On the definition and analysis of process performance indicators

Texo completo sacado de TESEOA key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the evaluation of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, having an appropriate definition of these PPIs is crucial. After a thorough review of the literature related and a study of the current picture in different real organisations, we conclude that there not exists any proposal that allows defining PPIs in a way that is unambiguous and highly expressive, understandable by technical and non-technical users and traceable with the Business Process (BP). Furthermore, it is also increasingly important to provide these PPI definitions with support to automated analysis allowing implicit information to be extracted from them and their relationships with the BP. This information can assist process analysts in the definition and evolution of PPIs, as well as in the evaluation and optimization of the BPs associated. The challenge we face in this thesis is to devise a set of techniques and tools to allow such an advanced definition of PPIs and their subsequent automated analysis. In order to face this challenge we first propose a metamodel that allows unambiguous and highly expressive PPI definitions, as far as we know, it supports PPI definitions that could not be expressed yet, i.e. PPIs not only related to time or control flow, supported by most existing approaches, but also those related to the state of BP elements and to the content or certain restriction of data, amongst others. Regarding the understandability, we propose a BPMN-like graphical notation and a set of templates and linguistic patterns inspired in successful approaches from the requirements engineering field. Both representations rely on the metamodel and can be automatically mapped from one to each other. Furthermore, we provide an automatic semantic mapping from the metamodel to Description Logics (DL), that allows the implementation of design-time analysis operations in such a way that DL reasoners¿ facilities can be leveraged. Finally, we have developed PPINOT Tool Suite, providing support for all these contributions, as well as the possibility to extract the information required to compute PPI values from Activiti, an open source BP management platform

Defining Process Performance Indicators: an Ontological Approach

It is increasingly important to evaluate the performance of business processes. A key instrument to carry out this evaluation is by means of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) as suggested in many methodologies and frameworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As a consequence, it is convenient to integrate the management of PPIs into the whole business process lifecycle from its design to its evaluation. in this paper, we focus on the definition of PPIs as a necessary step to achieve that integration. Unfortunately, current proposals are not able to specify several usual types of PPIs, specially those related to data, and are not well designed to enable the automated analysis of PPIs at design-time. in this paper, we present an ontology for the definition of process performance indicators that overcomes this issue, explicitly defines the relationships between the indicators and the elements defined in a business process modelled in BPMN, and enables the analysis of PPIs at design-time. Furthermore, this ontology has been validated by means of several real-world scenarios

Towards Modelling and Tracing Key Performance Indicators in Business Processes

It is increasingly important to evaluate the performance of business processes. A key instrument in order to detect the state of cur rent and completed processes, as well as to identify undesired behaviour, and suggest potential improvements are the key performance indicators (KPIs). The KPI lifecycle in the context of business process driven devel opment comprises the definition, measuring, analysis and report phases. In this paper we analyse how some current proposals deal with these stages, concluding that none of them covers properly the entire cycle; we also identify the challenges which are to be faced to achieve this goal of evaluating business processes performanceComisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) TIN2006-00472Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) SETI (TIN2009-07366)Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-253

Productivity Challenges in Digital Transformation and its Implications for Workstream Collaboration Tools

Digital transformation has brought an unprecedented pace of change and a huge amount of information available for businesses. At the same time, it has also created a number of difficulties for knowledge workers that have to deal with increasingly Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environments. In this scenario, the use of workstream collaboration tools (WSC), such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, to manage this new way of working and to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is proliferating. However, the goals that these WSC tools need to achieve and the way to use them are not well established because of two reasons: (i) these new work environments pose a new set of challenges for working productively that have not been clearly characterised, and (ii) there is neither previous experience nor a strong research body that study them in conjunction to offer guidelines to design good solutions based on WSC tools. In this paper, we follow an inductive approach based on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from 365 employees of 3 companies (immersed in VUCA environments and digitisation initiatives with WSC tools) to characterise the productivity challenges in these scenarios. The result is a set of 14 challenges that appear with different intensity in each company. A thorough study of the related literature shows that the implication of these challenges in WSC tools have been studied independently, but there is no single theory that covers all of them together. This paper, hence, helps to put them together

Specification and Automated Design-Time Analysis of the Business Process Human Resource Perspective

The human resource perspective of a business process is concerned with the relation between the activities of a process and the actors who take part in them. Unlike other process perspectives, such as control flow, for which many different types of analyses have been proposed, such as finding deadlocks, there is an important gap regarding the human resource perspective. Resource analysis in business processes has not been defined, and only a few analysis operations can be glimpsed in previous approaches. In this paper, we identify and formally define seven design-time analysis operations related to how resources are involved in process activities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a wide variety of resource-aware BP models, those analysis operations can be automated by leveraging Description Logic (DL) off-the-shelf reasoners. To this end, we rely on Resource Assignment Language (RAL), a domain-specific language that enables the definition of conditions to select the candidates to participate in a process activity. We provide a complete formal semantics for RAL based on DLs and extend it to address the operations, for which the control flow of the process must also be taken into consideration. A proof-of-concept implementation has been developed and integrated in a system called CRISTAL. As a result, we can give an automatic answer to different questions related to the management of resources in business processes at design time

Challenges to Support a Ppi Management Lifecycle

An important aspect in the business process lifecycle is the evaluation of business processes performance, since it helps organisations to de- fine and measure progress towards their goals. Performance requirements on business processes can be specified by means of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs), as suggested in many methodologies and frameworks like, for instance, COBIT, ITIL or EFQM. As a consequence, it is convenient to integrate the management of PPIs into the whole business process lifecycle from its design to its evaluation, enabling thus a more effective an effi- cient automated support to extract information from such indicators. in this paper, we analyse some approaches related to this issue and identify the challenges that need to be faced

Dialog-based Automation of Decision Making in Processes

The use of chatbots has spread, generating great interest in the industry for the possibility of automating tasks within the execution of their processes. The implementation of chatbots, however simple, is a complex endeavor that involves many low-level details, which makes it a time-consuming and error-prone task. In this paper we aim at facilitating the development of decision-support chatbots that guide users or help knowledge workers to make decisions based on interactions between different process participants, aiming at decreasing the workload of human workers, for example, in healthcare to identify the first symptoms of a disease. Our work concerns a methodology to systematically build decision-support chatbots, semi-automatically, from existing DMN models. Chatbots are designed to leverage natural language understanding platforms, such as Dialogflow or LUIS. We implemented Dialogflow chatbot prototypes based on our methodology and performed a pilot test that revealed insights into the usability and appeal of the chatbots developed

DemaBot: a tool to automatically generate decision-support chatbots

This article presents DemaBot: a low-code solution to create chatbots designed to automate decision making. Examples of these chatbots range from COVID-19 screening to first-line incident support, amongst others. Using DemaBot, the developer only needs to model the decision that the chatbot will automate using DMN and, optionally, customize the utterances that the chatbot will use to interact with the user. From this information, DemaBot generates automatically the complete set of components that implement a ready-to-use chatbot. Furthermore, it provides help to guide users during the conversation, and optimizes the conversation flow, being able to recognize several parameters in a single turn and asking only for those that are indispensable for the decision.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación OPHELIA (RTI2018101204-B-C22)Junta de Andalucía EKIPMENT-PLUS (P18-FR-2895

PPINOT: a Tool for the Definition and Analysis of Process Performance Indicators

A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the evaluation of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, having an appropriate definition of these PPIs is crucial. After a careful review of the literature related and a study of the current picture in different real organisations, we conclude that there not exists any proposal that allows to define PPIs in a way that is unambiguous and highly expressive, understandable by technical and non-technical users and traceable with the business process (BP). Furthermore, it is also increasingly important to provide these PPI definitions with support to automated analysis allowing to extract implicit information from them and their relationships with the BP. in this work we present PPINOT, a tool that allows the graphical definition of PPIs together with their corresponding business processes, and their subsequent automated analysis