Conclusions

introduction model software example hypermedia conclusions references appendix

As observed by Wastell [Wastell94] organisational change is a ``highly threatening and stressful experience for many participants and that high levels of stress can have a pernicious effect on individuals, group processes and organizational learning''. Hence, directly involving the users in the modelling phase of the BPR project may be an important step towards capturing the human aspects that are necessary for the production of an optimal model. It may also help to lessen the anxiety of employees.

Our contribution in this area is to provide support for an information context that encompasses both technical and social dimensions of the re-engineering effort. On a technological level, we advocate the use of business process simulation. Nevertheless, to accomodate the social aspects, we support the visualisation of such models and their integration in an arbitrarily complex information context, such as the World Wide Web.

As concerns the limitations of our approach, we wish to remark that we have only realized part of the visualisation and animation facilities that we consider desirable. Furthermore, in our current realization the user is required to use the hush Web browser, instead of a popular browser such as Netscape.

Developing visualisation and animation support for simulation models is a topic of ongoing research. To deal with the problem of accessibility we have to adopt a new technology, that is use for example Java, or develop a Netscape plugin for hush applications.

introduction model software example hypermedia conclusions references appendix