Measuring Moral Performance: A Framework for Ethical Business Process Management
摘要
This paper proposes a novel approach to integrating ethical considerations into process management. The research endeavor is timely and relevant, as ethics in Business Process Management (BPM) have been scarcely researched, and practice increasingly focuses on ethical principles. Our framework, developed based on the fundamentals of design science research (DSR), provides a structured method for integrating ethical assessments into BPM. It combines established ethical perspective questionnaires with customizable evaluations of specific ethical values, enabling both high-level and granular assessments. This framework supports the modeling phase by allowing annotation of ethical aspects, the execution phase by facilitating real-time ethical assessment by users, and the monitoring phase by visualizing collected ethical performance data. It enables customizable ethical value tracking, enhancing ethical awareness in business operations. The concept was implemented as a prototype and evaluated with domain experts, demonstrating its utility in operationalizing ethical considerations in BPM. This research contributes to ethics-aware BPM by providing a practical framework to make ethical considerations explicit, measurable, and manageable within daily business operations and expanding the scope of research on quantifying and enhancing ethical process performance.