The Effect of Cognitive Style on the Understandability of Business Process Models

Nowadays, with the development of organizations and complexity of business processes, the management and control of such organizations are much more important than before. Business process models (BPM) typically capture some of the graphical notations, tasks, events, states, and logic of a business process control flow. Business process models are key artifacts in the development of information systems. While one of their main purposes is to facilitate communication among stakeholders, little is known about the factors that influence their comprehension by human agents. Among the various factors that affect the understandability and comprehension of business process modeling, this paper deals with two factors: a reader’s cognitive style and theoretical knowledge on business process modeling. The research examines the cognitive style index (CSI) differences and how styles relate to their scores in process model understandability. This study is a descriptive-survey research and was carried out in Mellat Bank’s Information Technology and Plan and Program Management by selecting 183 samples using a questionnaire. The results showed that a high percentage of respondents had an adaptive cognitive style (60 people, 33%), 85 respondents (46%) were at level 2 of theoretical knowledge about BPM and BPMN2.0, and only 6% were in level 4. The results also indicate a significant difference between intuitive and analytic samples with respect to the level of BPM understandability. There was also a significant relationship between theoretical knowledge of business process modeling and their understanding of the model.