Performances of Business Processes and Organizational Routines: Similar Research Problems, Different Research Methods - A Literature Review

Breuker D, Matzner M

Abstract

Management studies and organization science use the concept of organizational routines when investigating collective recurrent activity patterns. Process mining is a sub-field of business process management that analyses event log data from information systems that signifies accomplished activities for the discovery, conformance checking and enhancement of business processes. Obviously, both fields alike are concerned with analyzing event sequnces. This paper studies the literature in both fields in an attempt to shed light on their relation. The main results obtained are: Scholars from both fields - while working on similar research problems - tend to employ different research methods and research tools. There also exist separated publication strands. From the set of papers that either belong to or cite papers from one of the fields, we found only three papers that cite organizational routines and process mining publications at the same time and another six papers on organizational routines that refer to process mining. The paper concludes that the adoption of methods from the counter-field may constitute a great potential for innovative research designs.