Business process learning on the job: A design science oriented approach and its empirical evaluation

Abstract

Today, Business Process Management (BPM) has established itself as an important cross-functional task in companies. The primary goal of BPM is to optimize the business process design and henceforth the actual execution of business processes. However, since optimizing processes on paper is not sufficient to really boost a company’s performance, it is indispensable to optimize the process execution which defines how business processes are actually performed at the end of the day. Yet before employees are able to carry out processes, they need a given up-front learning time. Hence, to research how business process learning can be realized on-the-job is promising in order to reduce up-front learning time; thus, being able to work efficiently on processes already from the very beginning. In this paper we present a tool-supported approach towards business process learning on-the-job using the concepts of task guidance and process guidance. After introducing the approach and its prototypical implementation, the paper presents an empirical study of this prototype showing that the general approach is useful to optimize workplace learning.

https://doi.org/10.34105/j.kmel.2012.04.031