Designing Process Guidance Systems the Case of IT Service Management

Organizations specify the processes that need to be followed in order to standardize employees’ work and improve their process execution. One important challenge in this context is the users’ lack of process knowledge. Employees’ process knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for proper process execution and a critical factor for achieving successful process standardization, improvement, and ultimately process performance. Therefore, it is key for organizations to support their employees with the proper process knowledge. In order to address this challenge, we propose the concept of process guidance and design process guidance systems to increase users’ process knowledge and their process execution performance. We argue that users require (1) general information on the process, such as an overview of all the steps and their sequence, (2) specific information on how to execute the steps to navigate through the process, and (3) the possibility to identify their current position within the process. When reflecting our DSR project, we identified three major key learnings. First, it was important to have identified multiple literature streams for the grounding of our design. Second, involving in a real-world case and engaging with our case company helped us to improve the relevance as well as the contribution of our research. Third, another important lesson learned is that researchers applying the DSR approach should be engaged with the DSR community, in particular the International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST) conference.