Process Improvement Based on External Knowledge Context

The external environment of an organization is characterized by significant changes that occur in the social, economical, political and technological fields. The organization should know this setting and act effectively. A major challenge is how to define significant information in its diverse contexts. In a business process scenario, context could be defined as the minimum set of variables containing all relevant information impacting the design and implementation of a business process. Although there are a few proposals that deal with context associated to business process (Nunes et al. 2009)(Rosemann et al. 2008)(Saidani and Nurcan 2007), they still miss an explicit method that supports the identification of relevant external contexts that impact on specific activities during a business process execution. In this paper we describe a method for supporting the identification and prioritization of variables to be considered in the context of the external environment that impacts process activities execution.