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Publication

Speech Acts in Actual Processes: Evaluation of Interfaces and Triggers in ITIL

Johannes Tenschert; Jana-Rebecca Rehse; Peter Fettke; Richard Lenz
In: Matthias Weidlich; Ernest Teniente (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process Management. Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process Management (BPMS2-2017), located at International Conference on Business Process Management, September 10-14, Barcelona, Spain, Springer, 2017.

Abstract

Today's organizations are socio-technical systems in which human workers increasingly perform knowledge work. Interactions between knowledge workers, clerks, and systems are essentially speech acts controlling the necessity and flow of activities in semi-structured and ad-hoc processes. IT-support for knowledge work does not necessarily require any predefined process model, and often none is available. To capture what is going on, a rising number of approaches for process modeling, analysis, and support classify interactions and derive processrelated information. The frequency and diversity of speech acts has only been examined within delimited domains, but not in the larger setting of a reference model covering different types of work and domains, multiple stakeholders, and interacting processes. Therefore, we have investigated interactions in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a collection of predefined processes, functions, and roles that constitute best practices in the realm of IT service management (ITSM). For ITIL-based processes, we demonstrate the importance, prevalence, and diversity of interactions in triggers, and that further abstraction of interactions can improve the reusability of process patterns. Hence, at least in ITSM, applying speech act theory bears great potential for process improvement.