Improving active participation during enterprise operations modeling with an extended story-card-method and participative modeling software

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need for process automation, using agile software development practices. However, when agile methods are used in scaled contexts, many software development efforts fail, mainly due to lacking requirements engineering practices. When business-oriented software needs to be developed within a scaled context, the story-card method (SCM), developed as part of a previous study, assists in structuring emerging software requirements within a taxonomy that represents enterprise operation. The SCM helps agile team members to develop a common understanding about enterprise operation when they construct the enterprise operation taxonomy. Digital participatory enterprise modeling (PEM) may increase collaboration and understanding among team members, especially when team members are geographically dispersed, when they co-model their understanding of enterprise operations. Using design science research to further evolve the existing SCM, we identified two concerns regarding the existing SCM: (1) The modeling software did not encourage active participation during modeling, and (2) Low quality of the resulting cooperation structure diagram (CSD) that is used to derive an enterprise operation taxonomy, i.e., the need to further extend the existing SCM. As main contribution of this article, we addressed previous deficiencies of the SCM, developing an extended SCM (eSCM), based on principles and guidelines that would encourage online participation during PEM, also providing a comprehensive case to demonstrate the eSCM. As a second contribution, we used survey-feedback from research participants, as well as activity tracking to evaluate whether the modeling tool encouraged active PEM. Our third contribution is to evaluate the quality of the resulting CSDs with suggestions for future improvement.