A Method to Identify Opportunities for Mobile Business Processes

In this paper we explore the opportunities for exploiting mobile technology in business processes. The paper addresses this research question by exploring the issues both conceptually and empirically. Our main aim in this paper is to develop an opportunity discovery framework to assess to what extent mobility could improve the performance of a business process. We propose a method to systematically derive opportunities by taking the existing business process and by gradually increasing the mobility of the participants in the process (and thus complicating their locations). The more mobile the actors are, the higher the geographical barriers, and the less feasible the use of traditional information systems becomes. We present two case studies of existing mobile business processes, and we show how the mobile information systems that were used in these business processes can be identified through our method.