Diego Toralles Avila, Encarna Sosa Sanchez, Marcelo Fantinato, Gregor Polančič and Lucineia Heloisa Thom
Due to a lack of event data, organizations using Business Process Management may struggle to update their process models whenever business process changes occur. As such…
Abstract
Purpose
Due to a lack of event data, organizations using Business Process Management may struggle to update their process models whenever business process changes occur. As such, alternative data sources are needed to detect and monitor business process changes.
Design/methodology/approach
We conducted interviews with domain experts to analyze real business processes and classify any identified changes using Reijers and Mansar's framework on business process redesign heuristics. Based on the results, we proposed a taxonomy of entity groups as well as a method for identifying entities in process models based on the taxonomy. With this method, we define how to create a mapping between entities and process models, forming a framework to identify outdated process models through monitoring the entities.
Findings
The analyses of 25 business processes let us define three entity groups that form our taxonomy. We confirmed the feasibility of our entity identification method by classifying process elements of 85 pre-existing process models according to the taxonomy. Regarding the mapping that forms the basis of our framework, we found it necessary to define requirement recommendations to ensure its consistency and rigor.
Originality/value
This study offers a novel approach to handling the challenges of business process change. By emphasizing the identification and use of entities in the analysis of business process changes, it provides a holistic approach to monitoring the work systems of an organization.
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S. Limam Mansar and H.A. Reijers
This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs.
Design/methodology/approach
An online survey was carried out in the years 2003‐2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands.
Findings
The survey indicates that this “top ten” of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified.
Research limitations/implications
The authors' estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research.
Practical implications
The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs.
Originality/value
This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge.
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The purpose of this paper is to determine the state-of-the-art in research on process owners, a key role within business process management and process governance, and thus to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine the state-of-the-art in research on process owners, a key role within business process management and process governance, and thus to increase our understanding of the role of process owners.
Design/methodology/approach
The author conducts a systematic literature review of research shedding light on the role of process owners. The review includes 100 academic papers and 10 books on BPM.
Findings
Findings from the review demonstrate the significance of appointing process owners and showcase process owners’ role and responsibilities, as well as obstacles to and enablers of effective process ownership.
Originality/value
Based on the findings from the review, the author proposes a comprehensive framework on process ownership. The review provides a knowledge base for future research to build upon and can serve as a guide for practitioners. The review also identifies several research gaps and opportunities for future research.
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Kamal K. Mukherjee, Laura Reka, Rudina Mullahi, Keldi Jani and Jonida Taraj
Despite widespread adoption of business process reengineering (BPR) for better delivery efficiency of public services, a structured approach continues to elude the most…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite widespread adoption of business process reengineering (BPR) for better delivery efficiency of public services, a structured approach continues to elude the most value-adding phase of BPR: business process redesign. From another viewpoint, the rising currency of Whole-of-Government (WoG) and “shared services” initiatives signal an unmissable trend toward resource reuse across public service agencies (PSAs) through business process standardization (BPS). This research invokes BPS into process redesign to produce a process redesign framework (PRF) and deploys the same to build a standard process model (SPM) for services of the government of Albania (GoA).
Design/methodology/approach
The methodology follows the design science research (DSR) paradigm, wherein best practices extracted from literature are synthesized with stakeholder inputs to design the PRF and SPM, both of which are then evaluated with case study research.
Findings
Adoption of PRF/SPM on a WoG basis will not only reduce service lead time but also enable a variety of public services to share the same process, thereby further saving costs for GoA. The research outputs will accelerate reengineering and subsequent digitalization of public service operations.
Research limitations/implications
Implementing SPM will maximize resource reuse and help offer uniform and integrated public services to GoA's customers. It will also enable demand-driven staff mobilization across GoA agencies. The proposed PRF/SPM have limitations in that they consider only flow aspects of service processes with aspects of conversion being ignored.
Originality/value
This research fulfills the need for a systematic approach to process redesign and prepares GoA for a WoG treatment to its BPR efforts.
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Steven Gross, Katharina Stelzl, Thomas Grisold, Jan Mendling, Maximilian Röglinger and Jan vom Brocke
Process redesign refers to the intentional change of business processes. While process redesign methods provide structure to redesign projects, they provide limited support during…
Abstract
Purpose
Process redesign refers to the intentional change of business processes. While process redesign methods provide structure to redesign projects, they provide limited support during the actual creation of to-be processes. More specifically, existing approaches hardly develop an ontological perspective on what can be changed from a process design point of view, and they provide limited procedural guidance on how to derive possible process design alternatives. This paper aims to provide structured guidance during the to-be process creation.
Design/methodology/approach
Using design space exploration as a theoretical lens, the authors develop a conceptual model of the design space for business processes, which facilitates the systematic exploration of design alternatives along different dimensions. The authors utilized an established method for taxonomy development for constructing the conceptual model. First, the authors derived design dimensions for business processes and underlying characteristics through a literature review. Second, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with professional process experts. Third, the authors evaluated their artifact through three real-world applications.
Findings
The authors identified 19 business process design dimensions that are grouped into different layers and specified by underlying characteristics. Guiding questions and illustrative real-world examples help to deploy these design dimensions in practice. Taken together, the design dimensions form the “Business Process Design Space” (BPD-Space).
Research limitations/implications
Practitioners can use the BPD-Space to explore, question and rethink business processes in various respects.
Originality/value
The BPD-Space complements existing approaches by explicating process design dimensions. It abstracts from specific process flows and representations of processes and supports an unconstrained exploration of various alternative process designs.
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Business process redesign (BPR) is still a big issue in improving organizations and a lot of methods and techniques exist to support this undertaking. Referring to this, the…
Abstract
Purpose
Business process redesign (BPR) is still a big issue in improving organizations and a lot of methods and techniques exist to support this undertaking. Referring to this, the purpose of this paper is to derive a framework for identifying patterns in BPR that help in discovering new mechanisms which are indispensable to redesign and improve business processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The first part of this research process follows the principles of design science research by deriving the framework as an artifact. The second part focuses on the justification (“Justify/Evaluate”) of the framework using a literature review and a laboratory experiment.
Findings
A framework for identifying BPR pattern is derived and in parts validated by literature that helps to support the act of improving business processes. The advantages of this approach lie in the integrity of deriving possible patterns and the fact that it is not limited (as attempts in related work suffered from). The practical implications and added value of the (selected) patterns could be validated by conducting a laboratory experiment.
Research limitations/implications
The justification of the framework is based on a narrow literature review, just to show that this framework is applicable. For a more detailed evaluation a broader literature review is needed. The laboratory experiment was conducted for four patterns only. This also needs to be expanded in further research.
Practical implications
The paper is valuable for academics and practitioners because the impact of BPR on organizational performance is high. Using the identified BPR pattern facilitates the redesign of business processes, as shown in the experiment.
Originality/value
The originality of the paper lies in the possibility to easily identify BPR pattern to support the redesign of existing business processes.
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Business process management (BPM) has attracted much focus throughout the years, yet there have been calls questioning the future of BPM. The purpose of this paper is to explore…
Abstract
Purpose
Business process management (BPM) has attracted much focus throughout the years, yet there have been calls questioning the future of BPM. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current state of the field through a dynamic literature review and identify the main challenges for its future development.
Design/methodology/approach
A dynamic co-citation network analysis identifies the “evolution” of knowledge of BPM and the most influential works. The results present the developed BPM subthemes in the form of clusters.
Findings
The focus within the field has shifted from facilitating wide-ranging business performance improvements to creating introverted optimizations within a particular BPM subgroup. The BPM field has thus experienced strong fragmentation throughout the years and has accrued into self-fueling subareas of BPM research such as business process modeling and workflow management. Those subareas often neglect related disciplines in other management, process modeling and organizational improvement fields.
Research limitations/implications
The study is limited by the initial keyword choice of the authors. The subsequent co-citation analysis ameliorates the subjectivity since it produces a data set and contributions based on references.
Originality/value
A new combination of historical development and the state-of-the-art of the BPM field, by employing a co-citation and cluster analysis. This dynamic literature review presents the current state of the theoretical core and attempts to identify the crossroads that BPM has reached. The study can be replicated in the future to track the changes in the field.
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Julian Rott, Markus Böhm and Helmut Krcmar
Process mining (PM) has emerged as a leading technology for gaining data-based insights into organizations’ business processes. As processes increasingly cross-organizational…
Abstract
Purpose
Process mining (PM) has emerged as a leading technology for gaining data-based insights into organizations’ business processes. As processes increasingly cross-organizational boundaries, firms need to conduct PM jointly with multiple organizations to optimize their operations. However, current knowledge on cross-organizational process mining (coPM) is widely dispersed. Therefore, we synthesize current knowledge on coPM, identify challenges and enablers of coPM, and build a socio-technical framework and agenda for future research.
Design/methodology/approach
We conducted a literature review of 66 articles and summarized the findings according to the framework for Information Technology (IT)-enabled inter-organizational coordination (IOC) and the refined PM framework. The former states that within inter-organizational relationships, uncertainty sources determine information processing needs and coordination mechanisms determine information processing capabilities, while the fit between needs and capabilities determines the relationships’ performance. The latter distinguishes three categories of PM activities: cartography, auditing and navigation.
Findings
Past literature focused on coPM techniques, for example, algorithms for ensuring privacy and PM for cartography. Future research should focus on socio-technical aspects and follow four steps: First, determine uncertainty sources within coPM. Second, design, develop and evaluate coordination mechanisms. Third, investigate how the mechanisms assist with handling uncertainty. Fourth, analyze the impact on coPM performance. In addition, we present 18 challenges (e.g. integrating distributed data) and 9 enablers (e.g. aligning different strategies) for coPM application.
Originality/value
This is the first article to systematically investigate the status quo of coPM research and lay out a socio-technical research agenda building upon the well-established framework for IT-enabled IOC.
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Florian Johannsen, Susanne Leist and Reinhold Tausch
The purpose of this paper is to specify the decomposition conditions of Wand and Weber for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Therefore, an interpretation of the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to specify the decomposition conditions of Wand and Weber for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Therefore, an interpretation of the conditions for BPMN is derived and compared to a specification of the conditions for enhanced Event-Driven Process Chains (eEPCs). Based on these results, guidelines for a conformance check of BPMN and eEPC models with the decomposition conditions are shown. Further, guidelines for decomposition are formulated for BPMN models. The usability of the decomposition guidelines is tested with modelling experts.
Design/methodology/approach
An approach building on a representational mapping is used for specifying the decomposition conditions. Therefore, ontological constructs of the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology are mapped to corresponding modelling constructs and an interpretation of the decomposition conditions for BPMN is derived. Guidelines for a conformance check are then defined. Based on these results, decomposition guidelines are formulated. Their usability is tested in interviews.
Findings
The research shows that the decomposition conditions stemming from the information systems discipline can be transferred to business process modelling. However, the interpretation of the decomposition conditions depends on specific characteristics of a modelling language. Based on a thorough specification of the conditions, it is possible to derive guidelines for a conformance check of process models with the conditions. In addition, guidelines for decomposition are developed and tested. In the study, these are perceived as understandable and helpful by experts.
Research limitations/implications
Research approaches based on representational mappings are subjected to subjectivity. However, by having three researchers performing the approach independently, subjectivity can be mitigated. Further, only ten experts participated in the usability test, which is therefore to be considered as a first step in a more comprising evaluation.
Practical implications
This paper provides the process modeller with guidelines enabling a conformance check of BPMN and eEPC process models with the decomposition conditions. Further, guidelines for decomposing BPMN models are introduced.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to specify Wand and Weber's decomposition conditions for process modelling with BPMN. A comparison to eEPCs shows, that the ontological expressiveness influences the interpretation of the conditions. Further, guidelines for decomposing BPMN models as well as for checking their adherence to the decomposition conditions are presented.
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Lukas Frank, Rouven Poll, Maximilian Roeglinger and Rupprecht Lea
Customer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs…
Abstract
Purpose
Customer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs. With most existing approaches to business process (re-)design focusing on process efficiency, customers are often treated as second-class citizens. Despite emergent research on customer process management, there is a lack of guidance on how to design customer-centric business processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted a structured literature review and analyzed companies awarded for outstanding customer centricity to compile design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. The authors iteratively validated and refined these heuristics with experts from academia and industry. Finally, the heuristics was grouped according to their expected impact on interaction capabilities to enable their prioritization in specific settings.
Findings
The authors proposed 15 expert-approved and literature-backed design heuristics for customer-centric business processes together with real-world examples. The heuristics aim at increasing customer satisfaction with interaction-intensive core processes, which is an important driver of corporate success.
Originality/value
The design heuristics complement existing efficiency-centered (re-)design heuristics. They reflect cognitive shortcuts that support process analysts in the generation of innovative ideas during process (re-)design. The heuristics also add to customer process management and help put customer centricity into practice.