Socially Business Process Patterns – A Sustainability Report-driven Demonstration and Refinement

Abstract

Business process patterns provide a well-accepted tool for analyzing and improving processes. Thus, patterns have the potential to leverage the sustainable transformation of organizations by considering societal and environmental concerns in addition to economic obligations. Although various process patterns have been proposed, there is a deficit regarding the social dimension of sustainability, which hinders improving processes in terms of issues such as inclusive working environments, employee health, participation, or fair value chains. By drawing on an initial set of socially business process patterns (SBPPs) that has been developed in previous work, this study seeks to examine sustainability reports from several organizations to evaluate, refine, and extend the current set of SBPPs. We contribute to social sustainability and process patterns by enabling researchers and practitioners to explore processes in respect of social concerns as well as providing orientation (i.e., examples) on how to improve social performance.