Analyzing Process-Aware Information System Updates Using Digital Twins of Organizations
This addresses the limited support for tracking and analyzing small-scale changes in business processes, offering a method to reduce operational frictions for organizations undergoing digital transformation, though it appears incremental in applying DTOs to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing the impact of small-scale updates to process-aware information systems, which can degrade process performance, by using Digital Twins of Organizations (DTOs) to model updates and quantitatively evaluate structural, operational, and performance-related impacts, with a prototype implementation and case study on an ERP procure-to-pay process.
Digital transformation often entails small-scale changes to information systems supporting the execution of business processes. These changes may increase the operational frictions in process execution, which decreases the process performance. The contributions in the literature providing support to the tracking and impact analysis of small-scale changes are limited in scope and functionality. In this paper, we use the recently developed Digital Twins of Organizations (DTOs) to assess the impact of (process-aware) information systems updates. More in detail, we model the updates using the configuration of DTOs and quantitatively assess different types of impacts of information system updates (structural, operational, and performance-related). We implemented a prototype of the proposed approach. Moreover, we discuss a case study involving a standard ERP procure-to-pay business process.