An evaluation of the intuitiveness of the PGA notation in a practical business context

Abstract

The Process-Goal Alignment (PGA) technique is a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) especially designed for realizing strategic fit within the business architecture of an organization. The PGA technique uses its own modeling notation, showing how one can get strategies defined and executed within the business architecture. In prior research, adaptations to the initial PGA notation were proposed to make it more intuitive. However, it could not ascertain that the adapted PGA notation was an improvement compared to the initial one. This research introduced a method to compare the intuitiveness of two notations in order to determine whether the adapted notation performs significantly better than the initial version.
With a significant improvement observed for the overall interpretational effectiveness, the adapted PGA notation seemed to perform better than the initial one, and based on the overall perceived ease of use and usefulness, the participants also had the feeling that the adapted PGA notation performed better. Detailed analysis revealed that from the six suggested adaptations only one element performed convincingly better, namely Importance, and two less convincing, namely Competence and Value stream. With the mixed results obtained in this research, it is not possible to unambiguously answer whether the adapted variant of the notation performs better. Further rethinking and redesign is thus needed.

Date of Award	16 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Supervisor	Ben Roelens (Examiner) & Harry Martin (Co-assessor)