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Organizations rely on their business processes to achieve their business objectives and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Hence, conformance to process specifications is essential to remain compliant. Various factors influence an organization’s ability to operate in conformance to its process specifications. This study investigates the influence of business process management (BPM)-supportive culture and individual process orientation on process conformance.

A construct was created for perceived process conformance and two constructs were selected from literature to represent BPM-supportive culture and individual process orientation. A survey was conducted with 178 employees of a global enterprise, hypotheses were formulated, and a statistical model was constructed and validated.

Results pinpoint the key role of the BPM-supportive culture in influencing both individual process orientation and conformance. Individual process orientation is also found to have a significant influence on process conformance. The findings provide additional evidence for the significance of human-related aspects of BPM in achieving BPM success.

The contributions of this paper help better understand how soft factors of BPM contribute to employees’ process conformance drawing on and relating concepts of BPM and organizational routines.

Current workflow management systems (WfMS's) are often too rigid and lead to “chain production” in the office. The paper proposes a number of “tuning measures” to reconfigure an implemented WfMS in such a way that it is more agreeable to the needs of its users.

The “tuning measures” are generated through a creative process that is founded on two theoretical pillars: the job characteristics model, from the domain of job design theory and work psychology, and the assignment and synchronization policies, from the area of workflow management.

By combining theories from both job design theory and workflow management we have developed a number of measures to “tune” WfMS's in a human oriented way. An expert panel has selected the six most promising of these measures. These six measures have been used in the evaluation of three contemporary WfMS's. From this evaluation we concluded that current workflow technology is only partly able to support our measures.

Because of the limited system evaluation, it would be valuable to do a more thorough evaluation of the three systems, have a closer study of the other generated ideas, and to broaden the scope of systems we considered. Additionally, it seems worthwhile to perform an actual validation in practice, i.e. an experiment with real workflow users in a realistic setting.

New in this paper is the focus on people working with WfMS's. The paper tries to go beyond the traditional borders of finding a good support for a business process. It highlights the importance of the human factor in the success of the implementation of a workflow system in a company and gives directions for concrete improvement in order to make working with a WfMS more enjoyable to its users. The proposals stated in the paper are of value to workflow designers, managers and workflow researchers.