How Do Experts Make Sense of Integrated Process Models?

A range of integrated modeling approaches have been developed to enable a holistic representation of business process logic together with all relevant business rules. These approaches address inherent problems with separate documentation of business process models and business rules. In this study, we explore how expert process workers make sense of the information provided through such integrated modeling approaches. To do so, we complement verbal protocol analysis with eye-tracking metrics to reveal nuanced user behaviours involved in the main phases of sensemaking, namely information foraging and information processing. By studying expert process workers engaged in tasks based on integrated modeling of business processes and rules, we provide insights that pave the way for a better understanding of sensemaking practices and improved development of business process and business rule integration approaches. Our research underscores the importance of offering personalized support mechanisms that increase the efficacy and efficiency of sensemaking practices for process knowledge workers.

From Internet of Things Data to Business Processes: Challenges and a Framework

The IoT and Business Process Management (BPM) communities co-exist in many shared application domains, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The IoT community has a strong focus on hardware, connectivity and data; the BPM community focuses mainly on finding, controlling, and enhancing the structured interactions among the IoT devices in processes. While the field of Process Mining deals with the extraction of process models and process analytics from process event logs, the data produced by IoT sensors often is at a lower granularity than these process-level events. The fundamental questions about extracting and abstracting process-related data from streams of IoT sensor values are: (1) Which sensor values can be clustered together as part of process events?, (2) Which sensor values signify the start and end of such events?, (3) Which sensor values are related but not essential? This work proposes a framework to semi-automatically perform a set of structured steps to convert low-level IoT sensor data into higher-level process events that are suitable for process mining. The framework is meant to provide a generic sequence of abstract steps to guide the event extraction, abstraction, and correlation, with variation points for plugging in specific analysis techniques and algorithms for each step. To assess the completeness of the framework, we present a set of challenges, how they can be tackled through the framework, and an example on how to instantiate the framework in a real-world demonstration from the field of smart manufacturing. Based on this framework, future research can be conducted in a structured manner through refining and improving individual steps.