Democratizing Business Process Management: Empowering Process Participants to Contribute to the Enactment of Business Processes

Abstract

Employee empowerment, meaning among other granting employees discretion to change work processes, has been identified as mean to improve the performance of an organization. Although the involvement of business process participants has been identified as one of the key success factors for BPM projects, end users are typically not participating in the modeling process nor are they involved in the implementation of the modelled processes based on supporting IT systems. Therefore the direct influence of employees on their work processes supported by IT systems is limited. To overcome this limitation this paper presents an agile business process management approach based on a strong involvement of process participants. To foster the involvement we propose a reduced model size and complexity, the iterative enrichment of the process model with exceptional paths and the possibility to migrate process instances to newer process model versions. We show which parts of this proposal are already used today, which additional requirements exist, which available research helps to propose solutions for the open issues and which hypothesis lying beyond our proposal we're planning to test.

Uncovering the Combined Impact of Process Characteristics and Reward Types on Employees’ Job Satisfaction: A European Quantitative Study

“…While studies have been done on different people aspects of BPM (Benraad et al, 2022;Danilova, 2018;Harmon, 2007;Hermkens et al, 2022;Kratzer et al, 2019;M€ uller et al, 2016;Skrinjar & Trkman, 2013), most of them deal with management, organizational, and cultural perspectives. Few studies have been conducted to explore employee-related topics, such as the resistance to change among employees during BPM implementation, empowerment aspects of BPM, and employees' perception of BPM (Mertens et al, 2011;Meyer & Schiffner, 2014;Pereira et al, 2019). Prior studies have proven that BPM has both a direct and indirect positive effect on organizational performance (Hernaus, 2012;Klun & Trkman, 2018;Skrinjar et al, 2007).…”

Agile business process management

“…Accordingly, Bruno et al (2011) address the challenges and the role of social software in enabling agile BPM through seven key approaches, including fostering the motivation to participate, sharing knowledge and fostering collaboration. Meyer and Schiffner (2014) focus on increasing employees’ involvement and by presenting an agile BPM approach, they enrich process models iteratively and reduces models’ size and complexity. Additionally, another challenge that organisations are dealing with is efficient project and change requirement gathering.…”