Finding the “liberos”: Discover organizational models with overlaps

Abstract

Organizational mining aims at gaining insights for business process improvement by discovering organizational knowledge relevant to the performance of business processes. A key topic of organizational mining is the discovery of organizational models from event logs. While it is common for modern organizations to have employees sharing roles and responsibilities across different internal groups, most of the existing methods for organizational model discovery are unable to identify such overlaps. The overlapping resources are likely to be generalists in an organization. Existing findings in process redesign best practices have proven that generalists can help increase the flexibility of a business process (similarly to the flexibility of the role of “libero” in certain team sports). In this paper we propose an approach capable of discovering organizational models with overlaps and thus helping identify generalists in an organization. The approach builds on existing cluster analysis techniques to address the underlying technical challenges. Through experiments on real-life event logs the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are evaluated.