E-business process management

Citation

Fui-Hoon Nah, F. (2004), "E-business process management", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 10 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bpmj.2004.15710aaa.001

E-business process management

About the Guest EditorsDr Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah is Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Previously, she was a member of the MIS faculty at Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. She received her PhD in MIS from the University of British Columbia. She has edited a book on Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions & Management and published her research works in such journals as Communications of the ACM, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, Business Process Management Journal, and Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution. Her research interests include enterprise resource planning, mobile e-commerce and e-business, human-computer interaction, individual and group decision-making, and theory building in information systems research.Dr Michael Rosemann is Associate Professor at the School of Information Systems and Director of the Centre for IT Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He received his MBA (1992) and his PhD (1995) from the University of Muenster, Germany. His main areas of research are business process management, conceptual modelling, enterprise systems and ontologies. He is the author and editor of four books and published more than 90 refereed journal and conference papers.Dr Edward Watson is Ourso Associate Professor of Business Analysis in the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at Lousiana State University. He also serves as the Director of the SAP UCC program at LSU where enterprise business solutions are hosted for academic use around the USA. This program is beginning to deliver services to academics globally. Dr Watson received his PhD from Penn State in 1993. His main areas of research are in the areas of IT adoption and diffusion and post-adoptive behavior, management of IT, simulation of complex systems, and he has a particular interest in enterprise systems and packaged solutions.

E-business process management

Managing business processes is a necessity for every organisation. Since the early work of Adam Smith, this challenge caught the interest of the academic world. However, it wasn’t until the fundamental contribution of Michael Hammer, that an entire new paradigm for process management was created. The proposed radical and increased focus on business processes led to new organizational structures and IT-related solutions.

From an organizational viewpoint, new areas of responsibilities have been designed. The classical job enrichment and job enlargement have been applied along business processes. As a consequence, process owners, process managers and most recently in European countries even chief process officers (CPOs) have been institutionalized as an approach to appropriately manage the requirements of a business process.

IT-related developments include the uptake of workflow management systems that automate the execution of business processes. Moreover, the worldwide focus on implementing enterprise systems was often motivated by the intention to provide an integrated application including database and graphical user interface for the business processes of an organization. However, many of these IT-focused approaches towards process management failed because they were dominated by the complexity of the selected software solution rather than concentrating on the challenge of business/IT alignment.

The Internet can now be seen as an enabler for new business processes as well as for new ways of re-designing existing business processes. The prefix “e-” became an established characterization for Internet-enabled new forms of conducting business. E-business process management comprises the design and continuous management of collaborative business processes facilitated by the Internet. Though many of the approaches that have been widely implemented and discussed are valid for the management of internal business processes, e-process management faces entirely new challenges.

Far and foremost, an e-business process spans at least two organizations. This leads to the need for integrating not only different organizational and often national cultures, but also different company objectives, locations, languages, time zones, company sizes, policies etc. Moreover, for business processes that leave the borders of organizations, issues related to security and privacy will need to be appropriately addressed.

Internet-enabled self-services provide further opportunities for new alternatives in process designs. Customer self-services may mean outsourcing of the main parts of a business process to customers who then become the drivers of a business process from its instantiation to its ongoing monitoring and finalisation. Supplier self-services are nowadays an indispensable part of comprehensive supply-chain-management solutions. Other similar concepts include manager self-services, employee self-services and citizen self-services. These services typically demand sophisticated portals solutions that streamline the individualised access of a variety of services.

E-business process management also sees the birth of intermediaries who act as agents between organizations. These intermediaries are often providing horizontal and/or vertical marketplaces that facilitate the interaction between the sell-side and the buy-side. Consequently, e-business processes typically include significant interfaces, which tend to become cumbersome.

Though electronic data interchange addressed the needs of standardized interfaces, it is only after the extensible mark-up language (XML) has been developed that a variety of promising standards became available. New challenges and opportunities arise in setting up Web services that promise the design of standardised solutions that are independent of software or hardware platforms.

Although e-business process management provides promising alternatives and new ways for the design of business processes, it is still not characterized by a widespread uptake. The majority of electronic marketplaces have been of limited success and many marketplaces do not even exist anymore. Customer-relationship management, supply-chain management and e-procurement are important concepts that are widely discussed and they drive many interesting research questions. The comprehensive implementation of related software solutions and their successful integration with enterprise systems is, however, still not taking place on a larger scale.

Finally, it seems that the organizational demands of e-business process owners have not been addressed at all. Thus, the current situation can be characterized by a variety of organizational and IT-related opportunities as well as challenges. This motivated us to work on this special issue on “E-business process management”.

Our “Call for papers” had received an excellent response. We were overwhelmed by 25 submitted abstracts from 12 countries. The editors provided feedback and further guidance to all of these abstracts. Finally, we received 14 full papers. All of these papers have been reviewed in a double-blind process by at least two experts in the area of business process management.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank the authors of all submitted papers for their contributions. We would also like to express our appreciation to the following reviewers: David Abercrombie, Buraj Patrakosol, Qing Cao, Wenjing Duan, Jose Esteves, Tim Harig, Yuan Long, Michael zur Mühlen, Kaushik Pandya, Nick Russell, Wasana Sedera, Zixing Shen, Emilda Sindhu, Les Singletary, Chris Taylor, Yuhong Tian, and Chrisy Yao. Six papers were finally selected after a highly competitive review process.

It gives us great pleasure to have an early pioneer and thought leader of modern process management providing his latest research findings to this special issue. Thomas Davenport outlines in his invited research article, co-authored by his colleagues Jeanne Harris and Susan Cantrell, the role of enterprise systems in ongoing process change. Interestingly, from extensive interviews and a survey of managers at 163 organizations in Europe, the USA and Australia, the factors found to be most closely associated with achieving value from enterprise systems were integration, process optimization, and use of enterprise systems data in decision-making. Furthermore, while few organizations were found to be interested in the radical new process designs advocated in the early days of reengineering, there still is an obvious need to refine and continuously support the needs of the business. The authors point out new varieties of processes enabled by enterprise systems such as performance management, planning and analysis, supply chain management, customer relationship management, product development and advanced analytics. Their qualitative results suggest that the most sophisticated use of enterprise systems are just beginning to address inter-organizational information and process flows, though, and that it will take many years for these areas to completely mature. This is certainly viewed as a window of opportunity for the readers of this Special Issue.

The paper by Henry Kim and Rajani Ramkaran on “Best practices in e-business process management: extending a re-engineering framework” discusses how best practices as perceived by Hammer and Champy can be adopted for e-business process management. The intention of this research is to assess the degree to which Hammer and Champy’s framework can be adapted to meet e-business process management challenges. The value of this paper also lies in its comparison of the key drivers, rules and characteristics of the classical business process reengineering approach with e-business process management.

Niklas Aldin, Per-Olof Brehmer and Anders Johansson propose a model for the development of intermediaries in their paper “Business development with electronic commerce – refinement and repositioning”. This model has been derived from a comprehensive literature review and three case studies of intermediaries. Their interesting finding is that electronic commerce has not radically reshaped the role of marketing channel intermediaries, but strengthened existing business.

A similar research methodology is applied by Alea Fairchild, Piet Ribbers and Allard Nooteboom. Their paper “A success factor model for electronic markets: defining outcomes based on stakeholder context and business process” aims to identify the crucial factors that can explain the success of electronic markets. The model that has been developed groups the 17 success factors into context, process and outcome. The model was validated using four case studies.

Business processes that utilize electronic markets are the focus of the fourth paper “An empirical study of business processes across Internet-based electronic marketplaces: a supply-chain-management perspective” by Martin Grieger. This research concentrates on supply chain processes and vertical marketplaces. It is based on insights from an analysis of marketplaces in three industries, i.e. the chemical industry, the retail industry and the maritime industry.

Supply-chain management is also one important focus of the paper “Internet-supported sourcing of complex material” by Wolfgang Kersten, Kirsten Schröder and André Schulte-Bisping. This study reports on the findings of an empirical study in the German automotive industry, which explores the different views of suppliers and original equipment manufacturers. One outcome is that it is not IT-related issues, but non-technological problems, that are the main obstacles in the application of Internet-based sourcing methods.

Last but not least, Emilda Sindhu, Alex Lee and Shaik Mohammad Salim present a portal solution that provides users with collaborative engineering services. The paper “COVES: an e-business case study in the engineering domain” discusses a solution that supports collaborative business processes in the construction industry. It explains how this portal integrates the different parties and how an engineer works with this system. Thus, this research provides valuable insights into an industry-specific solution for e-business process management.

We hope that you will enjoy this special issue on the very exciting and dynamic area of e-business process management.

Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Michael Rosemann and Ed WatsonGuest Editors