Analyzing Digital Trace Data to Promote Discovery – The Case of Heatmapping

Abstract

Business Process Management and Routine Dynamics are two streams of research that both explore process. To this end, Business Process Management has developed a rich array of methods that can be used to analyze digital trace data. Routine Dynamics has put less emphasis on the analysis of digital trace data, but it has advanced a methodological approach that promotes discovery, i.e., the process that actors perform and experience as they develop novel insights. This paper argues that the analysis of digital trace data can promote the process of discovery. It uses heatmapping as a specific example to show how analyzing digital trace data can promote discovery. The paper thus emphasizes a specific way how Business Process Management and Routine Dynamics can fertilize each other.

Sequence analysis: Its past, present, and future

“…The network approach has been used to understand sequence structure in a variety of phenomena that are embedded within sequences, including eating practices (Castelo et al, 2021), travel patterns (Zhang and Thill, 2017), gendered career mobility patterns (Hamberger, 2018), organizational work practices and routines (Goh and Pentland, 2019;Mahringer, 2022;Mahringer and Pentland, 2021), and other social phenomena (for an overview, see Pentland et al, 2017). A particularly important application has been to residential electrical energy consumption (see Lőrincz et al, 2021;McKenna et al, 2020).…”