The Use of Ubiquitous Computing for Business Process Improvement

Abstract

Due to the cut throat competition among organizations, business process improvement is now an everyday activity. A relentless activity that makes business processes more complex than ever. As they get more complex, the improvement rounds become time-consuming, costly and the quality of each outcome is put into jeopardy, which is somehow paradoxical with the concept of improvement. In this paper, we propose a business process improvement technique based on ubiquitous computing. First, we couple business processes with ubiquitous computing and define a ubiquitous business process. Then, we explain how ubiquitous computing positively impacts the performance metrics of business processes. Afterwards, we set a specification for designing ubiquitous business processes by extending BPMN. Finally, we propose a concrete case study about time-banking to corroborate our theory. A comparative study of the same process, in ubiquitous and non-ubiquitous versions, is established. The results clearly illustrate that ubiquitous computing impacts positively the business process performance metrics. Still, the case study corroborates that ubiquitous computing not only improves a business process but also enables it to get improved with the least of human interventions.