Publication
Efficiency Of Generated Performer Networks In Collaborative Business Process Models
Andreas Sonntag; Peter Fettke
In: 2016 IEEE 18th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2016). IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI-2016), August 29 - September 1, Paris, France, IEEE, 2016.
Abstract
Business process models (PMs) model activities
along the execution of business processes. A success factor of
process activities is collaboration providing the major part of
implicit process knowledge. Applying social network analysis
(SNA) on PMs can help understanding the formation of successful
organizational structures around PMs. In that context we want to
investigate, how the topology of process participants (performers
in the following) can be formalized respectively optimized and
what are drivers for the efficient interaction between performers
and PM. Our approach is to simulate multiple performer
networks (PNs) for a corpus containing 9 university admission
PMs. Different Social network generators are used in order
to generate realistic and extremely structured organizations.
The performers in the PN are given random capabilities and
according to them, they are associated to the PM functions. For
each generated PN its efficiency is measured by the number of
iterations the performers need to finish their tasks at the process
functions along the process flow. We describe the topological
patterns of the most efficient PNs as we assume them to be
success determinants for collaborative business processes. We
found optimal parameters to generate efficient PNs for the given
corpus. The best efficiency is reached by teams with on average
5 global connected colleagues. This number has the greatest
influence on the average PM performance. We also found too
many (global) connections between performers to decrease their
efficiency and that teams need hierarchy to be efficient in a
process.