Refining process models through the analysis of informal work practice

Abstract

The work presented in this paper explores the potential of leveraging the traces of informal work and collaboration in order to improve business processes over time. As process executions often differ from the original design due to individual preferences, skills or competencies and exceptions, we propose methods to analyse personal preferences of work, such as email communication and personal task execution in a task management application. Outcome of these methods is the detection of internal substructures (subtasks or branches) of activities on the one hand and the recommendation of resources to be used in activities on the other hand, leading to the improvement of business process models. Our first results show that even though human intervention is still required to operationalise these insights it is indeed possible to derive interesting and new insights about business processes from traces of informal work and infer suggestions for process model changes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.