2021, Martin, Andreas

Practitioners in business information systems are frequently faced with tasks that involve interpretation and representation of organizational information as models, e.g. business processes, the involved participants, and data. Usually, this information comes from varied sources like stakeholders and documents, often resulting in subjective, biased, or incomplete information. Simulating a realistic organizational environment is important for the education of future business process experts, but challenging to achieve in the educational setting. In this work, we propose a chatbot-based educational adventure game that can introduce complex and often contradictory sources of information in a fun learning approach and help the students in abstracting and interpreting this information, constructing models as an outcome. We elaborate on the first design ideas and requirements.

2018, Martin, Andreas

We explore the use of recommender systems in business scenarios such as consultancy. In these situations, apart from personal preferences of users, knowledge about objective business-driven criteria plays a role. We investigate strategies for representing and incorporating such knowledge into data-driven recommenders. As a baseline, we choose a robust and flexible paradigm that is based on a simple graph-based representation of past customer cases and choices, in combination with biased random walks. On a real data set from a business intelligence consultancy firm, we study how the incorporation of two important types of explicit human knowledge – namely taxonomic and associative knowledge – impacts the effectiveness of a data-driven recommender. Our results show no consistent improvement for taxonomic knowledge, but quite substantial and significant gains when using associative knowledge.

2020, Martin, Andreas

2011, Martin, Andreas

The work presented in this paper explores the potential of leveraging the traces of informal work and collaboration in order to improve business processes over time. As process executions often differ from the original design due to individual preferences, skills or competencies and exceptions, we propose methods to analyse personal preferences of work, such as email communication and personal task execution in a task management application. Outcome of these methods is the detection of internal substructures (subtasks or branches) of activities on the one hand and the recommendation of resources to be used in activities on the other hand, leading to the improvement of business process models. Our first results show that even though human intervention is still required to operationalise these insights it is indeed possible to derive interesting and new insights about business processes from traces of informal work and infer suggestions for process model changes.

2018, Martin, Andreas

In many industries, companies deliver customised solutions to their (business) customers within projects. Estimating the human effort involved in such projects is a difficult task and underestimating efforts can lead to non-billable hours, i.e. financial loss on the side of the solution provider. Previous work in this area has focused on automatic estimation of the cost of software projects and has largely ignored the interaction between automated estimation support and human project leads. Our main hypothesis is that an adequate design of such interaction will increase the acceptance of automatically derived estimates and that it will allow for a fruitful combination of data-driven insights and human experience. We therefore build a recommender that is applicable beyond software projects and that suggests job positions to be added to projects and estimated effort of such positions. The recommender is based on the analysis of similar cases (case-based reasoning), "explains" derived similarities and allows human intervention to manually adjust the outcomes. Our experiments show that recommendations were considered helpful and that the ability of the system to explain and adjust these recommendations was heavily used and increased the trust in the system. We conjecture that the interaction of project leads with the system will help to further improve the accuracy of recommendations and the support of human learning in the future.