The Explainable Business Process (XBP) - An Exploratory Research

Abstract

Providing explanations to a business process, its decisions and its activities, is an important factor to achieve the objectives of the business process, and to minimize and deal with any ambiguity in the process that may cause multiple interpretations, as well as to engender the appropriate trust of the users in the process. As a first step towards adding explanations to business process, we present an exploratory study to merge the concept of explainability and business processes, and we propose a conceptual framework to use explainability with business process in a model that we called the Explainable Business Process (XBP). Furthermore, we propose an XBP lifecycle, based on the Model-based and Incremental Knowledge Engineering (MIKE) approach, in order to show in details the phase where explainability fits in the business process lifecycle, noting that we focus on explaining the decisions and activities of the process in its as-is model, without transforming it into a to-be model.