Can Working Style Be Identified?

                                 Marcello Sarini1

             University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Psychology,
               I-20126 Milan, Italy. marcello.sarini@unimib.it


      Abstract. Working style is a concept not fully taken into account espe-
      cially when the unfolding of a business process is supported by Process-
      aware Information Systems. In this paper we present a practical approach
      to define and identify working style. The identification is done by search-
      ing for some patterns representing critical common features which define
      a working style. A prototype is presented as a proof of concepts for this
      new research path.

      Key words: Working style, Organizational mining, Graph databases,
      Process-aware Information Systems, Visualization.



1 Introduction

The concept of style has been widely discussed in different fields such as Arts,
Fashion, and Design. Research on style focused on two different complementary
perspectives, on the one hand on the artifacts which are characterized by a cer-
tain style; on the other hand on the process of designing the artifacts [8]. In this
last perspective, more related to the Design field, style is an organizing principle
emerging from a series of choices made within some set of constraints [6, 21]. In
our proposal we want to fill this gap by creating an artifact, the Working Style
Artifact (WSA), which reifies the way people work by making visible the inter-
dependencies among performers who completed their work related to a business
process. Even if little has been told about the concept of style associated to the
way people work, Working style considers the process of work as a set of choices
made by the involved performers within the set of constraints posed by the
workplace; and this is crucial especially when work is performed with the sup-
port of Process-aware Information Systems as these systems tend to pose strong
constraints on the way work is arranged during the unfolding of the supported
business process.
    In this view, the concept of Working style, and especially its visible counter-
part, the Working Style Artifact, can be seen as a tool for facilitate comparisons
to identify similarities and differences about the nature of work; this could be
useful in different situations where it would be meaningful to make visible and
commonly acknowledged in a seamless way to the involved stakeholders repe-
titions of work behaviors. This seems relevant for instance in different areas of
Job analysis where Job analysis is the process by which jobs are subdivided
into elements, such as tasks, through the application of a formalized, systematic
2      Sarini

procedure for data collection, analysis and synthesis [14]: e.g., to promote orga-
nizational compliance, i.e., to facilitate the comparison of real work performed
by an actor with the tasks expected to be completed according to her specific
position; to facilitate team formation, by choosing people who are similar in
working [20]; to limit the possible raise of resistance to change, by facilitating
the comparison of work performed during the as-is process with the tasks ex-
pected for the redesigned to-be process. All of these aspects will be crucial for
a well functioning organization, as organizational compliance is about the capa-
bility of an organization of setting clear duties for a determined position; this
is the opposite of role ambiguity, where studies in organizational Psychology
emphasized that role ambiguity could negatively affect, among the others, job
satisfaction [19]. It would be useful to keep into account that working style could
be associated to the concept of habits in work settings and changing habits could
be troublesome [27], leading also to resistance to change phenomenon which of-
ten hampers redesign efforts [12]. All in all, taking into account working style
would also lead to the satisfaction of both joint understanding and involvement
principles advocated as two of the identified ten principles for good business
process management [25].
    Research on style is interested to answer different critical questions about
style, and how a style could be identified is one of them [21]. The visual identi-
fication of a style would follow two different theoretical approaches as described
in [15]: template matching and feature analysis: the first approach relies on the
possibility to compare each new input with a standard; the last ones focuses
on the identification of a common set of critical features which characterizes
the style itself [7]. Here we propose a similar approach to the definition and
identification of a working style focusing on a set of features describing possi-
ble aspects of working style as reported within the Working Style Artifact. For
the first step towards its identification, we consider working style in terms of
handover-orientedness and rework-orientedness. The first feature characterizes
the working style of a person in terms of level of handovers and this would relate
to the degree of interdependence in the work of a performer. The second feature
is intended to characterize the working style of a person in terms of amount of
rework and this is strictly connected to the concept of efficiency in working or,
following the idea of waste reduction in Lean thinking [16], to the reduction of
over-processing. To give these features a concrete meaning we associate to them
a set of patterns identifying the repetition of a specific work condition charac-
tering the style of work in terms of the considered features which should be then
made visible and recognizable within the corresponding Working Style Artifact.
    In Computer Science the concept of pattern was mainly exploited in the
Software Engineering field, focusing on design patterns [9], intended as tools
helpful to facilitate the reuse of object oriented software already coded for a
similar problem. The idea of the authors is rooted in the work of Alexander [4],
an Architect, who defined patterns as “elements which are a collective memory of
things which work in our surroundings”. Lately, the concept of design pattern was
extended also to the Business Process Management area, with the definition of
                                           Can Working Style Be Identified?         3

workflow patterns [24], built with the same rationale in mind of design patterns
for Software Engineering. We considered here patterns, and more specifically
work patterns, concerning a repetition of obversable behaviors [1]. From the
perspective of identifying patterns as a repetion of a structure, and in particular
referring to the definition of working style, we took strong inspiration from the
field of Organizational mining. Organizational mining was defined by [20] as
part of the broader Process Mining area where the focus is on the possibility to
extract any meaningful repetition of behaviors regarding the organization of work
from logs of real work. Similarly, patterns of work has been identified in terms
of Affordance Networks [18] within Organizational Routines, where again the
concept of organizational routine is related to “repetitive, recognizable patterns
of action” [17].
    In the following of the paper we describe our approach to identify work-
ing style by means of Working Style Artifacts; Conclusions and Future Works
conclude the paper.


2 The Proposed Approach
As the presence of Process-aware Information Systems has become readily avail-
able, it is assumed that it is possible to extract information from transaction
logs such as i) events concerning an activity (a well defined step in a process);
ii) the case to which an event is related (the istance of the process); iii) the per-
former of the event; iv) and the total order of events [23]. In this way, the nature
of work would be analyzed thanks to this information. From this premise, we
propose a prototype which allows users to search for patterns where the iden-
tified patterns would be related to features describing some characteristics of a
working style. Patterns will be searched within the Working Style Artifact by
means of a pattern search interface (See e.g., Fig. 4). For the search of patterns
we took inspiration from [23] by considering the metrics proposed, in particu-
lar the metrics based on the identification of possible causality of work such as
handovers. The occurences of the eventually found patterns are then visualized
directly in the Working Style Artifact. In addition, to facilitate the identification
of the occurrences of the selected patterns, we considered to support juxtaposi-
tion [10] which is a technique for visually comparing information which aims at
helping “the users shift their attention between objects or see patterns between
elements” (compare e.g., the initial Working Style Artifact in Fig. 3 with the
Artifact displayed in Fig. 5 after the highlighting of the found patterns).
     The prototype is built using Python programming language [3] togheter with
Neo4j, a graph database [2]. The choice of this database was driven by the fact
that it provides a query language, Cypher, which is oriented to the identification
of patterns within graphs. Moreover, the Cypher language, was already used for
its flexibility in the field of Business Process Management [13]. For what con-
cerns the idea of visualizing patterns of work behavior, we took inspiration from
another tool, the EventExplorer by [5], used to identify and visualize patterns
of events regarding consumers’ activities during online commerce sessions.
4      Sarini

2.1 The Identification of Patterns
To illustrate our prototype we took inspiration from the log presented in [20].
The prototype first reads the log data expressed in CSV format (see Fig. 1),
where in each row is reported a case, an activity performed, a performer and
a timestamp. At this point, the CSV data are transformed into the related db
graph. This would then facilitate the search of patterns within Working Style
Artifact through the functionalities provided by the Cypher language.




                   Fig. 1. An excerpt of the csv log from case 1.


    The graph db will include nodes: Cases, Activities, and Performers and
relations: a Case includes an Activity, an Activity is performed by a performer,
and most important of all, for the search of patterns related to working style, a
Performer works with a Performer, where this relation is set into the database
whenever a Performer p1 performed an activity immediately before an activity
performed by p2 . As it is possible to notice in Fig. 1, John performs activity A
before Mike performs B, and this is represented in the graph database with the
creation of a relation works with connecting John to Mike (see Fig. 2).




             Fig. 2. An excerpt of the db graph generated from case 1.


    From the graph generated, we are able then to build the corresponding Work-
ing Style Artifact (see Fig. 3) which is structured in this way: each row represents
a case, while each cell in the rows is colored as to represent the related performer
in completing an activity for that case. For instance, John in the first case per-
forms both the first and the third activity (see Fig. 1) and consequently both the
                                            Can Working Style Be Identified?         5

first and the third cell of the first row of the Working Style Artifact are colored
in red which is assumed to be the color representing the performer John within
the Working Style Artifact (see Fig. 3).




                        Fig. 3. The Working Style Artifact.


    The search for the patterns of interest is specified through a Cypher query.
In this query are to be specified: i) the two performers at the edge of the pattern
(both the request for a specific performer or for any performer is allowed); ii)
the length of the path connecting the two performers (with the Cypher language
different options are possible, such as to search for paths of any length, to search
for paths with a specific length, with at least or at most a specific length, or
to search for paths with a length falling into an interval); iii) if any performer
is selected at one edge of the pattern, whether to search for patterns including
only the same or different performers; iv) whether the activities performed by
the two performers have to be the same or not. To facilitate the definition of the
query to search for a pattern we designed a pattern search interface generating
automatically the desired query.




           Fig. 4. The pattern search interface for handover-orientedness.


    In Fig. 4 for instance it is displayed how to set the user interface to search for
handover patterns in which John is the first performer completing an activity
(p1 is selected as “John” and p2 as “any”), and there is a direct handover of work
with other performers (path length is set to “Exactly 1” and also the “search
different performers” check box is set). The results of the query both identifies
some metrics counting the occurrence of the pattern, and identifies the recurring
patterns which are then visualized accordingly in the Working Style Artifact by
6       Sarini

coloring in light blue all the cells corresponding to the performers involved in
the patterns (See Fig. 5).




    Fig. 5. The WSA after the identification of patterns for handover-orientedness.


    Another interesting example is related to the identification of some forms of
rework for a performer. The idea is to look for patterns whenever a performer,
e.g. John, is involved into some rework, (see Fig. 6 ).




             Fig. 6. The pattern search interface for rework-orientedness.


   In this case the specification of rework is done by selecting “John” for both
performers and selecting “Same activity” with paths of any length. The occur-
rences of the pattern are then visualized in the Working Style Artifact (See
Fig. 7).




     Fig. 7. The WSA after the identification of patterns for rework-orientedness.


    The first pattern considered in the examples is about the feature of handover-
orientedness to characterize working style. In the presented case, John’s working
style is handover-oriented as it is characterized by the presence of the handover
pattern in all of the considered cases (as it is possible to notice by comparing
the Working Style Artifact in Fig. 3 with the Working Style Artifact after the
                                          Can Working Style Be Identified?           7

search of the handover patterns as displayed in Fig. 5). In the second example
(see Fig. 7), the pattern we looked for is related to rework-orientedness feature.
In the presented case, the rework pattern is identified with just one occurrence
only in the first case, so due to its scarse presence, John’s working style is not
to be considered rework oriented.


3 Conclusions and Future Works
In this paper it is described our approach to identify working style through the
definition of a Working Style Artifact. This Artifact reifies visually the way peo-
ple work according to the data contained in a log file related to the activities
they performed in a business process. It is explained how to build and query the
Working Style Artifact by means of a prototype implemented using the Python
programming language [3] and the Neo4j graph database [2]. Working style is
determined by searching within the Working Style Artifact for the occurrence of
some patterns which characterize some critical common features of the working
style. However, other features could be considered to enrich the set of com-
mon features characterizing a working style e.g., feature of autonomy: whether
a performer is the only one to perform the activities of a case or not; feature of
redundancy: whether a performer in any single case is replaceable or not by other
performers in the completion of the same activities; feature of question-answers
among pair of performers reflecting the occurrence of some Activity Patterns [22].
Future works will be oriented to apply the approach to real cases by considering
a richer set of common features to characterize a style. Then, the future pro-
totype will aim at facilitating both the visual pattern recognition associated to
the features of the style and the visual comparison of Working Style Artifacts by
considering additional visualization techniques, such as Arc Diagrams [26] and
Rythm-Eye views [11]. These methods could be more useful than the simpler
visualization of the Working Style Artifact proposed in the prototype. In fact,
the first method is aimed at making more explicit the relations among different
segments of the considered Working Style Artifact so to facilitate the identifi-
cation of patterns, while the second method could make the sequences in the
Working Style Artifacts more easy to be compared as the presentation of them
is not linear and dispersed but built around a circle to facilitate comparison at
a glance. This would be especially useful for visually comparing larger Working
Style Artifacts.


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