Guiding Knowledge Workers Under Dynamic Contexts

A knowledge-intensive process (KiP) is a flexible process where knowledge workers have the control over the actions to be taken towards fulfilling the process goals. Yet, the context of a business process impacts how the goals are met by the knowledge worker throughout the process. The context of a business process can be dynamic, i.e., the context might be subject to changes during the process execution based on the decisions and interpretations of the knowledge worker. Moreover, there can be multiple ways to fulfill the goals depending on the dynamic context. In such a case, the knowledge worker faces a difficult decision on prioritizing the available tasks in the process to execute this flexible process and fulfill the goals as efficient as possible. This paper presents a method that provides knowledge workers a prioritization ranking for the available tasks, to help them efficiently collect the information they need to evaluate the fulfillment of goals in dynamic contexts. Our method guides the knowledge worker in executing KiPs more efficiently by giving higher priority to tasks that provide information required for the goals of multiple dynamic contexts. We present our approach on a real-life case and evaluate the improvement gained by following the recommendations of our method through simulation.