Digital Twin of the Organization for Support of Customer Journeys and Business Processes

We present a new approach for a Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO). Its focus is to better support weakly structured and knowledge-intensive business processes. Driving forces behind this development are the increasing demands for organizational agility, customer focus and information utilization. Existing business information systems show a number of shortcomings in this respect: Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) either neglect agility (e.g., workflow management systems as tightly framed PAIS) or process representation (e.g., groupware as unframed PAIS). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems fall behind in customer data integration and analysis for customer journey support, and Business Intelligence (BI) focuses too much on structured data. In contrast, a DTO is highly information-based, real-time enabled and visualization-oriented and thus better fits the requirements. However, organizations as complex socio-technical systems with open boundaries are challenging for digital twins. We have chosen a process-oriented representation for the virtual part of the DTO based on internal and external data. The increased availability of unstructured data, for example, from process contexts, supports process redesign during execution: this results in more process agility while maintaining a comprehensible process framing. An Insight Engine augmented with artificial intelligence processes the data. In a case study we present a DTO prototype for the service sector. More precisely, the DTO supports a marketing campaign from design to service execution associated to the respective customer journey, representing business process and customer journey in a joint representation.