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Process mining techniques can be used to analyse business processes using the data logged during their execution. These techniques are leveraged in a wide range of domains, including healthcare, where it focuses mainly on the analysis of diagnostic, treatment, and organisational processes. Despite the huge amount of data generated in hospitals by staff and machinery involved in healthcare processes, there is no evidence of a systematic uptake of process mining beyond targeted case studies in a research context. When developing and using process mining in healthcare, distinguishing characteristics of healthcare processes such as their variability and patient-centred focus require targeted attention. Against this background, the Process-Oriented Data Science in Healthcare Alliance has been established to propagate the research and application of techniques targeting the data-driven improvement of healthcare processes. This paper, an initiative of the alliance, presents the distinguishing characteristics of the healthcare domain that need to be considered to successfully use process mining, as well as open challenges that need to be addressed by the community in the future.

Due to the current focus on social media, and the lack of scientific literature available, the goal for this research has been to create a social media maturity model, which will allow organizations to assess their current state of social media implementation, and plot for their next move. This research has been conducted in cooperation with Accenture and Utrecht University as part of the Master Graduation Project for Business Informatics. The social media maturity model has been developed according to the design principles of the maturity matrix, laid out by previous researchers. By means of literature study, expert interviews, group sessions and application of the model in business context, the model has been constructed, tested, and validated.

Hardly any figures exist on the success of product software companies. What we do know is that a good Software Product Management (SPM) practice pays off. However, not many IT-professionals know how to implement SPM practices in their organization, which causes many companies to not have the proper SPM processes (such as prioritizing requirements or defining a product roadmap) in place. One of the reasons for this low maturity in SPM practices is that hardly any education exists in this domain. Some commercial courses are offered in the US and Europe. However, software product management is not taught in colleges and universities. As a consequence, software product managers have to learn the practice of SPM on the job. Since no solid body of knowledge in the SPM domain exists, this can be a difficult task. An approach to address the lack of SPM knowledge among product managers is to give them access to SPM methods and guide them in implementing them in their company. Immediately some other problems come to mind. For example, product software companies can be characterized by differing situational factors; they operate in diverse sectors, have varying sizes and use a range of development methods. Subsequently, companies need different methods. For example, a company with 5 employees does not need an elaborate release planning method, whereas a large company, such as Microsoft, needs to have a very elaborate workflow process in place within the software product management domain. Each company operates in its own context that can be described by multiple situational factors. These situational factors have a great influence on the decision whether to implement simple or elaborate SPM processes. In this research, a knowledge infrastructure is proposed that provides methodical support to product software companies. The aim of this knowledge infrastructure is to assess and thereby analyze a company’s current situation and maturity level. Then, by using incremental method e

Web applications are evolving towards strong content-centered Web applications. The development processes and implementation of these applications are unlike the development and implementation of traditional information systems. In this paper we propose WebEngineering Method; a method for developing content management system (CMS) based Web applications. Critical to a successful development of CMS-based Web applications, is the adaptation to the dynamic business. We first define CMS-based Web applications and identify their specific characteristics. Combining these characteristics with situational factors in projects, we show that by taking parts of proven methods such as UML based Web-engineering (UWE) and the Unified Software Development Process (UP), a unique method can be assembled for situational development of CMS-based Web applications. We successfully validated the method at GX, a web-technology specialized in developing and implementing CMS-based Web applications. Future research focuses on optimizing the development method, and creating reference models and modeling tools for the development of CMS-based Web applications.