Business Process Management is a boundaryspanning discipline that aligns operational capabilities and technology to design and manage business processes. The Digital Transformation has enabled human actors, information systems, and smart products to interact with each other via multiple digital channels. The emergence of this hyper-connected world greatly leverages the prospects of business processes -but also boosts their complexity to a new level. We need to discuss how the BPM discipline can find new ways for identifying, analyzing, designing, implementing, executing, and monitoring business processes. In this research note, selected transformative trends are explored and their impact on current theories and IT artifacts in the BPM discipline is discussed to stimulate transformative thinking and prospective research in this field.

Digitalization is a hypernym that denotes the ground-shifting impact IT artifacts have on organizations. The term implicitly refers to core topics in Information Systems research, which now enfolds at increasing magnitude, speed, and reach. However, digitalization often lacks explicit references to domestic theories, concepts, and constructs in the Information Systems literature. Fundamental mechanisms that constitute digitalization as an interplay of organizations and information systems remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, based on extending extant theory on organizational routines, we propose four patterns that conceptualize digitalization mechanisms as an interplay of organizational routines and IT artifacts. Second, we demonstrate how more complex transformation trajectories of routines unfold, by concatenating our patterns to form transformation stories. On either level of abstraction, further research can build on the proposed patterns to theorize on how the interplay of IT artifacts and organizational routines constitutes the digitalization of work systems.

Workarounds are goal‐driven deviations from the standard operating procedures performed to overcome obstacles constraining day‐to‐day work. Despite starting as temporary fixes, they can become established across an organisation and trigger the innovation of processes and IT artefacts that can resolve misfits permanently. Although prior research has elicited antecedents and types of workarounds, it is not known how workarounds diffuse in an organisation and, thereby, innovating co‐workers' activities, IT artefacts, and organisational structures. The results of our multiple two‐year case study provide unique empirical insights into the diffusion of workarounds and how they can act as generative mechanisms for bottom‐up process innovation.

The trend for 'servitization' reflects manufacturers' increasing efforts to offer services along with their physical goods. Organizations establish smart service systems with digitally networked products-e.g., cars, industrial machinery, or home appliances-as boundary objects that connect the organization with customers, offering them digital channels for communication and interaction. While anecdotal evidence indicates that many manufacturers fail to establish profitable services, few studies have traced the underlying causes for failure. We perform a revelatory case study at a global white-goods manufacturer to identify pitfalls and derive guidelines for establishing smart service systems. Based on interpreting qualitative data from interviews and additional organizational resources, we analyze how and why the manufacturer's efforts to establish pay-per-use services based on a smart laundry machine failed. While we provide insights that can guide management in establishing smart service systems, our findings also motivate updating concepts and methods currently discussed in service science.

While the Information Systems (IS) discipline has researched digital platforms extensively, the body of knowledge appertaining to platforms still appears fragmented and lacking conceptual consistency. Based on automated text mining and unsupervised machine learning, we collect, analyze, and interpret the IS discipline’s comprehensive research on platforms—comprising 11,049 papers spanning 44 years of research activity. From a cluster analysis concerning platform concepts’ semantically most similar words, we identify six research streams on platforms, each with their own platform terms. Based on interpreting the identified concepts vis-à-vis the extant research and considering a temporal perspective on the concepts’ application, we present a lexicon of platform concepts, to guide further research on platforms in the IS discipline. Researchers and managers can build on our results to position their work appropriately, applying a specific theoretical perspective on platforms in isolation or combining multiple perspectives to study platform phenomena at a more abstract level.

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