106 research outputs found
Workflow management as you like it
No full textWorkflow Management Systems (WfMS’s) offer a tremendous potential for organizations. Shorter lead times, less mistakes in work handoffs, and a better insight into process execution are some of the most notable advantages experienced in practice. At the same time, the introduction of these systems on the work floor undoubtedly results in great changes in the way that business professionals coordinate their work. If a WfMS's coordination of work is experienced as too rigid or mechanistic, it may negatively affect employees' motivation, performance, and satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a set of measures to tune functioning workflow systems to minimize such effects. The measures we propose do not require undue cost, time, or organizational changes, as they characteristically lie within the configurable options of a WfMS. We asked an expert panel to select and validate the 6 most promising measures, which we present in this
paper. From our evaluation of three commercial WfMS products, we conclude the ease with
which the 6 measures can be implemented depends on the specific WfMS product
Design and evaluation of virtual environments mechanisms to support remote collaboration on complex process diagrams
No full textMany organizational analysis tasks are solved by collaborating teams. In technology-mediated collaborations, enabling relevant visual cues is a core issue with existing technology. We explore whether avatars can provide relevant cues in collaborative virtual environments. To do so, we develop a research prototype for a collaborative virtual environment that utilises avatars to improve workspace awareness in collaborative tasks. We test this solution through two studies, qualitative and quantitative, in which participants have to collaborate to jointly validate and correct a diagrammatic model of operational procedures.\ud
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Our evaluations provide both positive and negative results about the proposed prototype. Collaboration patterns changed and became significantly easier, but, task performance was only slightly improved. Together, these findings inform both the ongoing development of collaborative 3D virtual environments and the role of technology-mediated collaboration for validating and fixing models of processes
How to increase work autonomy in workflow management systems?
No full textAbstract: Purpose – Current workflow management systems (WfMS's) are often too rigid and lead to chain production in the office. The paper proposes a number of tuning measures to reconfigure an implemented WfMS in such a way that it is more agreeable to the needs of its users.
Design/methodology/approach – The tuning measures are generated through a creative process that is founded on two theoretical pillars: the job characteristics model, from the domain of job design theory and work psychology, and the assignment and synchronization policies, from the area of workflow management.
Findings – By combining theories from both job design theory and workflow management we have developed a number of measures to tune WfMS's in a human oriented way. An expert panel has selected the six most promising of these measures. These six measures have been used in the evaluation of three contemporary WfMS's. From this evaluation we concluded that current workflow technology is only partly able to support our measures.
Research limitations/implications – Because of the limited system evaluation, it would be valuable to do a more thorough evaluation of the three systems, have a closer study of the other generated ideas, and to broaden the scope of systems we considered. Additionally, it seems worthwhile to perform an actual validation in practice, i.e. an experiment with real workflow users in a realistic setting.
Originality/value – New in this paper is the focus on people working with WfMS's. The paper tries to go beyond the traditional borders of finding a good support for a business process. It highlights the importance of the human factor in the success of the implementation of a workflow system in a company and gives directions for concrete improvement in order to make working with a WfMS more enjoyable to its users. The proposals stated in the paper are of value to workflow designers, managers and workflow researchers
Optimized cross-organizational business process monitoring: Design and enactment
Full text linkOrganizations can implement the agility required to survive in the rapidly evolving business landscape by focusing on their core business and engaging in collaborations with other partners. This entails the need for organizations to monitor the behavior of the partners with which they collaborate. The design and enactment of monitoring, in this scenario, must become flexible and adapt as the collaboration evolves. We propose an approach to flexibly design and enact cross-organizational business process monitoring based on Product-Based Workflow Design. Our approach allows organizations to capture monitoring requirements, optimize such requirements, e.g. choosing the monitoring process with lowest cost or highest availability, and enacting the optimal monitoring process through a service-oriented approach. Optimization, in particular, is made efficient by adopting an Ant-colony optimization heuristic. The paper also describes a prototypical implementation of our approach in the ProM framework
Advanced Dynamic Role Resolution in Business Processes
No full textIn business processes tasks are often executed by humans. Dynamic role resolution is the (run time) selection of the optimal resource to execute a task for a certain process instance based on conditions and requirements that are specified at design time. For this purpose a classification of resources is made, usually based on their organizational position (department, role). This is, however, a very simple way of modeling resources. In this position paper, we propose conceptual extensions to the current approach to role resolution that focus on a more detailed and extended characterization of resources, cases and process objectives in order to improve human and cognitive aspects of the system such as motivation, learning and training of employees
2013 IEEE 1st International Workshop on Communicating Business Process and Software Models : quality, understandability, and maintainability (CPSM), September 23, 2013, Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
No full textThe road to a business process architecture : an overview of approaches and their use
Full text linkWith the uptake of business process modeling in practice, the demand grows for guidelines that lead organizations to consistent and integrated collections of process models. The notion of a business process architecture has been explicitly proposed to address this issue. This paper provides an overview and comparison of the prevailing approaches to design such a business process architecture. Furthermore, it includes an evaluation of the usability and actual use of the identified approaches through our interaction with a large group of practitioners. Our findings suggest that practitioners heavily rely on a mix of guidelines instead of embracing any single approach wholeheartedly
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