Prioritization of Interconnected Processes

Title data

Lehnert, Martin ; Röglinger, Maximilian ; Seyfried, Johannes:
Prioritization of Interconnected Processes.
In: Business & Information Systems Engineering. Vol. 60 (2018) Issue 2 . - pp. 95-114.
ISSN 1867-0202
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-017-0490-4

Project information

Abstract in another language

Deciding which business processes to improve is a challenge of all organizations. The literature on business process management (BPM) offers several approaches that support process prioriti-zation. Sharing the individual process as unit of analysis, these approaches determine the processes' need for improvement mostly based on performance indicators, but neglect how pro-cesses are interconnected. So far, the interconnectedness of processes is only captured for descriptive purposes in process model repositories or business process architectures (BPAs). Prioritizing processes without catering for their interconnectedness, however, biases prioritization decisions and causes a misallocation of corporate funds. What is missing are process prioritization approaches that consider the processes' individual need for improvement and their interconnect-edness. To address this research problem, we propose the ProcessPageRank (PPR) as our main contribution. The PPR prioritizes processes of a given BPA by ranking them according to their network-adjusted need for improvement. The PPR builds on knowledge from process performance management, BPAs, and network analysis – particularly the Google PageRank. As for evaluation, we validated the PPR's design specification against empirically validated and theory-backed design propositions. We also instantiated the PPR's design specification as a software prototype and applied the prototype to a real-world BPA.