Analyzing Process-Aware Information System Updates Using Digital Twins of Organizations

TL;DR

This paper leverages Digital Twins of Organizations to model and quantitatively analyze the impact of small-scale information system updates on business process performance, addressing a gap in existing support tools.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using DTOs to assess various impacts of system updates, including structural, operational, and performance effects, with a prototype implementation and case study.

Findings

Effective modeling of system updates using DTOs

Quantitative assessment of impact types

Successful case study on ERP process

Abstract

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.