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work practice and to refine the process definition, or in other words, to improve the
workflow system's support of employees in performing their business.
In this work, we present a technique of identifying lived business processes by
means of To-do's of the performers in a process. Coming from a human-centric per-
spective of business processes and workflows, we argue that a bottom-up approach of
capturing and documenting actually performed business processes leads to a more
faithful process model to reality than a top-down approach. In a bottom-up approach,
performed activities and tasks are collected from the performers of the process and are
mapped to the process model. Thus, the process model is implicitly modeled by all
process participants, whereas in a top-down approach the process model is mainly
defined considering the knowledge about the company's processes available at vari-
ous management levels, e.g. top-level, middle-, and lower management (depending on
the company's organizational structure) and the collected data is optionally comple-
mented with process information elicited from samples of further process participants.
The top-down approach seems to be often used in practice when business processes
need to be, e.g. defined and redesigned, as it is a question of time and costs to which
extend all participants of the process are actively involved in the process elicitation
phase.
We assume that personal To-do's implicate information about process fragments
that are very close to reality and which include information about activities, tasks,
roles, agents, decisions, delegations, time, data, and tools. By
personal To-do's
we
understand activities and tasks listed by an individual organizational member in order
to organize his or her work. These lists include activities and tasks (complemented
with additional data if available) sorted in treated chronological order. We consider
To-do lists as a resource of the individual used to perform a particular work task. We
use the terms
activity
and
task
according to the definition of BPMN [3].
We use the
qualitative
content analysis
as a technique to capture data of the To-do
lists in a transparent, structured, uniform and comprehensive way. The content analy-
sis supports the process designer to deal with (1) systematic identification of process
elements, (2) homogenization of labels, and (3) granularity of activities. We show
how the output of the analysis can be used to model or mine views of individual proc-
ess participants and to aggregate and merge process fragments resulting from To-do's
into an entire business process. By the term “process view” we understand a part of a
process (process fragment) that is performed by a single organizational member. The
method presented in the paper is evaluated in a case study.
The work is structured as described in the following. The next section presents the
Business Process Model Extraction (BPME) Method that allows a transparent and
traceable transformation of process information communicated in natural language to
a formal process model. In Section 3 the qualitative content analysis and its potential
to deal with challenges particularly arising in the context of business process model-
ing (level of abstraction, labeling and identification of essential process elements) are
discussed. Section 4 focuses on the preparation of process view logs based on the
output of the qualitative content analysis and the mining of the logs into one entire
process model. The case study which was conducted for the teaching process in a
real-world setting is presented in section 5. In Section 6 related work is reflected and
Section 7 concludes our work.
