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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between capital structure and business process management (BPM) within ambidextrous firms. In particular, referring to the listed companies in the Mercato Telematico Azionario (MTA) and Mercato degli Investment Vehicles (MIV) markets with large- and mid-sized capitalization, divided into ambidextrous and non-ambidextrous companies, the authors examined the capital structure to fill a gap in the current literature.

This study uses a mixed-method sequential exploratory design. In particular, a qualitative study was conducted to identify some Italian-listed companies, called ambidextrous firms, which have implemented incremental (exploitative) and radical (explorative) innovations in an ambidexterity perspective of process management. A quantitative study was designed to provide insights into the different degrees of leverage of the listed companies selected by the qualitative analysis.

The research is based on an empirical analysis undertaken with 69 companies listed on Italian markets (starting from the MTA and MIV Italy 100 – large- and mid-sized capitalization). In particular, the authors highlight 11 companies that, based on the literature, can be defined as ambidextrous organizations. These firms, in each year analyzed (2014, 2015, and 2016), have more leverage than non-ambidextrous ones. Considering that firms today need to constantly revisit their portfolio of debt and equity, ambidextrous organizations could evaluate the largest debt available in order to implement new BPM tools.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first exploratory study based on capital structure and the simultaneous exploration and exploitation of knowledge (ambidexterity) that also is informed by a BPM perspective. The paper presents evidence from Italian-listed companies that are referred to as ambidextrous and have different degrees of leverage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how big data can shape ambidextrous business process management (BPM) in terms of exploitation and exploration.

A qualitative methodology involving case studies has been chosen to explore the impact of big data deployment on exploitative and explorative business processes.

The results of case studies offer some opportunities and challenges for service firms related to both the exploitative and the explorative aspects of BPM driven by big data.

The deployment of big data in business processes has attracted a large amount of interest recently. However, these studies are mostly conceptual, so empirical research about this complex relationship is quite rare, especially research with specific arguments regarding exploitative and explorative activities. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering empirical evidence for big data-driven business processes.

The aim of this paper is to identify the main challenges and limitations of current business process management (BPM) development directions noticed by researchers, as well as to define the areas of the main BPM paradigm shifts necessary for the BPM of tomorrow to meet the challenges posed by Industry 4.0 and the emerging Industry 5.0. This is extremely important from the perspective of eliminating the existing broadening gap between the considerations of academic researchers and the needs of business itself.

A systematic literature review was conducted on the basis of the resources of two digital databases: Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS. Based on the PRISMA protocol, the authors selected 29 papers published in the last decade that diagnosed the challenges and limitations of modern BPM and contained recommendations for its future development. The content of the articles was analyzed within four BPM core areas.

The authors of the selected articles most commonly point to the areas of organization (21 articles) and methods and information technology (IT) (22 articles) in the context of the challenges and limitations of current BPM and the directions of recommended future BPM development. This points to the prevalence among researchers of the perspective of Industry 4.0 – or focus on technological solutions and raising process efficiency, with the full exclusion or only the partial signalization of the influence of implementing new technologies on the stakeholders and in particular – employees, their roles and competencies – the key aspects of Industry 5.0.

The proposal of BPM future development directions requires the extension of the BPM paradigm, taking into account its holistic nature, especially unpredictable, knowledge-intensive business processes requiring dynamic management, the need to integrate BPM with knowledge management (KM) and the requirements of Industry 5.0 in terms of organizational culture. The limitation is that the study is based on only two databases: WoS and SCOPUS and that the search has been narrowed down to publications in English only.

The proposal of BPM future development directions also requires the extension of the BPM paradigm, taking into account the specific challenges and limitations that managers encounter on a daily basis. The presented summaries of the challenges and limitations resulting from the literature review are accompanied by recommendations that are primarily dedicated to practitioners.

The article indicates the area people and culture as one of the four core areas of BPM. It emphasizes the necessity to account to a greater degree for the influence of people, their knowledge, experience and engagement, as well as formal and informal communication, without which it is impossible to use the creativity, innovativeness and dynamism of the individual and the communities to create value in the course of business process execution.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first systematic review of the literature on the limitations of modern BPM and its future in the context of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0.

This study highlights the significance of knowledge management in the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and organizational performance within the context of Indonesian SMEs.

The study adopts a quantitative research approach, employing a survey questionnaire to collect data from a sample of SMEs operating in Indonesia. Structural Equation Modeling using Partial Least Square is used to investigate the relationship between variables.

The findings of this study show that in the context of small and medium enterprises, the variables of environmental and technological uncertainty are not driving factors in organizational ambidexterity. In contrast, market uncertainty has a significant effect on organizational ambidexterity. Moreover, it is also found that knowledge management does not support the variables of environmental, market, and technological uncertainty on organizational ambidexterity in small and medium enterprises. The results show that knowledge management plays a significant role in organizational ambidexterity. It also shows that knowledge management could support a significant way between organizational ambidexterity and organizational performance.

The findings of this study give insights for SMEs to attain a sustainable competitive edge in a dynamic business landscape by implementing efficient knowledge management techniques that bolster their ambidextrous capacities.

Although improving customer experience (CX) has always been one of the top priorities of business process management (BPM), the evidence on the actual contribution made by traditional BPM to improving CX and customer experience management (CXM) is mixed. Recently, new and enhanced capability areas have been added to the traditional BPM frameworks, yet it is unclear which of them contribute to CXM. Moreover, it is not known which of them are necessary and which are sufficient conditions. The aim of this research is to shed light on the research gap concerning which BPM capabilities, especially new and enhanced ones, are relevant to CXM.

Quantitative data from 268 medium and large companies in 3 EU countries were analysed using hierarchical linear regression analysis and necessary condition analysis.

The results show that traditional BPM capabilities are a necessary condition for CXM, but with minor significance. Most highly significant necessary conditions and also most highly or medium significant sufficient conditions belong to the People or Culture area. Agile Process Improvement is the only new or enhanced BPM capability area in the Methods/IT area that is a necessary and also a sufficient condition for CXM maturity. Advanced Process Digitalisation was identified as neither a significant necessary nor a sufficient condition for CXM.

This research contributes to better understanding of the role played by BPM for CXM, where previous research provides mixed results.

More than two decades after the early works about Business Process Management (BPM) were published by the discipline's thought-leaders of that time, the authors were interested in getting an assessment of what BPM has been able to achieve so far, what promises have been fulfilled, and where BPM should be heading in the future. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the above issues.

The authors conducted an interview with Professor Michael Rosemann, one of today's authorities in the BPM field, who shared with us his thoughts on ambidextrous BPM.

According to Michael Rosemann, the BPM community has, since its conception, put much effort in mastering exploitative BPM that focusses on analyzing and automating single processes as well as on improving such processes step-by-step. However, explorative BPM, which emphasizes radical process change, process innovation and the enabling of new business models, still is in its infancy. Professor Rosemann therefore calls for ambidextrous BPM integrating exploitative and explorative capabilities, more interdisciplinary as well as a closer collaboration between academia and practice.

In this interview, Michael Rosemann points to directions of future development for the BPM community, particularly with respect to explorative BPM. Michael Rosemann also highlights the skillset explorative BPM researchers and professionals should have.

Although Business Process Management (BPM) is a critical issue and small- and medium-sized family firms (SMFFs) frequently adopt process organization, very little literature focuses on the processes by which family firms remain distinctive (Chrisman et al., 2016) or on their approach to BPM. The current research aims to fill this gap by analyzing dynamic companies’ attitudes to process-driven ability that concern exploitative as well as explorative processes. The purpose of this paper is to identify which kinds of dimensions may build an ambidextrous state in BPM in SMFFs, also favored by entrepreneurial IT capabilities and influenced by a stable but changeable context.

The authors referred to vom Brocke et al.’s (2014) study as it allows a focus on BPM research in the context of SMFFs. Then, the authors adapted the framework to the context of SMFFs. In addition, an empirical analysis has been made for applying the framework’s principles on effective BPM requirements to SMFFs. In the research, the authors applied grounded theory, according to which observation and theorization are linked by circularity, as they represent moments being managed simultaneously. The theorization emerged in different moments of the empirical surveys, influencing the next data gathering and the data gathering was the object of a de-structured matching and analysis process.

Specific cultural and cognitive aspects, values and abilities affect the company behavior of SMFFs in terms of BPM, and this is influenced by the connection between the family and the business. Therefore, it confirms that the family is a missing variable in organizational research (Dyer, 2006) also in BPM. A good BPM permits the definition of business abilities of running the current processes, along with of acclimatizing the company to a changeable context. In regard to the exploitative and explorative strengths typical of organizational ambidexterity, the research favors, respectively, transactional excellence with a focus on net cost reduction and transformational excellence based on net revenue generation. This approach requires consideration of the difference between external and internal contingencies as well as of the different processes to manage. However, despite IT-based BPM tools and the new era of IT-based process thinking, technology appropriation is only one of our dimensions, and each dimension plays a role in good BPM behavior; only a combination of dimensions favors effective and flexible BPM.

The research contributes to the literature on BPM through theoretical implications, in particular two main implications. First, the research emphasizes the impact of familiness on good BPM practice. Family appears to be a missing variable in organizational research on BPM, even though familiness affects process specificity and mechanisms. Second, the research is based on certain category dimensions that characterize management models common in the literature, allowing the application of BPM in FFs by taking advantage of their confidence and adaptability. Limitations are related to different points of view on the model’s scope and design, the recipient and the research method.

The research has two main practical implications, representing managerial potential, that improve the significance and originality of the research in internal and external contexts. In the internal context, this permits a new BPM mind-set.

The research is original for the following two reasons. First, when FF complexity grows and/or new organizational issues emerge, FFs are faced with two challenges: an increased number of complex processes to handle, along with a lack of IT-based BPM for organizational ambidexterity. In such a context, this research can suggest a solution. Second, the research is based on dimensions that have been widely characterized in general management models. For this reason, FFs may already be familiar with these dimensions. In addition, the model strongly valorizes the familiness impact on BPM development and takes into consideration the context awareness of the company.

In several studies, it has been found that organizational performance is affected by ambidextrous IT capabilities. Nevertheless, business processes are essential to the value generation conversion of IT investment into performance. In the literature, this focus on the impact of IT capabilities at the business process level is still under investigated. So, the purpose of this paper is to test the effects of explorative and exploitative business process IT capabilities on business process performances (BPP) and the positive moderator role of business process management (BPM) capabilities.

This analysis has been done through a quantitative study in the Italian hotel industry. An OLS regression analysis has been carried out on a sample of 404 firms.

The study identifies distinct effects related to exploration and exploitation and finds a moderating effect of BPM capabilities, explaining their positive impact on BPP.

The main purpose of the paper is to contribute to the area of business process management by demonstrating the importance of both explorative and exploitative IT capabilities for a business process as well as the managerial capabilities at the process level. Furthermore, this focus at the process level allows us to add original insights into research on ambidexterity by expanding existing works.

This study investigated the interplay between business process management (BPM) and digitalization in organizations and developed principles for designing their interaction.

This study was explorative and used a questionnaire-based survey that involved experts in BPM and digitalization who were actively engaged in these two domains in their organizations to come up with the design principles. The survey and the design principles were based on Rosemann and vom Brocke's (2010) six core elements of BPM.

Digitalization was seen as influencing how BPM is practiced in organizations by strengthening organizations’ focus on BPM, and conversely, BPM was perceived as beneficial for digitalization and digitalization outcomes. In addition, based on Rosemann and vom Brocke’s six core elements of BPM, we proposed six principles for designing the interplay of BPM and digitalization in organizations.

Our empirical investigation was situated in a Norwegian context and included 104 respondents. While we have no reason to believe that our findings should not be valid and useful in other regions, this is a limitation in generalizing our findings, and a natural follow-up would be to investigate our research questions in other geographical areas. We are also aware of the potential response bias in our sample. Moreover, to outline the principles for designing the interactions of BPM and digitalization, we applied the six core elements of BPM by Rosemann and vom Brocke (2010) as our theoretical lens. We acknowledge that there are more issues related to the interplay of BPM and digitalization than we have dealt with in this study.

This study has several implications for organizations. First, managers may use our proposed design principles to decide how to integrate BPM and digitalization. Second, although this study showed that each discipline nurtures its own culture, building an organizational culture that combines values from each discipline can enable a process-oriented organization to innovate its operations and services with digital technology. Third, managers should align the responsibilities and tasks of process owners with the demands for the digitalization of business processes. Fourth, managers, when integrating BPM and digitalization, should take care not to impede the generative attributes of each discipline.

Processes and digital technologies play important roles in society at all levels. BPM seeks to understand how processes unfold and explores how new practices may better serve individuals, organizations and society (vom Brocke et al., 2021), while digitalization is concerned with how various kinds of modern digital technologies may trigger organizational and social changes (Markus and Rowe, 2023; Suri and Jack, 2016).

This study is one of the first studies to investigate the interplay between BPM and digitalization – how digitalization affects BPM practices in organizations and how BPM influences digitalization outcomes. In addition, this study offers novel principles for designing the interaction between BPM and digitalization.