Modeling contextual decision making in service organizations

Motivation Service organizations rely on efficient, high quality satisfaction of customer needs. In industries as diverse as call centers, banks, and healthcare, managers attempt to institute quality standards through standardized protocols, best practice guidelines, and workflow management systems. These devices offer a good understanding of the ideal process, but inadequately describe the contexts in which decision makers systematically deviate from the ideal. These contexts include the time of day, the workload of the decision maker, the workload of collaborators, and the schedule status of an activity. In certain contexts, managers have found their employees' decision making behavior deviating in predictable ways from the ideal protocol, in order to fulfill objectives not described by the protocol. The failure of many workflow management systems to handle such deviations adequately can give rise to workarounds which undermine the system [1]; the failure of protocol designers to offer flexibility in their protocols can lead to failures in implementation [2]. In general, failure to consider context-dependent changes in decision making behavior can lead to unanticipated results in the load on individual workers, the communication and coordination requirements of activities, and the amount of error and rework necessary. Employees may develop alternatives to the manager's desired workflow that impact service quality and efficiency. Our research builds upon an established discrete event-based simulation tool, the Virtual Design Team (VDT) [3], which has been used to model the behavior of organizations engaged in routine engineering design tasks. The VDT representation has recently been extended to model service organizations engaged in diagnose and repair tasks at a low level of granularity [4]. Differences in decision making policies are currently represented by an average behavioral effect which remains constant throughout each simulation scenario. Our goals for incorporating contextual effects are twofold: to describe the heuristics used by decision makers to respond to recurring contexts, and to measure the effects of such local behaviors on the organization-level process performance.