The support of workplace learning is increasingly relevant as the change in every form determines today's working world in the industry and public administrations alike. Adapting quickly to a new job, a new task or a new team is a significant challenge that must be dealt with ever faster. Workplace learning differs significantly from school learning as it is aligned with business goals. Our approach supports workplace learning by suggesting historical cases and providing recommendations of experts and learning resources. We utilize users' workplace environment, we consider their learning preferences, provide them with useful prior lessons, and compare required and acquired competencies to issue the best-suited recommendations. Our research work follows a Design Science Research strategy and is part of the European funded project Learn PAd. The recommender system introduced here is evaluated in an iterative manner, first by comparing it to previously elicited user requirements and then through practical application in a test process conducted by the project application partner.
Purpose
Business processes (BPs) of public administrations (PAs) are often described in the form of written procedures or operational manuals. These business process descriptions are expected to be properly understood and applied by civil servants, who have to provide legally compliant service provisions to the citizens. However, process descriptions in the PA are sometimes hard to read, ambiguous, or vague, leading to false interpretations or even incorrect execution of the processes. The purpose of this paper is to focus on improving the descriptions of BPs to be used in PAs.
Design/methodology/approach
To this end, the authors present an in-depth domain analysis, including a literature review and interviews with PA stakeholders belonging to different realities. From this analysis, the authors identified a set of 52 typical defects of process descriptions.
Findings
The authors provide a set of guidelines and a template to constrain the definition of these documents and to mitigate the identified defects. Furthermore, the authors outline research challenges in the field of quality assessment of textual process descriptions for the PA.
Research limitations/implications
This paper addresses the needs of any PA officer who has to write an official procedure or operational manual, and should be studied by researchers who wish to provide automatic strategies to check the quality of these documents.
Originality/value
Text quality issues have been addressed in various fields (e.g. requirements engineering), but not in the area of BP descriptions of PAs. The contribution consists in the study of the quality issues that occur and create problems in the practice of this particular domain. Based on this insight, we provide directions for research that will find solutions to mitigate the issues.
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