Business Process Variability: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Business processes have facilitated and enhanced management activities, being considered an instrument capable of approximating the strategic guidance and the people who execute their work to achieve organizational goals. In this scenario, continuous evaluation procedures, compliance with government regulations and industry standards, evolutions in the business domain, stakeholders’ needs, new technologies and economic factors related to globalization pressure are examples of aspects that can foster changes on business processes. The impact of this changing environment is the variation of business processes, in a phenomenon called business process variability. The objective of this research is, therefore, to aggregate relevant studies which address the context of this phenomenon. The studies’ selection was accomplished through a Systematic Literature Review, conducting automatic searches in a set of digital libraries and manual searches in leading conferences and journals in the fields of Business Process Management and Computer Science. In total, 13619 studies were retrieved, from which 80 were classified as relevant. This set of primary studies acted as sources of evidence for answering 3 research questions and their respectively subquestions. From the analysis performed, the study concludes that despite efforts in the literature for managing business process variability, this concept is not clear and well delimited, involving additional aspects and, hence, lacking a structured taxonomy. Contributions of the current work are: to provide valuable information with respect to the main notions in business process variability field and, possible types and inductors of process variability;to identify the main challenges faced by organizations when dealing with this phenomenon and; to examine a set of proposals for process variability management, investigating the existence of tool support and empirical evaluations carried out.