Thinking Out of the Box: Discovering the Relevance of External Context to Business Processes

Abstract

Successful organizations are those able to identify and respond appropriately to changes in their internal and external environments. The search for flexibility is linked to the need for the organization to adapt to frequent and exceptional changes in scenarios imposed to them. Those disruptions in routine should be reflected in business processes, in a sense that processes must be adjusted to such variations, taking into account both internal and external variables, typically referred in the literature as the context of the process. In particular, defining the relevance of external context for the execution of a process is still an open research issue. We propose a method to identify and prioritize external variables that impact the execution of specific activities of a process, applying competitive intelligence concepts and data mining techniques. We have evaluated the method in a case study, which showed how the discovered variables influenced specific activities of the process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.