Purpose
The authors observe that actionable guidelines are missing from many reference works on business process management (BPM). Also, success factors are mostly not contextualized in the different phases and concerns of a BPM initiative. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap.
Design/methodology/approach
The research design builds on a literature survey for building an integrated framework for BPM that is referred to as integrated BPM. It integrates lifecycle phases, capability areas and governance aspects. Then, the authors consolidate insights from expert interviews.
Findings
As a result, the authors provide a list of various activities that are associated with the different elements of BPM. Furthermore, the authors describe pitfalls for each of the elements that have been avoided in order to make the BPM initiative a success.
Research limitations/implications
The findings emphasize the potential to study BPM success and its factors on a more fine-granular activity level.
Practical implications
The list of activities and the list of pitfalls are directly applicable for practitioners.
Originality/value
The research on the integrated BPM framework consolidates insights from prior research and extends it with an expert perspective on pitfalls.
Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach adopted by many organizations for improving their business processes in order to serve their customers more efficiently and effectively. Literature on BPM offers a plethora of methods used as a guide when improving business processes. Some are promoted as methods for process reengineering, while others as methods for improvement, redesign, or innovation. The number of BPM methods is overwhelming, such that organizations are faced with the challenge to select one that best fits their needs. In this paper, we follow a systematic literature review approach to investigate the characteristics of existing BPM methods. We find that the ambition, nature and perspective of the methods are important to determine whether they can be used for radical or incremental process change. Our findings point to the lack of research done on methods for radical process change.
Abstract. Business Process Management (BPM) is used by organizations as a method to increase awareness and knowledge of business processes. Although many companies adopt BPM, there is still a notable insecurity of how to set it up in the most effective way. A considerate amount of research concerning partial aspects of BPM adoption has been done, such as the pitfalls of business process modeling. However, up until now hardly any empirical research has been conducted that aims at validating them. In this paper we address this research gap by conducting eleven in-depth interviews with BPM experts from various companies. We use the Grounded Theory approach to qualitatively analyze the data. Our contribution is twofold. First, we derive a conceptual framework showing the insights of BPM adoption by organizations. Second, we use the evidence from the interviews to discuss the pitfalls of business process modeling and show the countermeasures that are taken by companies.
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