A Configuration Taxonomy of Business Process Orientation

Abstract

Organizations strive to develop a variety of capabilities to improve and measure business processes. Researchers have used various maturity models to investigate the development of a business process orientation (BPO), and most have argued that such development comes in stages. Current literature underestimates the interrelationships between BPO capabilities and fails to consider multidimensional or non-linear paths to maturity. To refine the features of maturity models, we rely on configuration theory to uncover different archetypes for BPO development and quantitatively evaluate them by examining performance differences among archetypes based on a large-scale international dataset. The resulting empirical taxonomy with seven BPO archetypes establishes important performance differences between organizations at a similar maturity level. Besides strengthening the theoretical foundations of BPO and making maturity assessments more multifaceted, our results help organizations focus their managerial efforts by enabling comparison with peers in the same archetype and showing various paths for BPO improvement.

The Relation Among Business Process Orientation Practices in Influencing Organizational Performance

“…Based on the conceptual model, strategic view (SV) practices have several relationships with other practices, such as suppliers (SU) [25] [26] , customers (CU) [26] , process definition (PD) [5] , structure (ST), and organizational performance (PFM). Some relationships have a direct influence, such as the practice of supplier (SU), customer (CU), process definition (PD), and structure (ST), while the effect on organization performance (PFM) is not direct.…”

“…SV links to Market/Customer Orientation (CU) as an organization's strategic orientation is influential in creating dynamic capabilities to shape a market [26] . Two hypotheses are generated: H1 SV practice affects SU H2 SV practice affects CU In addition, SV also drives process definition practices [5,11] and performance measurement [11,27,28] . These three practices are related because they are a business process lifecycle [11,29] .…”

“…According to Looy et al [4] , organizations need tools to help them assess and improve the way they manage their business processes. Many organizations use the Maturity Model (MM) to benchmark and measure their improvement progress [5] . The topic of BPO maturity has received much attention in the literature.…”

Assessing business process orientation using multi-criteria decision-making

“…BPM has been consolidated as the methodology most used to achieve BPO (Van Looy et al, 2022;Skrinjar and Trkman, 2013). Nonetheless, implementing BPM successfully remains a quite difficult task (Van Looy et al, 2022;Bai and Sarkis, 2013;Imanipour et al, 2012).…”

“…In principle, they should aid organizations to reach best practices and capabilities. Despite great advances, some issues concerning the effectiveness of their functionality still need attention (Van Looy et al, 2022), thus indicating that more research studies are needed (Van Looy et al, 2022;Tarhan and Reijers, 2016).…”