Analyzing content of tasks in Business Process Management. Blending task execution and organization perspectives

Abstract

An efficient organization, management, and execution of tasks are central for the successful functioning of any organization. This topic was on the research agenda already in the early 1950s and keeps attracting the scientific community's attention today. Continuous advances and penetration of technologies in organizations are expected to increase task variety and complexity. This creates a constant demand for new methods to analyze, measure, manage, and execute tasks. In this study, we extract relevant task content aspects from textual task descriptions and build a task content model as a basis for the development of various decision-support solutions for process workers and managers. Using the Theory of Situation Awareness, we specify a method for analyzing and measuring the content of tasks and illustrate it by an industry example of ITIL IT ticket processing. We refer to the Strategic Alignment Model while discussing the implications for task management and execution research and practice.