diagramming: Entity-Relationship (ER) Diagramming is a very widely used data modelling technique. ER diagrams are network models that describe the stored data layout of a system (Yourdon 1989). ER diagrams focus on modelling the data present in a system and their relationships in a manner that is entirely independent of the processing that may take place on that data (Giaglis, 1999), which makes it a bit of a mismatch for the purpose of the modelling technique being surveyed by this master thesis. State Transitioning Diagramming: State-Transition (ST) diagrams originate from the analysis and design of real-time systems (Grigorova et al., 2005). The limitations of the static nature of DFDs and ER diagrams are overcome by ST diagramming by providing explicit information about the time-related sequence of events within a system. ST diagrams
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are primarily focused on the data portion of a system, ignoring aspects of work flow, control, decisionmaking, and so on and therefore inappropriate for capturing business process modelling aspects (Giaglis, 1999). Business Process Model and Notation: Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model (Grigorova et al., 2005). Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the standard for business process modelling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a business process diagram based on a flowcharting technique very similar to activity diagrams from Unified Modelling Language (UML). BPMN was developed with the objective of supporting business process management, for both technical users and business users, by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users, yet able to represent complex process semantics according to (Giaglis, 2001). Unified Modelling Language (UML): The Unified Modelling Language is an industry standard visual modelling language for specifying, constructing, and documenting the artefacts of systems. UML has almost universally been accepted throughout the object-technology community as the standard graphical language for specifying, constructing, visualising, and documenting software-intensive systems (Rumbaugh, Jacobson, and Booch, 2004). UML’s diagrammatic notations include: o o o o
Use case diagrams Class diagrams Activity diagrams Implementation diagrams
Firstly, the various techniques differ significantly in the extent to which they provide the ability to model different business and system perspectives. Some techniques focus primarily on functions, some others on roles, and yet some others on data. BPMN is naturally a very effective technique for business procedure modelling however, UML was also found to be equally effective. The effectiveness of UML Activity Diagrams versus BPMN technique for business modelling is evaluated in the research paper by Geambaşu, (Geambaşu, 2012). There is very insightful comparison of the two techniques and conclusion suggests that both techniques were found to be equally appropriate. Unified Modelling Language (UML) Activity Diagrams can be used very effectively to model a variety of systems: software systems, business systems, or any other system. UML fulfils the requirements of business-system modelling: it reflects various views of a business system, in order to capture its different aspects. Additionally, there is an available Javascript library for UML diagramming, which makes UML the perfect choice for the implementation of this master thesis.
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2.3 Business Model Diagramming Tools The demand for cross-platform web-based applications combined with the need for online collaboration and interesting web interfaces that can be created with new technologies (e.g. HTML5 canvas) has created a ‘new’ market for modelling tools: online modelling tools. In a way, these tools are more drawing tools than modelling tools but still, they offer a way to draw and share UML/ER/BPMN models online. Popular online and standalone applications for business procedure modelling including Visio, Creately, Gliffy, GoJs, Lucid Chart, Concept Draw etc., have been reviewed. Most of the diagramming tools are aimed at providing the most usable interface and collaboration features for the drawing itself. No tool was found which provided any features that included digital services or a way to enhance the models that were drawn.
2.4 Conclusions from Related Work From the above sections, it can be seen that, the research in this field is underdeveloped and there is a lack of practical tools related to the precise area of this master thesis. The research gap can be classified into two categories: Missing actionable approaches: Extant literature does not provide actionable approaches for business models in inter-connected IoT- enabled business environments. Missing Methods/Tools for digital business model generation. Methods/Tools for conversion of existing traditional Business Models into Digital Business Procedure Models. Missing platform for digital service providers to make their services available for business modelling.
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Chapter 3 Concept In order to address the research questions stated earlier, a possible solution is being proposed as an application that digitizes business procedure models. Therefore, the objective of this master thesis is the development of a business procedure modelling and digitization toolbox. The toolbox shall provide business modelling and diagramming functionalities as well as a platform for service providers to make their services available. A webbased tool shall be developed that lets a user draw business procedure models using basic drawing tools and pre-defined elements. This model would then be digitized by the tool. It shall provide a set of digital services corresponding to each procedure element. Therefore, the tool shall be able to provide a digitally enhanced business procedure model. This tool shall be called ‘Digitizer.’ Figure 3.2 (a-d) illustrate the idea behind the generation of digital services enhanced business model from the basic business procedure model. A simple business procedure model is drawn, then ‘digitized’ to generate the available services that can be associated with the activity elements of the model and finally selected services enhance the BPM to result in a final Digital BPM. An initial low fidelity prototype and later a medium fidelity prototype were developed in order to identify the requirements of the system. Use-case diagrams and mockups in the following sections help in describing and explaining the system in detail. The following sections further explain the conceptual aspects such as definitions, system description, functionality, architecture, target users etc.
3.1 Definitions The concept of the solution involves some terms that would be used to describe the solution throughout the thesis report. The system allows the drawing of a business procedure model. A business procedure model, has already been defined in Section 1.3 Definitions. Other terms such as a model element or activity, digital service and digitization are defined as follows:
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Business Procedure Model: A (Business Procedure Model) BPM is defined as the step by step procedural description of an enterprise’s business model from the perspective of functional hierarchy of one instance of operation. A business procedure model is a workflow diagram that provides a comprehensive understanding of the workflow of business model.
Activity or Model Element: A model or procedure element or activity is a single sub-procedure or subprocess in the BPM. It usually represents a single processing step, also synonymous to an activity.
Digital Service: A digital service is a digital technology, such as social, mobile, analytics or cloud, provided by digital technology providers.
Digitization: Digitization aka Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business (Gartner, Inc., 2012). Digitizing a BPM produces a digitally enhanced BPM in which each element is supported by a corresponding digital service.
3.2 Solution The idea behind this master thesis has immense potential to enhance business models of innovative startups. There has been an explosion of digital and mobile health startups in recent years that are trying to solve the problems caused by escalating costs of health care, shortages of physicians and the need for improved prevention and management of expensive chronic conditions. To illustrate the concept of the solution, consider a business procedure model of an On-demand Healthcare Service Provider. The Healthcare Service Provider would like to provide quick consultation for day-to-day urgent health issues such as cold and flu, allergies, sore throat, diarrhoea and vomiting, minor sports injuries, UTIs, depression, anxiety and so on. A typical scenario would begin with the patients providing details about their condition, following a consultation session with a healthcare professional. The healthcare professional then provides a prescription and the patient would take the prescribed medication. The patient’s health is then monitored for progress until he/she has recovered. The patient would then make payment and provide feedback to the healthcare service provider. A simple business procedure model is drawn as shown in figure 3.2 (a). Each element/activity is depicted in the illustration in green. The procedure elements of the business procedure model represent a single activity or sub-process within the whole business procedure model. The system shall allow the user to create such a model on a canvas. The user would then have the possibility to digitize this model. Digitization then generates a set of the available digital services that can be associated with the elements of the business procedure model as shown in figure 3.2 (b). This array of digital services would be generated by mapping their properties with the properties of the elements of the model. At this point all the available services that match the elements are suggested. The user has the chance of then selecting the most appropriate/preferred digital services to support each of the elements as shown in figure 3.2 (c). This completes the digitization process and the output is the final Digital Service Enhanced BPM as illustrated in figure 3.2 (d).
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Figure 3.2 (a) Business Procedure Model.
Figure 3.2 (b) Digital services proposed by mapping of services to model elements or activities.
Figure 3.2 (c) BPM with user selecting most appropriate service.
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Figure 3.2 (d) Digital services enhanced (Digitized) Business Procedure Model
3.3 System Description This Master thesis is aimed at the development and evaluation of a simple business procedure modelling tool that supports the association and mapping of business procedure elements to digital services, called the Digitizer. This requires the development of a web-based UI that enables the user to draw a simple BPM using predefined procedure elements. For each procedure element Digitizer shall propose a digital service based on a comparison of properties of the procedure element with a predefined set of digital service. The user can then select the most appropriate service to describe a digital service enhanced BPM. Besides the modelling and service selection component, Digitizer shall also provide an administration and data management interface to create and maintain business procedure elements, digital service descriptions as well as their association by tags, properties or links. So there would be two kinds of end users. A typical user shall be able to draw business procedure models and generate digitally enhanced BPMs using the system. Service providers on the other hand shall be able to use the system to add their services and let the system recommend them in the digital BPMs. The rest of the section describes the System Functionality, Architecture and Use-cases in detail.
3.3.1 System Functionality Following an iterative approach, prototypes of the conceptual solution were developed for requirement analysis and module extraction. The development of a low fidelity paper prototype and medium fidelity prototype of UI mockups, helped in identifying the functionalities and features of the proposed toolbox. The functionalities of the system can be categorised into two main types: 1. Business Procedure Modelling 2. Digital Services Management Descriptive lists of functionalities of each type are provided as follows:
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– – – – – – – – –
– – –
3.3.2 Architecture of Solution Figure 3.3.2 illustrates the architecture of a Business Procedure Modelling and Digitization platform. ProD3 stands for Prototyping Platform for Service Design and Digitization. The architecture illustrates the two categories of end users, BPM Users and Digital Service Providers, which is further explained in section 3.4 Target Users. The platform describes the mapping between activities/process elements and the digital services and also illustrates how the proposed digital services are generated. It shows how the platform has three major components namely: 1. Business Procedure Modelling Block 2. Digital Services Management 3. Digital Services and Activity Mapping Process
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Figure 3.3.2 Architecture of the Business Procedure Modelling and Digitization System
Business Procedure Modelling Block: This block is mainly used by the BPM User who has a profile and draws and maintains his BPMs. A BPM is nothing but a flow diagram of connected activities, that have tags associated with them. Once the BPM is modelled, the mapping of digital services is performed to generate services that support each activity. Finally, this leads to a digital service enhanced BPM.
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Digital Services Management: This block is mainly used by the Digital Service Providers who interacts with Digitizer to provide their digital services. The digital services are stored in a database and maintained by the provider who also has an account profile. Each service is also associated with descriptive tags to be used for association and mapping. Association and Mapping of Activities and Digital Services: This is the component of the system where the essence of digitization is carried out. This component is responsible for the association and mapping between the digital services and BPM activities. The output is a set of matching services that are proposed by the system, for every activity in the BPM.
3.3.3 Use-cases The Use Case diagram is used to depict the dynamic behaviour of the Digitizer system and capture the functional requirements. The system involves two types of end users namely, BPM User and Digital Service Provider. The BPM User is the one who uses the system to draw a BPM for his/her business. The Digital Service Provider is the one who has digital technologies as services to provide and is interested in making his/her service available to the customers (BPM Users). The two types of end users are further elaborately described in the next section 3.4 Target Users. Figure 3.3.3 (a) and (b) describe and visualize the use-cases and Table 3.3 (a), (b) and (c) describe use-case indexes for each.
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ID
01
Actor
BPM User
Pre-condition
User is logged in.
Post-condition
Digitally enhanced business procedure model is generated.
Main scenario
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Log in. Open/create project. Draw business procedure model (BPM). Digitize BPM. Select appropriate digital services from proposed list. Save final Digital BPM Table 3.3 (a) Use Case Index - BPM User Modelling
ID
02
Actor
BPM User
Pre-condition
User is logged in.
Post-condition
Database of Activities is maintained.
Main scenario
1. 2. 3. 4.
Log in Open/Create new Activity Add/Edit Tags Save Activity Table 3.3 (b) Use Case Index - BPM User
ID
03
Actor
Digital Service Provider
Precondition
Service Provider shall be logged in to the system.
Post-condition
Digital Services successfully managed.
Main scenario
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Log in. Open Digital Services Create/Modify services. Add tags to the service element. Click save button. Table 3.3 (c) Use Case Index – Digital Service Provider
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Figure 3.3.3 (a) Use Case Scenario BPM User
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Figure 3.3.3 (b) Use Case Scenario - Digital Service Provider
3.4 Target Users As the system description states, the system shall provide two types of functionalities. One aspect involves the digitizing of the business procedure models and the other involves the management of digital services. Therefore, it can be seen how the system caters to two types of target users as elaborated below. The modelling functionality brings the first type of users, that involves anybody who is looking to bring an existing business to the digital platform or start a new business involving digital services. The system could be used by the end users as a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool by a BPM User. These users would use the system to describe, design, and pivot their business model on digital services. The digital services management aspect provides functionalities for a Digital Service Provider to make his/her services available to BPM users. The tool provides functionality for the service providers to add their services and manage them.
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Therefore, Digitizer shall have two sets of target users, each benefitting from each other as illustrated in figure 3.4. This can be seen as a huge step towards bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and digital service providers.
Figure 3.4 Target Users
3.5 Solution Summary This chapter provided a comprehensive description of the concept that forms the core of this master thesis. The first section, section 3.1, defined important terms related to the solution. This was followed by the explanation of the conceptual idea behind the solution in section 3.2. Section 3.3 described the complete solution by listing out the functional requirements of the system. The architecture of the solution as a business procedure modelling and digitization toolbox was illustrated and discussed in detail. Use-case scenarios were describes using UML use-case diagrams and use-case index tables. The penultimate section described the target users of the system, the BPM User and the Digital Service Provider. The various components that form the concept of the solution to the research questions of this master thesis are thus described. The following chapter discusses the implementation of this solution.
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Chapter 4 Implementation This chapter describes the various steps executed during the Implementation of the Concept described by the previous chapter. The implementation followed iterative cycles of design, implement and analysis and resulted in low-fidelity and medium-fidelity prototypes and finally a Web Application called Digitizer. The following sections describe the Prototypes, Digitizer Application, User Interface, Tools, Technologies and Frameworks, and finally a summary of the Implementation phase.
4.1 Prototypes Software prototyping is the activity of creating prototypes of software applications, i.e., incomplete versions of the software program being developed. During the early stages of development of the Master Thesis, several kinds of prototypes were developed to realise the objective and visualise the core concepts. Low Fidelity and Medium Fidelity prototypes are discussed below.
4.1.1 Low-fidelity prototype Low-fidelity prototypes, in particular, are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate core concepts early on in the design process. Low-fidelity prototyping is a unique tool to radically improve development work and to build an environment in which system requirements can be truly realized. In order to identify the functionalities of the proposed solution, prototypes have been developed. During the brainstorming phase, several low fidelity paper prototypes were designed, which provided a way to realise the initial idea of the thesis. Fig 4.1.1 (a) (b) and (c) represents the paper prototypes developed. These paper prototypes had been
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constructed to depict concepts, design alternatives, and screen layouts. Fig 4.1.1 (b) and (c) illustrate the paper prototypes built to ideate over the digitization features.
Figure 4.1.1 (a) Paper Prototype
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Figure 4.1.1 (b) Paper Prototype
Figure 4.1.1 (c) Paper Prototype
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4.1.2 Medium-fidelity prototype The best low-fidelity prototypes are built resourcefully, on a small or non-existent budget and in a short time period. The low-fidelity prototypes had served their purpose and it was time to build more tangible prototypes. Medium Fidelity prototypes in the form of User Interface Mockups are static high-profile visual design drafts of system used to represent the structure of information, visualize the content and demonstrate the basic functionalities in a static way. Medium Fidelity Prototypes or Mockups help to achieve the following:
Organize project details Find errors early in the design stage Design implementation Target users’ perspective
Mockups are flexible and this makes it easy to iterate. To form a more concrete visualization of the proposed system, a medium fidelity prototype was developed using Adobe Photoshop. The functionalities of the system as discussed earlier, can be categorised into two main types: Business Procedure Modelling and Digital Services Management. The interface was designed keeping these two categories of functionalities in mind. The UI consists of three basic components. The ‘Dashboard’, ‘Projects Explorer’ and ‘Services Manager.’ Figure 4.1.2 (a-f) describe the mockups.
Figure 4.1.2 UI Mockups (a) Dashboard for prototyping (b) Digitizing the model
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Figure 4.1.2 UI Mockups (c) System proposes set of services (d) User selecting appropriate service
Figure 4.1.2 UI Mockups (e) Projects Explorer (f) Services Management
4.2 Digitizer Application As a result of the prototyping, concrete functionality requirements had been generated and the user interface of the system had been evaluated. The final prototype was implemented as a web application. The following subsections describe he various modules, class diagram and architecture of the application.
4.2.1 Modules The System consists of 4 main modules: Projects, Activities, Services and Users as described in figure 4.2.1 (a). Each of these modules contain the components such as template, scope, controller, service, filters, directives, routes etc., as illustrated in figure 4.2.1 (b). 28
Figure 4.2.1 (a) Main conceptual modules in the Digitizer Application
It can be seen from figure 4.2.1 (a) that the four main modules are ‘Projects’, ‘Activities’, ‘Services’ and ‘Users’. However, there are several more modules that implement the interface of the application such as ‘common’, ‘core’, ‘dashboard’ and ‘data’. Figure 4.2.1 (b) further describes the structure of implementation of the AngularJS objects that bring functionality to each of these modules. The AngularJS objects would be further explained in the implementation concepts of the technologies section. To explain briefly, the template holds the HTML template view, scope holds the objects, controller consists of the controller function containing all the business logic, and service hold the model of the data.
Figure 4.2.1 (b) Interaction of the various components in each module
4.2.2 UML Class Diagram The previous sub-section described the internal components of each module. This sub-section describes the associations between the various modules of the system using a UML Class Diagram. In Javascript, the classes are implemented as modules and therefore we have the main modules of the system as project, activity, service, BPM, tag and profile. Figure 4.2.2 illustrates the class diagram of the system.
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Figure 4.2.2 UML Class Diagram
4.2.3 Architecture of Application Following a description of the modules of the system, figure 4.2.3 illustrates the architecture of the Digitizer Application. It illustrates the separation of Frontend and Backend in the system and shows the various technologies and frameworks used.
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The Frontend of the application is implemented using three key technologies, namely, Node.js, Express and AngularJS. The frontend consists of a client Node.js+Express Application and an Angular SPA Application. HTML and content are directly delivered from the server. The HTML content requires data that is delivered via REST API as the Backend. REST API has been developed with Node.js, Express, Mongoose and MongoDB.
AngularJS Single Page Application (SPA) and Node.js ExpressJS Application (NEA) form a unique architectural pattern, which is a combination of a two architectures for the applications that require combination of application constraints that are best supported by both NEA and SPA. NEA supports short duration of user interactions, low interactions, content rich, etc. SPA supports feature-rich, highly interactive, long duration of user interactions, private, fast response, etc. Digitizer is implemented as a combination of two applications, one is a Node.js and Express Application (NEA) and the other is an AngularJS SPA application as illustrated in Figure 4.2.3.
Figure 4.2.3 Architecture of Digitizer Application
4.3 User Interface This section describes the User Interface of the Digitzer Application. As discussed previously the 4 main modules of the application are the ‘Projects’, ‘Activities’, ‘Services’ and ‘Profile’. Figure 4.3 (a) is a screenshot from the application to show the 4 main modules of the application. Projects contain the projects created by the users to maintain their BPM and digitize the BPM. Model Activities are the elements the BPM users, create and maintain
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to use is modelling their BPM. Digital Services is the repository of services, where Digital Service Providers add and maintain their services. Profile is used for account configuration settings.
Figure 4.3 (a) Modules: Projects, Activities, Services and Profile
Login: The application begins with a Login page requiring the users to login using their username and password as shown in Figure 4.3 (b).
Figure 4.3 (b) Login
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Dashboard: As soon as the user logs in, the Dashboard view is reached. The Dashboard, illustrated by figure 4.3 (c), is the home of the application and the users can navigate to any of the modules easily from it. Widgets are used to display the recently created projects and the recently added services directly on the Dashboard.
Figure 4.3 (c) Dashboard
Sidebar: Figure 4.3 (d) illustrates a sidebar that is used for navigating across the application. It includes links to Dashboard, projects, activities, services, profile and logout.
Figure 4.3 (d) Navigation Sidebar
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User Interface as the workflow of a BPM User Projects: A BPM user can maintain projects to contain his/her BPM. All projects can be accessed from the projects view illustrated by figure 4.3 (e). It presents all projects in a tabular view showing the title, domain, last updated date and buttons for direct navigation to BPM modelling view or the Digitizing view or the final Digitized BPM model. A project can also be deleted by using the delete button.
Figure 4.3 (e) Projects
Create/Update Project: The BPM user can select an existing project or create a new project using the ‘create new project’ button. The users are then directed a view where they can provide details about the project such as a title, description, and also select a domain from a dropdown select. Figure 4.3 (f) illustrates this view.
Figure 4.3 (f) Editing project details
Business Procedure Model Drawing Interface: After providing the details, the user can begin modelling the BPM using the modelling view as illustrated by figure 4.3 (g). The available activities are displayed above the modelling
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canvas and they can be dragged and dropped onto the BPM canvas to add to the BPM. The user can search for existing activity elements or create new activity elements using the ‘+’ to add a new activity.
Figure 4.3 (g) Drawing Business Procedure Model
Create/Edit Activity: As mentioned before the user can create a new activity at any point during the modelling step simply by clicking on the ‘+’ button. Figure 4.3 (h) illustrates the creating activity view. A new activity is created by adding a title, and tags. The tags are then used to display the matching services that are available to help the user use effective tags to describe the activity.
Figure 4.3 (h) Creating new activity
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Activities: Figure 4.3 (i) illustrates the Activities view which consists of a tabular representation of the activities’ title and tags, along with buttons to edit or delete them. The user can also search for activities and use the ‘+ Add Activity’ button to create more activities.
Figure 4.3 (i) Activities
After the activity creation and modelling of the BPM, the user then clicks on the ‘Digitize’ button, which can be seen in figure 4.3 (j) to digitize the BPM.
Figure 4.3 (j) Business Procedure Modelling with Digitize button
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Digitization of BPM (Services): Once the user clicks on the ‘digitize’ button, the app directs to the digitizing view. A set of digital services is proposed for each of the activities in the BPM. The services are encapsulated within containers under the corresponding activities to which they were mapped. Figure 4.3 (k) illustrates the digitizing view.
Figure 4.3 (k) Digitization of the BPM
The user is then expected to select preferred services by dragging and dropping the service on the indicated areas. Figure 4.3 (l) illustrates the completion of the selection with one digital service above each activity.
Figure 4.3 (l) Digitization of the BPM
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Final Digitized BPM: Once the user has completed the selection of preferred services, he/she can complete the digitization process by clicking the ‘Complete Digitization Process’ button. This then directs the user to the final view of the digitization process. This is illustrated by figure 4.3 (m) which presents the final digitally enhanced BPM to the user.
Figure 4.3 (m) Final Digitized BPM
User Interface as the workflow of a Digital Service Provider Services: A Digital Service Provider maintains all the services in the ‘Services’ module. Figure 4.3 (n) illustrates the Services view. It consists of a tabular representation of services, displaying the title and tags and buttons to edit or deleted them.
Figure 4.3 (n) Services
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Search for activity: The user can search through the long list of the digital services using the search bar. Figure 4.3 (o) illustrates an example of searching for all services related to the keyword ‘health’. All services are searched based on their title as well as tags.
Figure 4.3 (o) Search for a Digital Service
Create/Edit Service: New services can be created using the ‘+ Add Service’ button. Figure 4.3 (p) illustrates the view to add a new service.
Figure 4.3 (p) Create new Digital Service
Profile User’s account details can be updated using the Profile view. The user can update the username, firstname, lastname and login password. Figure 4.3 (q) illustrtates the Profile view.
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Figure 4.3 (q) Profile
4.4 Tools, Technologies and Frameworks This section discusses the various tools used at each step of the implementation and documentation of thus master thesis. Other subsections further explain the technologies and frameworks that are used to implement the final system of the master thesis.
4.4.1 Implementation Concepts The final system has been implemented as a full stack end-to-end Javascript web application. The architectural pattern used is Model View Controller Pattern. This system implements a MEAN stack which includes the technologies: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js. Detailed description of MEAN stack is provided in the next sub-section 4.4.3 Technologies and Frameworks. MEAN architectural patterns are based on the ModelView-Controller (MVC) pattern. According to the Gang of Four, MVC architecture is a combination of:
Strategy Composite Observer
They state that the view is a composition of components. In AngularJS, which is used to implement the UI of the application, the situation is similar. The views are formed by a composition of directives and DOM elements, on which these directives could be applied.
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Model View Controller (MVC) Pattern: The MVC pattern is data oriented. Model holds data, Controller processes data and view renders data. There is also a route component between the controller and users’ browsers (Web). The route component coordinates interactions with the controller. The Model-View-Controller or MVC model (Krasner and Pope, 1988) is a software architecture design pattern. MVC was created for the implementation of the Smalltalk-80 environment (Goldberg & Robson, 1983) and is implemented as a set of Smalltalk classes. Model describes the interface of an application as a collection of triplets of objects. Each triplet contains a model, a view and a controller. A Model represents information that needs to be represented and interacted with. It is controlled by applications objects. A View displays the information in a model in a certain way. A Controller interprets user input via the view and transforms it into changes in the model. When a model changes it notifies its view so the display can be updated. Figure 4.4.1 (Zugic, 2016) illustrates how the MEAN stack implements and MVC pattern.
Figure 4.4.1 MVC Architecture of MEAN Stack as in Digitizer (Zugic, 2016)
Abstraction Full stack Javascript projects tend to be large. The client and server are very dissimilar environments, and so set of abstractions must be created that decouple application logic from the underlying implementations, so that a single API is exposed at the end. Routing A set of routes map URI (Universal Resource Identifier) patterns to route handlers. The route handlers access HTTP headers, cookies, and URI information, and specify redirects without directly accessing window.location (browser) or req and res (Node.js). Fetching and persisting data The resources needed to render a particular page or component are described independently from the fetching mechanism. The resource descriptor is a simple URI pointing to a JSON endpoint, or for larger applications, it
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is useful to encapsulate resources in models and collections and specify a model class and primary key, which at some point would get translated to a URI. RESTful API REST (Representational State Transfer) defines a set of architectural principles by which web services can be designed that focus on a system's resources, including how resource states are addressed and transferred over HTTP by a wide range of clients written in different languages. The implementation of Digitizer includes RESTful services and a REST API. REST Web services follows four basic design principles:
Use HTTP methods explicitly. Be stateless. Expose directory structure-like URIs. Transfer XML, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), or both.
4.4.2 Tools The following tools and technologies were used for prototyping, modelling, documentation and implementation of the final system: Tools Medium Fidelity Prototype
Adobe Photoshop
Use-case Scenarios and Sequence Diagrams
Creately
Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, Atom Editor
Cloud Hosting for Digitizer Application:
Heroku
Testing Web App Performance
BlazeMeter Table 4.4.2 Tools
4.4.3 Technologies and Frameworks The following tools and technologies were used for final implementation of Digitizer:
Software Package Management: NPM, Bower Front-end: – Technologies: HTML/HTML5, CSS, JavaScript – MV Framework: AngularJS – Authorization: Passport Back-end: – Technology: Node.JS
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– Framework: Express – Architecture: REST Scaffolding tool: Yeoman Build tools: Gulp.js, Uglify.js, Browserify Testing: Karma, Jasmine, Protractor, PhantomJS, Database: NoSQL: MongoDB
MEAN Stack Digitizer was implemented using the MEAN stack for web application development. The MEAN stack makes use of MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, and Node.js. MEAN stack was chosen because all components of the MEAN stack support programs written in JavaScript, and therefore MEAN applications are written in JavaScript for both server-side and client-side execution environments. The main components of MEAN are:
Database: MongoDB Web framework: Express Frontend framework: AngularJS Server: Node.js
Reasons for choosing the MEAN stack:
Single language - Javascript is used in the whole application Support for the MVC pattern JSON data is used for transferring data
Figure 4.2.3 Architecture of the Application in an earlier section, illustrates the complete architecture of a web application built using the MEAN stack. AngularJS is a JavaScript frontend framework that is designed to help build single-page applications rapidly using the MVC architecture. It was built and maintained by Google. Most popular advantages and features are:
Two-way data binding helps in synchronization between models and views
Extensibility through directives
Extended HTML with attributes to bind JavaScript objects with HTML elements
Code structure makes it very easy to code with very little DOM manipulation
Declarative approach requires lesser code to be written
Simple unit testing with dependency injection
Seamless integration with Bootstrap and jQuery
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Node.js allows the building of a real-time web application employing push technology over web-sockets. Node.js implements non-blocking, event-driven I/O to remain lightweight and efficient in the face of data-intensive realtime applications that run across distributed devices. It makes web applications with real-time, two-way connections, where both the client and server can initiate communication, allowing them to exchange data freely.
Express is a Node.js framework that provides HTTP utility methods to create robust APIs easily. The Express framework helped in the development of a RESTful API for Digitizer.
4.5 Implementation Summary This chapter described the various processes undergone as part of the implementation of the solution concept of the master thesis. Section 4.1 described the various prototypes that were built during the idea generation and requirement analysis phase. This resulted in a better understanding of the requirements of the system and helped in implementing the final system. Section 4.2 described the implementation of the system as a web-based application called Digitizer, for the business procedure modelling and digitization toolbox. A UML Class Diagram and an Architecture Diagram, among other figures, were used to describe the structure of the implemented system. Section 4.3 presented the User Interface of Digitizer and explained the workflow of the application in detail. Finally, section 4.4 explains the implementation concepts behind the implementation of the system and the tools, technologies and frameworks used were described briefly. With all aspects of the implementation having been elaborately explained, the stage is set for the evaluation of the solution. Chapter 5 discusses the steps involved in the evaluation of the implemented system.
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Chapter 5 Evaluation The Digitizer system shall be implemented in an iterative manner that follows a Design, Implement/Prototype, Analyse/Evaluate/Test cycle. Evaluation of the system will be done at the end of each iteration. This will help in identifying the problems early on and focusing on the problems when they are less critical.
Figure 5.1 Design Implement Analyse Cycle
The development cycle as a DIA Cycle is repeated five times. The iterations include the following evaluation techniques: 1. Requirement Analysis with low fidelity and medium fidelity prototypes. 2. Heuristic Evaluation of fully implemented system. 3. Cognitive Walkthrough with general users. 4. Workshop with Focus Group as Target Users. 45
5. Informal Usability Testing of final system. The following sub-sections describe each iteration in detail and elaborate on the methodologies and results at the end of each iteration.
5.1 Requirement and Functional Analysis As described earlier in section 4.2 Functional Requirements, at the earlier stages of the implementation of the master thesis, requirement analysis was performed repeatedly to generate the functional requirements of the proposed system. Functional analysis was performed as a subpart of requirements analysis in the design process. The intended user group and intended purpose of use of the proposed system was considered. This information is compiled and then the user interface is designed accordingly. The results of a functional analysis helped to design the system considering all factors that might influence the user when facilitating it. This enables objective decisions to be taken about the need for design changes to enhance usability, and about trade-off s which may be appropriate between usability and other requirements. The development of a low fidelity paper prototype and medium fidelity prototype of UI mockups, helped in identifying the functionalities and features of the proposed toolbox. The development of a low fidelity paper prototype and medium fidelity prototype of UI mockups, helped in identifying the functionalities and features of the proposed toolbox. The functionalities of the system can be categorised into two main types:
Business Procedure Modelling
Services Management
The following functional requirements of Digitizer have been identified:
Business Procedure Modelling: – User Authentication: Account and Login. – Modelling interface to draw a simple business procedure model using pre-defined procedure elements aka activities. – Create/Update elements or activities as needed during the modelling procedure. – Implement a mapping technique that uses property/tag/links to map procedure elements called activities to digital services. – Recommendation/Proposal of a set of digital services corresponding to each element/activity. – System allows user to select most appropriate digital service for each element. – Outputs a digitally enhanced business procedure model with a set of digital services for each element.
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Digital Services Management: – Service Provider can create account and login. – Functionality for service provider to maintain services. – Create/Modify and Delete business procedure elements, digital services and their properties/tags.
5.2 Heuristic Evaluation Once the functional requirements were identified, the Digitizer application was implemented as a functional prototype of the proposed solution. To evaluate the system at an early stage a simple method of evaluation was necessary to detect any issues and improve the system. Heuristic evaluation is very apt for such a situation and hence it was adopted to evaluate the system at this stage. Heuristic evaluation is a very informal usability testing method for user interfaces. It is a fast and easy method to test systems in order to recognize failures with respect to intended purposes and can be performed by the developer him/herself thus sparing the effort of going through the process of user involved testing at early stages. The heuristic evaluation included the following steps: 1. Create common use cases. 2. Create a set of heuristics. 3. Apply the heuristics along the use case 4. Incorporate the results in a redesign of the system.
The result of the heuristic evaluation was a more robust application that successfully functioned according to the requirements of the system.
5.3 User Study Tasks A user study needed to be designed in order to perform the next iterations of evaluation, namely the Cognitive Walkthrough and Focus Group Workshop. Care was taken to design the tasks as close to the real world usage of the system as possible. For the sake of simplicity, the same user was made to switch roles between the two types users. The user used the system as both a BPM User and a Digital Service Provider. Figure 5.3 (a), (b) and (c) describe the tasks included in the user studies. Part 1 involves the user as a BPM user, in creating a BPM for his/her business idea and digitizing the same. Part 2 involves the role of a Digital Services Provider and lets the users add their digital services into the system. Finally, part 3 lets the user go back to their Digitized BPM and see how their BPM was enhanced further by the new digital services that they added. The goal of the user study is to make the user exhaustively try out the system and come up with workflows to complete the given tasks. The tasks were designed to let the same user create the business procedure model and later also add digital services for the same. This helps in achieving the goal of enriching the services database as well.
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The user study tasks aim at investigating user behaviour and whether the users’ interaction with the system is as expected.
Figure 5.3 (a), (b) and (c) User Study Tasks Part 1-3
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5.4 Cognitive Walkthrough The heuristic evaluation exposes any issues in functionality and makes sure that basic functionalities of the system are in compliance with the requirements. However, in order to ensure that design of the system is usercentric, the system must go through user studies to expose usability issues as well. The final system needs to be very user friendly as this is a first of its kind application. Cognitive walkthrough is a usability inspection method that takes into account the first-time user and what kind of usability problems he or she might encounter while learning the system step-by-step. It involves users, and is a structured way to find crucial usability problems at a low cost. For the Cognitive Walkthrough if this system, general users were picked to execute the tasks defined in the above section 5.3 User Study Tasks. The Cognitive Walkthrough participants were 6 in number and ranged in age from 22 to 28.
The cognitive walkthrough focused on the learning aspects of the user interface of the system and was task oriented. A set of use-cases and tasks was prepared based on possible future use-case scenarios. Then, the user was provided with a “walk through” of the tasks using a sample use-case. During the evaluation the following four questions were to be answered:
Will the user know how to solve the (sub)task in this step? Will the user notice the interface element to use? Will the user understand the information on the interface element to use? Will the user receive appropriate feedback after the action?
As a result of the Cognitive Walkthrough, a list of usability issues, were generated that needed to be considered in the redesign phase. The results are elaborately discussed in Section 5.6. Summary of Issues: The system failed to save the BPM in its current state every time the user created an activity to be included in the model. When the size of BPM exceeded the width of the browser, the content overflowed. There was no feedback to indicate the end of the digitizing process. No indication of which services were suggested for which particular activity or sub-process of the BPM.
5.5 Focus Group Workshop Post the Cognitive Walkthrough that involved general end users, a user study involving participants with a more focused background was necessary. At this stage a Workshop was conducted involving a Focus Group to obtain deeper insights into the design of the system. A focus group is a group interview or discussion which involves target users or experts in the context of the given system. The participants are expected to use the system as end users, and in addition they are researchers who provide expert advice. One of the researchers takes on the role of a moderator to keep the discussion on track, introduce different topics and summarise the
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entire workshop. The entire workshop has been documented and recorded for further reference. Workshops can be used to not only increase the awareness and facilitate communication between professionals and users, but also as a way to enable designers to participate in activities that are different than ordinary workflows. This Focus Group included researchers at the Cooperation Systems Research Group at Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Information Technology, Germany. The Workshop lasted 90 minutes and the focus group participants executed all the tasks in the User Study Tasks listed above. The first 30 minutes were spent completing the user study tasks. That was followed by a discussion lasting 60 minutes. At the end of the discussion some time was spent summarising and prioritizing the feedback session. This evaluation method resulted in the most valuable feedback results. The results from this discussion have been described in the following section as well as in the outlook of the Conclusion.
5.6 Results of User Study and Feedback There were 6 participants from the general user group, taking part in the cognitive walkthrough and 4 from the target focus group as part of the workshop. All of them worked on projects to use Digitizer. As already mentioned the users executed the tasks in the User Study Tasks and worked on projects of their choice to draw their BPMs and Digitize them using Digitizer. The sub-section 5.6.1 Digitized BPMs discusses selected projects and digitized BPMs that the users digitized using Digitizer. Sub-section 5.6.2 User Feedback describes the feedback from the users who took part in the user study and sub-section received through the feedback form and questionnaires.
5.6.1 Digitized BPMs The participants were provided with some empty projects to complete but they also had the option of creating projects for completely new business ideas. The ideas included models for Accommodation Renting, Emergency Healthcare, Moving and Delivery On-demand and Borrowing/Lending items. The participants drew very innovative BPMs for each of these and using the User Study Tasks, they digitized their BPMs successfully. Accommodation Renting and Lodging In this project the user modelled a complete process that involves a user looking for accommodation, booking an apartment/room all the way until payment and feedback. It can be seen how the BPM was digitized with digital services supporting the advertisements, booking and reservation, payment and feedback. Figure 5.6.1 (a) illustrates the final Digitized BPM of this project.
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Figure 5.6.1 (a) Digitized BPM for Accommodation Renting and Lodging
Moving On Demand In this project the participant modelled a process that involves a user who would like to move a piece of furniture, an appliance or other heavy items and does not have access to a truck. The idea was to model an ondemand service that helps the user move bulky items without the need to rent or borrow a truck. As can be seen, the BPM was digitized with digital services supporting the order, logistics planning, pickup and delivery, payment and feedback. Figure 5.6.1 (b) illustrates the final Digitized BPM of this project.
Figure 5.6.1 (b) Digitized BPM for Moving on-demand
Borrowing and Lending Items This project is an idea to model a system for people to borrow items they need from others in their neighbourhood or nearby hardware shops for using. The participant modelled a process that involves a user who would like to borrow a device from the local hardware store, use and return it for a small amount of money. As can be seen, the BPM was digitized with digital services supporting the contacting, availability checking, reservation, pickup and delivery and payment. Figure 5.6.1 (c) illustrates the final Digitized BPM of this project.
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Figure 5.6.1 (c) Digitized BPM for Borrowing/Lending Items
Emergency Healthcare This project is an idea to model a healthcare system for an emergency situation. The participant modelled a short BPM to support diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of an emergency patient. Figure 5.6.1 (d) illustrates the final Digitized BPM of this project.
Figure 5.6.1 (d) Emergency Healthcare
The various BPMs modelled by the participants describe potential use-case scenarios of the Digitizer App and are illustrate the great possibilities that a system like this facilitates.
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5.6.2 User Feedback Feedback was collected during the user studies as part of both Cognitive Walkthrough and Focus Group Workshop. A feedback form was used to collect data which included a questionnaire. Questionnaires can complement ethnographic work, field observations and field studies, which provide relatively objective data on users’ activity. The questionnaire contained several fields like the following: Dropdowns, Multiple Choice questions, Likert rating scale of 5 points and Open-ended enquiries. The questions included enquiries about both functionality and usability. The Likert scale looks as follows:
Figure 5.6.2 (i) Likert Scale
A total 10 participants provided their valuable feedback. The Feedback Form can be found in Appendix B – Digitizer Feedback Form. Questions enquired whether the user found the workflow of the app easy to understand and if they had any difficulty in modelling the BPMs. Also if the user was able to successfully digitize their BPMs and was satisfied with the results. Table 5.6 describes the results from Likert-scale data. Figure 5.6.2 (ii) visualizes the results of the feedback related to functional aspects of the system and figure 5.6.2 (iii) illustrates the usability feedback. Table 5.6 represents the Likert-Scale data collected from the results of the user feedback. The columns are color-coded to indicate positive, negative and neutral data. Each row represents a question from the feedback questionnaire. The response to each question is represented using the # or count of participants who selected the particular response and also the % or percentage they represent among all the participants. Finally, for each question a mean is calculated and correspondingly color-coded to indicate if the result was positive, negative or neutral. The mean has been calculated using the following formula:
𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 = ((# 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 1) ∗ (𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 1) + (# 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 2) ∗ (𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 2) … (# 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑛) ∗ (𝑣𝑎𝑙𝑢𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑛)])/(𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠)
Formula 5.6 Mean value calculation for Likert-scale data
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The App allowed you to create a Business Procedure Model easily?
Strongly disagree (1)
Disagree (2)
Neutral (3)
Agree (4)
Strongly agree (5)
#
0
0
2
3
5
%
0%
0%
20%
30%
50%
mean You were able to successfully digitize your BPM?
4.3
#
0
0
1
4
5
%
0%
0%
10%
40%
50%
mean You were satisfied with the proposed digital services.
4.4
#
1
1
3
3
2
%
10%
10%
30%
30%
20%
mean Would you recommend this App to others?
3.4
#
0
0
0
6
4
%
0%
0%
0%
60%
40%
mean The App was easy to navigate and user-friendly.
4.4
#
0
0
0
3
7
%
0%
0%
0%
30%
70%
mean Overall Rating.
4.7
#
0
0
0
7
3
%
10%
10%
30%
30%
20%
mean
4.3
Table 5.6 Mean value calculation for Likert-scale data
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Figure 5.6.2 (ii) illustrate questions that investigate the effectiveness of the functionalities of the Digitizer App. 50% of users found it very extremely easy to create a BPM and 30% found it easy followed by 20% who were not very sure of the workflow of creating the BPM. 40% users were highly successful in digitizing their models, followed by 50% who were able to digitize effectively enough and 10% who were neutral. As to the satisfaction with the digitized BPM, 20% agreed strongly, followed by 30% who agreed, 30% neutral, 10% disagreed, 10% strongly disagreed.
Figure 5.6.2 (ii) Functionality Feedback
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Figure 5.6.2 (iii) describes the results related to the usability aspects of the Digitizer App. It is very clear from the results that the users were immensely satisfied by the user friendliness and usability of the system. 40% users said they were extremely likely to recommend this app to others, followed by the rest of the 60% who would likely recommend. Other questions asked the users, if the app was easy to navigate, user friendly and also an overall rating of the system.
Figure 5.6.2 (iii) Usability Feedback
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The open questions resulted in very useful feedback in the form of comments from the users. These suggestions formed very good inputs for a redesign of the system. Some of the very useful suggestions are listed below:
“It would have been great if the app allowed me to add more than one services for each activity.” -General User
“Some hint to tell the user that he has finished digitizing or he has reached the end.” -General User
“Let user ‘Request for service’ when expected services is missing.” -Target User
“Would be nice to have visualizations of the mapping between activities and services via tags.” -Target User
“Provide recommendations about most appropriate services by showing some statistics from usage data” -Target User
“Forward the text the user enters while search for an element into the text field of creating a new activity element” -Target User
5.7 Final Testing Using all the data collected above, the system was redesigned with all the relevant changes incorporated and all bugs fixed. The system was tested informally to ensure compliance to all the requirements. To finish the evaluation phase, some unit tests were run and all passed successfully. The systems Performance Metrics as analysed by BlazeMeter, is illustrated by Figure 5.7. It shows the summary of the test run by BlazeMeter that simulated 20 virtual users to load the app and ran for 20 minutes. The performance tests were run primarily to check the response time and throughput of the application. The overview includes total Virtual Users, Average Throughput, Errors, Average response Time and Average Bandwidth. The detailed timeline graphs for concurrent users, hits and response time can be found in Appendix C Digitizer Performance Tests.
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Figure 5.7 Tests Summary
The terms are explained below:
Virtual User (VU): The entity used by load generation tool to simulate real users accessing the system under test.
Throughput: Number of requests completed in a time interval.
Response Time: The time that passed to perform the request and receive full response.
Bandwidth Usage: Amount of the network traffic that goes through network infrastructure.
5.8 Evaluation Summary To validate the concept of this master thesis the system was evaluated as described in the above sections. As mentioned earlier, the iterative nature of the implementation has resulted in several rounds of evaluation. Table 5.8 summarises the evaluation phase of this master thesis and describes the Prototypes, Evaluation methods and Results of each iteration.
As a conclusion of the evaluation, based on the results presented in Section 5.6 Results of User Study and Feedback and Final testing, it can be said that the system proved to be a successful solution to the research questions of the master thesis.
Iteration Requirement Analysis
Functional Analysis
Prototype Low Fidelity Paper Prototypes
Medium Fidelity User Interface Mockups.
Evaluation
Result
The paper prototypes are evaluated to check if they reflect the initial system description. Requirement analysis is performed.
Functional Requirements.
The user interface mockups are evaluated to check if they reflect the initial system description. Further requirement analysis is performed.
User Interface evaluated.
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Heuristic Evaluation
Cognitive Walkthrough
Focus Group Workshop
Usability Testing
High Fidelity Web Application
Proposed solution is implemented as a fully functional application. Heuristic evaluation of the system exposed functionality issues.
System Design.
Final System
General users are invited to try the application for the first time. A Cognitive Walkthrough exposes usability issues and minor bugs in the system.
General User Feedback.
Final System
Experts in the field of Business Modelling and Digitization are consulted for evaluation. A Workshop involving a Focus Group is conducted to obtain expert target user feedback.
Target User and Expert Feedback
Final System
Based on the result of previous evaluation, the system is redesigned. Usability testing is performed where system is compared with the functional requirements to check for compliance. Table 5.8 Summary of Evaluation
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Chapter 6 Conclusion The main objective of this master thesis has been to address the transcendence of business models from the physical to the real world. The research undertaken by this thesis addresses the need for a business procedure modelling and digitization toolbox, to capture the specifics of digitization. More specifically, empower businesses to build digitally enhanced business models in a structured way from existing or physical business procedure models. Accordingly, the state of the art and extant literature was surveyed to find related work and inspiration. The research in this field has been found to be rather underdeveloped and extant literature lack practical approaches and tools. The literature review exposed a research gap and it was found that available literature does not provide actionable approaches for business models in inter-connected IoT-enabled business environments. Also, no existing tool for generating digital business model from existing business models was found. Further, there is a gap between the business organisations and the digital service providers. The research goals of the thesis were then formulated to cater to these needs. This master thesis is a step towards bridging the gap between businesses and the digital technology providers by providing a single platform for both. It aims at building a recommendation tool that provides digital services that could enhance the existing physical business procedure models and generate digital business procedure models. The target users are of two kinds, firstly, entrepreneurs or business strategists and secondly, digital technology/service providers. As a prototype for conducting research, a web application called Digitizer has been developed. Digitizer is a business procedure modelling tool, that lets the user draw a business model, supports the association and mapping of business procedure elements to digital services, provides a set of digital services for every procedure element or activity and generates a final digital business procedure model. Digitizer allows service providers to make digital services directly available on this modelling platform, for businesses to incorporate them in their business procedure models. Several prototypes were developed to generate functional requirements and evaluate the user interface of this system. A final system was implemented using latest web application technologies. The system was 60
implemented as a full-stack web application called the Digitizer. Digitizer was implemented iteratively following a repetitive cycle of design, implementation and analysis. The Digitizer was then tested with general users in a cognitive walkthrough and later with expert users in a workshop. The user studies generated valuable feedback which was used to redesign the system. Finally, the application was tested to check for compliance with all the requirements. Digitizer successfully passed all tests. Therefore, the master thesis successfully completes all the research goals and objectives that it set out to achieve. The final chapter, Chapter 7 - Outlook, discusses some of the numerous possibilities that
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Chapter 7 Outlook The research in the field of this master thesis has tremendous scope for future work. The research is in its novice phases and there are several directions that require further investigation and development. With the dawn of the Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things, the onslaught of the digital technologies as services is going to take over and become a part of all businesses very soon. To make such digital transformation smoother and facilitate the transcendence from the physical world to the digital world, a lot of ongoing research is needed to support the industry. During the course of this master thesis a lot of innovative ideas have been developed. As many of these ideas as possible, have been selected and implemented within the scope of this master thesis. However, several innovative ideas that were generated along the course, pose incredible opportunities for further research and development. Some of these suggestions for future work, are conceptual in nature and others are directly related to the improvement of the features of the Digitizer platform. These ideas are discussed below under ‘Digitzer functionality features’ and ‘Concepts for future research’.
Digitzer functionality features: The Digitizer system has immense scope for improvement and there are several features that could be implemented to make the system more robust and powerful. Some of these suggestions were generated as a result of the workshop and user studies. The ideas for implementation to expand the Digitizer Application are as follows: 1.
Use Domains/Categories to categorise projects, activities and services into relevant categories such as: Projects: Logistics | Health | Education etc.
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Services and Activities: Appointments, Organizing, Documents/Resources, Logistics, Solutions and Support, Orders, Customers, Company etc. When tag-based matching generates no matching services, prompt user to match by Domain to find better results. 2.
Request Service: Let user ‘Request for service’ when expected services is missing. Maintain list of requested services. Digital Service Providers refer to ‘Requested Service’ and add services. The users themselves generate a demand within the application and request for necessary services which get supplied by technology providers. Provide notifications to users when their requested services are available.
3.
User Comments: If User selects a service that was not suggested by the system or not generated as a result of the tagbased mapping, ‘ask user to comment on his actions’ and maybe improve the activity model elements by updating the tags. This would help in analysing user behaviour to improve the system.
4.
Allow reordering of activities in the BPM and services in selected services.
5.
Usage Statistics: Provide recommendations about most appropriate services by showing some statistics from previous usage data. For example: 90% of users chose a Payment Service Provider for Payments. Only 2% of users chose Instant Messaging for Payments.
6.
Activity creation is currently the most significant task for the BPM end user. Making the process fun would result in better quality of data. Example: Gamify the process of adding activities.
7.
Tagging and Visualisations: 1. Tagging: a. When user adds tags to an Activity, show the matching Services that are available and vice versa. b. Encourage user to add more tags. c. Abstraction in tagging. Enforce levels of abstraction in the tags the user adds. General to Specific tagging. For example: BitPay service: Payment > Online Payment > Digital Wallet > BitCoins 2. Visualize tags and activities and services.
8.
Forward the text the user enters while searching for an activity into the text field of creating a new element.
9.
Services Explorer: An explorer like interface for exploring available services and finding alternatives easily for services. The Explorer could support domain matching or separate search by tags, domains, providers etc.
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Concepts for future research: Taxonomy for activity creation: One of the common feedbacks from the users during Part 1 of the tasks, i.e., ‘Business Procedure Modelling’, was that the users found it hard to define the activities. There was general confusion around what level of abstraction is appropriate while creating an activity in the BPM. Some guidelines around the creation of such activity elements would be necessary to guide users to creating activities that would result in effective BPMs. As future work, a taxonomy or set of design patterns need to be developed to ensure BPMs are appropriately modelled. BPMs as Pedagogical models: The BPMs serve as teaching models of how a process is defined in terms of sub-process and activity elements. The BPMs can be utilised as very effective models for how certain processes are carried out. BPMs as services: An entire BPM could represent a service in itself. For example: A shipping/delivery BPM represents a service: ‘delivery’. This can be very effective in expanding the system and allowing a complete Digitized BPM to be used as a service for an activity element of another BPM. This would allow nesting of BPMs within another BPM.
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Appendix A - Digitizer Project Structure
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Appendix B - Digitizer Feedback Form
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Appendix C - Digitizer Performance Tests
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