Logs and enterprise networks for overcoming obstacles in business processes

This paper discusses obstacle tackling in the context of business processes, in general, and social business processes, in particular. Obstacles are situations that could evolve into exceptions, if they are not efficiently and promptly (i.e., no preventive measures taken) tackled. Compared to obstacles, exceptions put a business process in a suspension mode until corrective measures are taken, which does not help ensure this process’s operation continuity. To address this lack of continuity, a two-stage approach for obstacle tackling using specialized enterprise networks is presented. The approach consists of (i) an early business-process obstacle detection technique based on logs and enterprise networks, and (ii) obstacle tackling technique based on solutions that result from network crawling. A system demonstrating the technical feasibility and efficiency of the approach through a real dataset, is presented in the paper as well.