Search results

Business Process Management (BPM) is key for successful organisational management. However, BPM techniques are often criticized for their inability to deal with continuous and significant change and uncertainty. Following recent calls to make BPM more agile and flexible towards change, this study presents the results of a systematic literature review (SLR) of agile concepts in BPM. Analysing and synthesising previous works and drawing on agility research in the field of IS, this paper introduces a framework for agile BPM. Integrating different components that define agility in the context of BPM, this framework offers a number of important implications. On the theoretical side, the authors argue that the concept of agile BPM departs in some important ways from traditional BPM research. This, in turn, points to various opportunities for future research. On the practical side, the authors suggest that emerging technologies, such as process mining, embody important features that help organisations to be more responsive to change. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To assess the state of the art of agility in the BPM research, the authors conducted an SLR. More specifically, the authors drew on the approach of vom Brocke et al. (2009, 2015), which consists of five steps: defining the scope of the review; conceptualising the topic; searching for literature; analysing and synthesising literature; and developing a research agenda.

This study presents the results of a systematic review of agile concepts in BPM. This study then proposes a resulting research framework that can be used to strengthen the concept of agile BPM and provides an agenda for research in this rapidly growing and increasingly necessary area of BPM.

In this paper, the authors establish a shared understanding of agile BPM and develop an agile BPM framework that represents the current state as well as implications for research and practice in agile BPM.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper comprehension of the nature of enterprise content management systems (ECMS) success by exploring factors that are important in the context of ECMS success, i.e. how these factors can be measured, and how they are interrelated.

The paper develops a success model specific to the enterprise content management (ECM) domain that builds on the DeLone and McLean information systems (IS) success model. The model is empirically tested by means of structural equation modeling applying the partial least squares approach and using data collected in an online survey.

The results show that ECMS positively affects organizational content management in terms of efficiency, collaboration and compliance. It also provides evidence that the use of the ECMS alone does not provide impact to the organization, but needs to be moderated either by the impact of the ECMS on the user or the users’ satisfaction of the ECMS.

For practitioners, the model identifies the factors that influence the success of ECMS. Practitioners can monitor these factors as performance indicators to improve users’ satisfaction with the ECMS and, thus, the success of their ECMS. Furthermore, the results can support practitioners in understanding the multiple facets of ECMS success to improve how they plan and prepare for ECM investments.

The study’s results contribute to theory by extending and empirically testing the D&M IS success model in a new domain and system context. The presented research is the first to empirically validate a comprehensive ECMS success model that extends knowledge related to ECM by examining the relationship between the quality dimensions and the success measures.

Many researchers and practitioners suggest a contingent instead of a “one size fits all” approach in business process management (BPM). The purpose of this paper is to offer a contingency theory of BPM, which proposes contingency factors relevant to the successful management of business processes and that explains how and why these contingencies impact the relationships between process management and performance.

The authors develop the theory by drawing on organizational information processing theory (OIPT) and applying an information processing (IP) perspective to the process level.

The premise of the model is that the process management mechanisms such as documentation, standardization or monitoring must compensate for the uncertainty and equivocality of the nature of the process that has to be managed. In turn, managing through successful adaptation is a prerequisite for process performance.

The theory provides a set of testable propositions that specify the relationship between process management mechanisms and process performance. The authors also discuss implications of the new theory for further theorizing and outline empirical research strategies that can be followed to enact, evaluate and extend the theory.

The theory developed in this paper allows an alternative way to describe organizational processes and supports the derivation of context-sensitive management approaches for process documentation, standardization, monitoring, execution and coordination.

The theoretical model is novel in that it provides a contextualized view on BPM that acknowledges different types of processes and suggests different mechanisms for managing these. The authors hope the paper serves as inspiration both for further theory development as well as to empirical studies that test, refute, support or otherwise augment the arguments.

Process redesign refers to the intentional change of business processes. While process redesign methods provide structure to redesign projects, they provide limited support during the actual creation of to-be processes. More specifically, existing approaches hardly develop an ontological perspective on what can be changed from a process design point of view, and they provide limited procedural guidance on how to derive possible process design alternatives. This paper aims to provide structured guidance during the to-be process creation.

Using design space exploration as a theoretical lens, the authors develop a conceptual model of the design space for business processes, which facilitates the systematic exploration of design alternatives along different dimensions. The authors utilized an established method for taxonomy development for constructing the conceptual model. First, the authors derived design dimensions for business processes and underlying characteristics through a literature review. Second, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with professional process experts. Third, the authors evaluated their artifact through three real-world applications.

The authors identified 19 business process design dimensions that are grouped into different layers and specified by underlying characteristics. Guiding questions and illustrative real-world examples help to deploy these design dimensions in practice. Taken together, the design dimensions form the “Business Process Design Space” (BPD-Space).

Practitioners can use the BPD-Space to explore, question and rethink business processes in various respects.

The BPD-Space complements existing approaches by explicating process design dimensions. It abstracts from specific process flows and representations of processes and supports an unconstrained exploration of various alternative process designs.

This paper presents a structured literature review of studies on IT-enabled organizational transformation to determine the state of the art and to identify areas for future research.

We collect 201 academic publications on IT-enabled organizational transformation and analyze them from three perspectives: a publication perspective, a research perspective and a conceptual perspective.

From a publication perspective, we identify and synthesize the seminal works to provide a brief history of research on IT-enabled organizational transformation. From a research perspective, we show that studies in this area have seldom been grounded in theory and have predominantly used qualitative approaches, while only a few studies have drawn from quantitative data. From a conceptual perspective, we show that most research has studied higher levels of transformation, especially process redesign.

This review presents the landscape of the literature on IT-enabled organizational transformation, which provides a foundation for future research.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important topic in information management, but researchers have long had difficulty developing a consistent definition. The purpose of this paper is to analyze ECM case reports from practice to identify ECM’s objectives, processes and technologies and to provide a foundation on which ECM can be conceptualized and defined.

This paper assembles more than 1,200 case reports on industrial ECM implementations in order to characterize the ECM concept from a practitioner’s viewpoint. The paper provides a descriptive overview and historical examination of ECM implementations over time and across countries and industries, grounded in a structured content analysis.

Even though the case reports share some commonalities, their ECM projects differ considerably in terms of their objectives, processes and technologies, and vary widely across countries and industries. In addition, ECM implementations are much broader today than they once were, so the scope and boundaries of the ECM concept are increasingly blurred in practice.

While several researchers have characterized the ECM concept based on literature reviews, only a few have approached the definition problem from a practical viewpoint. This paper provides a foundation from which to evaluate how well researchers’ conceptualizations of ECM match current business practice.

This study explores how process managers perceive the adoption, use and management of process mining in practice. While research in process mining predominantly focuses on the technical aspects, our work highlights organizational and managerial implications.

We report on a focus group study conducted with process managers from various industries in Central Europe. This setting allowed us to gain diverse and in-depth insights about the needs and expectations of practitioners in relation to the adoption, use and management of process mining.

We find that process managers face four central challenges. These challenges are largely related to four stages; (1) planning and business case calculation, (2) process selection, (3) implementation, and (4) process mining use.

We point to research opportunities in relation to the adoption, use and management of process mining. We suggest that future research should apply interdisciplinary study designs to better understand the managerial and organizational implications of process mining.

The reported challenges have various practical implications at the organizational and managerial level. We explore how existing BPM frameworks can be extended to meet these challenges.

This study is among the first attempts to explore process mining from the perspective of process managers. It clarifies important challenges and points to avenues for future research.

While researchers and practitioners agree on the importance to adapt business process management (BPM) practices to the nature of processes, the authors observe a lack of research on how to most meaningfully distinguish processes in order to apply context-specific BPM practices that increase process efficiency and effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the nature of processes as one contextual factor for BPM.

Based on a literature review, the authors systematically derive process dimensions that describe the nature of processes and apply an information-processing perspective to the process level as a theoretical lens through which to analyze and structure these process dimensions.

The authors identified 36 dimensions used to describe process differences that can be consolidated into five generic dimensions based on an information-processing perspective: interdependence of process participants, differentiation of process participants, process analyzability, variability, and importance.

The paper derives process dimensions from the literature and links them to extant theories as a foundation for context-sensitive BPM. The findings serve as a basis for further conceptualizing BPM and for explaining seemingly contradicting findings about whether management practices increase or decrease organizational performance.

While the paper focuses on understanding and explaining process differences, the authors also demonstrate how these dimensions can be used to make strategic management decisions in order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of processes.

The authors systematically conceptualize process differences as a foundation for contingent process management. In addition, the authors demonstrate that organizational processes provide a new field of application for information-processing theory.

Business process management (BPM) requires a holistic perspective that includes managing the culture of an organization to achieve objectives of efficient and effective business processes. Still, the specifics of a BPM‐supportive organizational culture have not been examined so far. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify the characteristics of a cultural setting supportive of BPM objectives.

The paper examines the constituent values of a BPM‐supportive cultural setting through a global Delphi study with BPM experts from academia and practice and explore these values in a cultural value framework.

The paper empirically identifies and defines four key cultural values supporting BPM, viz., customer orientation, excellence, responsibility, and teamwork. The paper discusses the relationships between these values and identifies a particular challenge in managing these seemingly competing values.

The identification and definition of these values represents a first step towards the operationalization (and empirical analysis) of what has been identified as the concept of BPM culture, i.e. a culture supportive of achieving BPM objectives.

Identifying these cultural values provides the basis for developing an instrument that can measure how far an existing cultural context is supportive of BPM. This, in turn, is fundamental for identifying measures towards achieving a BPM culture as a necessary, yet not sufficient means to obtain BPM success.

The paper examines which cultural values create an environment receptive for BPM and, thus, specifies the important theoretical construct BPM culture. In addition, the paper raises awareness for realizing these values in a BPM context.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate business process management (BPM) and accounting on a conceptual level in order to account for the economic implications of process-state changes in process design-time and process run-time.

The paper adopts a design science research paradigm. The research, grounded in an “events” approach to accounting theory, builds on the REA accounting model that has been adapted for the design of a process accounting model (PAM).

The paper presents a PAM that can be used to structure event records in process-aware information systems (PAIS) to enable process-oriented accounting. The PAM is specified as a light weight data structure that is intended for the integration of PAIS and accounting information systems.

As this paper is technical in nature, more research is needed to evaluate more thoroughly its approach in naturalistic settings.

The PAM can support traditional accounting approaches, and because of the adopted events approach, it readily supports use cases related to real-time analytics in BPM and accounting.

The PAM presents a novel approach to integrating BPM and accounting. The novelty of this approach lies in its use of event records to document flows of economic resources.