Business Process Management and Digital Innovations: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Emerging technologies have capabilities to reshape business process management (BPM) from its traditional version to a more explorative variant. However, to exploit the full benefits of new IT, it is essential to reveal BPM’s research potential and to detect recent trends in practice. Therefore, this work presents a systematic literature review (SLR) with 231 recent academic articles (from 2014 until May 2019) that integrate BPM with digital innovations (DI). We position those articles against seven future BPM-DI trends that were inductively derived from an expert panel. By complementing the expected trends in practice with a state-of-the-art literature review, we are able to derive covered and uncovered themes in order to help bridge a rigor-relevance gap. The major technological impacts within the BPM field seem to focus on value creation, customer engagement and managing human-centric and knowledge-intensive business processes. Finally, our findings are categorized into specific calls for research and for action to let scholars and organizations better prepare for future digital needs.

Forecast of Changes in Business Administration Driven by Digitalization

“…Clearly structured processes with defined internal and external interfaces are a prerequisite for efficient control and administration (Ahmad & Van Looy, 2020). A well-developed IT system landscape acts as a key efficiency driver and increases the ability of the entire organization to react quickly to internal and external changes.…”

“…In this Comp2 hypothesis, the nominal scaled variables of the industry were contrasted with the interval scaled variable degree of digitization, the latter being the dependent variable and the former the independent variable. For this reason, the single factor analysis of variance or single factor ANOVA was used (Ahmad & Van Looy, 2020). This method checks whether the mean values of the considered groups, which are defined by a categorical independent variable, differ.…”

“…In addition to the WEF 2020, other authors (Ahmad & Van Looy, 2020) and (Androniceanu, Georgescu, Tvaronavičienė, & Androniceanu, 2020) have dealt with the topic of digitalization and its changes in the corporate and academic world. This paper shows the changes induced by Industry 4.0 on business studies and their effects on the business world.…”

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“…With the new drifts in information technology such as IOT, blockchains, process mining, Artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, organizations are struggling to incorporate these new technologies into their business processes [55]. Traditional version of BPM also has been reshaped creating new opportunities for improving business processes [22]. For example, internet-based and intelligent devices help automate several manual BPM tasks and help during process analysis by tracking and monitoring in a fast and efficient manner [3].…”

“…Moreover, bridging the cultural gap in communication between BPM vendors and clients from different cultures is crucial for successful BPM adaptation in organizations [21]. The contextual factors of an organization's external environment (e.g., stakeholders, customers and competitors) also impacts the BPM initiatives [22]. These contextual factors can be summarized into four groups, namely goal-related, process-related, organization-related and environment-related factors [23].…”