Process Visibility - Towards a Conceptualization and Research Themes

Although various dedicated software packages provide analytical information about business processes, the underlying concept unifying these approaches remains vague and has not yet been conceptualized explicitly. We suggest Process Visibility as a possible approach and conceptualize it based on an analysis of existing software packages and literature. Our analysis found that the established differentiation of software packages vanishes towards Process Visibility. This is due to an integration of transactional and analytical systems, particularly driven by in-memory databases. Our literature analysis suggests that Process Visibility provides management and process workers with the ability to share and access process information in an operational context. The extent of Process Visibility depends on the degree to which process information is contextualized, relevant, trusted, timely, and integrated. Based on this definition, we propose four research themes that call for future research and that will be addressed in our research project