Process Modeling for Network Organizations - The Impact of the Process Environment

Attention to the specific characteristics of rather unstructured processes and the consequences for the modeling of these processes can only rarely be observed. This paper presents the results of a process analysis in a research network covering highly cooperative processes. The analysis shows that the network exhibits processes were conventional modeling methods fail to generate meaningful results. An in-depth analysis reveals that an optimized execution and an optimized outcome depend more on the environment of the processes than on an optimized sequence. Therefore it can be concluded that in order to achieve optimization it is fundamental to analyze the environmental factors.