Hasso-Plattner-Institut
 

Sharing knowledge through tangible IT engineering models

PI: Prof. Mathias Weske

Abstract

Insufficient user involvement is a major problem in IT engineering projects. One reason is the lack of communication vehicles for users to express knowledge. In systems engineering, modeling techniques evolved to manage communication between IT experts. Since these techniques were developed by experts to be used by experts, detailed, formal models are hard to grasp for end users, so that they are barely involved in model building of IT projects.

 With t.BPM we have shown that it is possible for end users to express their knowledge by process models, gaining a higher level of user involvement than with traditional methods. Based on these findings, we intend to empower users to communicate also through other types of models that are valuable input for engineering projects. As project outcome, we anticipate a toolbox of modeling techniques and workshop methods that enable end users to instantly express their knowledge into concepts that can be used in engineering project.

Team