A positive deviance approach to eliminate wastes in business processes. The case of a public organization

Published date14 August 2017
Date14 August 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-09-2016-0393
Pages1323-1339
AuthorPavlos Delias
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems
A positive deviance approach
to eliminate wastes in
business processes
The case of a public organization
Pavlos Delias
Department of Accounting and Finance,
Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology, Kavala, Greece
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to manifest a method that exploits process analytics to discover
critical knowledge for a business process. This knowledge eventually answers to the question if process
behavior can suggest which activities should be outsourced to get the performance improved.
Design/methodology/approach The author linked waste sources to process behavioral patterns, and
adopted the positive deviance paradigm to highlight compelling behaviors. Various analytic tools
(generalized regression, clustering, etc.) were used to provide recommendations.
Findings By outsourcing small parts of the process, significant process improvement is expected.
Evidence-based process analytics can effectively support the relevant decisions.
Research limitations/implications The author had no access to the relevant policy makers
(process owners).
Originality/value The author proposed an operationalization of concepts that connects process behavior
to waste sources. The author presented the use of positive deviance as a guide for waste elimination projects.
Keywords Decision support, Positive deviance, Process analytics, Waste elimination
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Deciding whether to grant or not a building permit is a process that in most European
countries is a municipal service. It is a rather complex process, which comprises hundreds of
activities that may be carried out in a great variety of pathways. This work considers a case
from the Netherlands, where five Dutch municipalities opened their data about their
building permit application process. Although all municipalities are subject to the same law
(the Wet algemene bepalingen omgevingsrecht, 2012), performance significantly differs
across municipalities, and from case to case. In particular, it has been observed that the
process lasts long, and that duration service-level agreements (SLAs) are frequently missed.
Pursuing aredesign venture, authoritiesare considering outsourcingsome of the hundreds
of activitiesthat may be performed during the process.In this paper, I follow the principles of
lean management about eliminating waste to guide a process analytics approach that
eventually supports the pertinent decision making. The actual recommendations are reached
through the positive deviance paradigm (Galperin, 2012). The positive deviance paradigm
tries to suggest performance improvements by resolutely examining positive organizational
phenomena in the workplace (Cameron and Spreitzer, 2011). The essential research question
that emerges is:
RQ1. If waste elimination best practices and positive deviance can suggest which
activities should be outsourced to get the performance improved.
Identifying the activities that if outsourced will yield substantial duration reduction, will
have an immediate effect on customers (citizens) satisfaction, since the process behavior will
be in accordance with their expectations (SLAs). Yet, there are additional benefits: first,
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 117 No. 7, 2017
pp. 1323-1339
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-09-2016-0393
Received 25 September 2016
Revised 22 October 2016
27 March 2017
Accepted 5 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
1323
Eliminate
wastes in
business
processes
missing SLAs brings in financial losses to organizations, since after the deadline has passed,
a municipality has no rights to ask for any fees. Next, after a specified time period has
elapsed, the municipality is obliged to grant the permit to the applicant (granted by
law –“van rechtswegeregulation). This simply means that adverse or detrimental
buildings could potentially be constructed within the municipal territory (imagine for
instance the construction of a chemical factory near a river). Last, the outsourcing decision
has to be evidence based and guided by a scientific method, in order to be legitimated.
Nevertheless,selecting whichactivities of the buildingpermit process should be outsourced
is far from being a trivial task for municipalities. The main reasons making such a decision
hard are: first,the traditional publicadministration is (ordinarilyin European countries)bound
with its heritage of a Weberian-style organization (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004), second,
the relevant process is documented with legalistic regulations and not with process
maps. Consequently, although atomic activities are recognized, it is difficult to observe the
end-to-end process, third, the particular process comprises hundreds of activities, while its
flows are not standardized, making thousands of variants possible, and dominant patterns
hard to get discovered, and fourth, external factors (e.g. political influences) may apply
(Kuipers et al., 2013).
Although it is hard to tackle the last reason, the remaining ones can be operationally
managed. A popular treatment to improve performance in public organizations is
performance measurement (Lee Rhodes et al., 2012; Speklé and Verbeeten, 2014; West and
Blackman, 2015). Indeed, performance measurement has played a pivotal role in public
organizationsreform initiatives (Wouter Van Dooren and Bouckaert, 2015). However,
besides performance measurement approaches having been criticized for their absence of
intervention theories (Nielsen and Ejler, 2008), they lack the necessary process perspective
to reflect on the deviant process behavior.
A more appropriate approach, which would fit better the complexity and the interactions
that are taking place through the process, appears to be system dynamics. In particular,
Ghaffarzadeganet al. (2010) suggest models that willallow quick feedback, take an aggregate
approach to modeling, provide an experimentation platform (via simulation), and are of small
size, to address public policy problems. Our approach conforms to these suggestions, as well
as it adds the following contributions: first, it constructs evidence-based models, thus turning
redundant the costlybrainstorming sessions. Then, before anysimulation is run, all relevant
influences on the process behavior need to be captured. Our method allows stakeholders to
replay history over the as-is, automatically discovered, models.
It is possibleto reach these contributions becauseI apply evidence-based processanalytics
to the collecteddata sets. By keeping a process perspective,It is possible to track the elements
that lead to positive deviant behavior, and provide recommendations to eliminate wastes.
Therestofthepaperisorganizedasthefollowing:inthenextsection,Ibrieflyreviewthe
literature about lean management applications in the public sector, the cases that exploit
positive deviance, and the deviance mining techniques. Then, in Section 3, I describe the context
of our approach, as well as its intuition. The actual application, in tandem with the relevant
results, is presented in Sections 4 and 5. Finally, a short discussion concludes the paper.
2. Related works
The lean management concepts, originating from the manufacturing sector, have few
instantiations in the public service sector. At the operational level, we observe works that
target the complexity reduction issue (e.g. by standardizing information flows in
business-to-government information exchange (Bharosa et al., 2012)), the uncertainty
reduction concern (e.g. by identifying the important variables for process improvement
(Bamber et al., 2014)), or the waste elimination (e.g. by shortening waiting times, cutting
costs, and improving resource allocation (Smith et al., 2012)). At the strategic level, we
1324
IMDS
117,7

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