Business Process Management Practices in a Small Transition Economy: Current Status and Research Opportunities

The main objective of this research is to contribute to an improved understanding of BPM practices in transition economies. The paper offers an overview of the key motives for BPM implementation within different business processes and across industry sectors, as currently practiced by 240 (large and small) companies in a small transition economy of Bosnia & Herzegovina. Being the first of its kind for this particular country, this research also contributes to an important body of knowledge on BPM in transition economies of a particular type. Our research also identifies an important limitation of prior research in this area, where BPM studies are often de-contextualized from their very unique context of transition economies. Consequently, we propose to expand the current research on BPM in transition economies to include further research on BPM for transition economies

Creativity, Coordination & Knowledge co-Creation on a Global Scale- The Process Perspective

In very recent times new tools and technologies for peer-to-peer collaboration and coordination became easily and readily available taking knowledge creation processes outside of the organizational boundaries. This paper proposes to extend the existing boundaries of Business Process Management (BPM) to include an emerging category of processes; here termed Global Knowledge-Intensive Business Processes (GKIBP). These processes differ from other global processes, such as supply chains and collaborative cross-organizational business processes (BPs), as their main outcome is a commercial knowledge artifact, co-created trough coordinated activities of knowledge agents, that may or may not come from an organizational setting. Drawing from, and combining the state-of-the art research findings from three disciplines: i) BPM (ii) Global Digital Collaboration and more recently (iii) Crowdsourcing and Collective Intelligence processes, this research aims to investigate the main characteristics of these processes through an exploratory case study. Our findings are then placed in the context of the current developments in BPM field, in particular the frameworks used to inform and guide BP Management today, demonstrating a need for their extension

IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE HEALTH CARE PROCESSES BEYOND EFFICIENCY

Health care has been one of the most important domains for Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice for many years. Through an exploratory case study conducted in a real organization, here named “SpecialClinic”, this research aims to investigate what lies beyond “traditional” BPM, in particular process efficiency, as practiced by many organizations today. It focuses on customer-facing knowledge-intensive BPs in the case organization and aims to investigate their ongoing improvement. The main findings of this research challenge the main objectives of BP improvement (i.e. reduced costs, improved efficiency) as they show that some organizations are making their “to-be” processes slower and more expensive, yet significantly improved in terms of quality of patient care. In addition to its main research contribution related to new approaches to improvement of knowledge-intensive BPs, this work offers some important lessons for the BPM practitioners interested in expanding the current boundaries of BPM

Improvement of Knowledge-Intensive Business Processes Through Analytics and Knowledge Sharing

This applied research focuses on knowledge-intensive business processes (KIBPs) supported by Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A), here termed BI&A-supported KIBPs. Examples of these processes include customer-support services, risk and assurance processes, and design of marketing campaigns. This research aims to investigate an industry-informed research challenge of ongoing improvement of BI&A-supported KIBPs, in particular the role of BI&A in process improvement. This paper presents a qualitative research case study, conducted in a large retail distribution company, using a theoretical lens of Work Systems Theory (WST). We describe an innovative approach to ongoing improvement of BI&A-supported KIBP and confirm an important role played by BI&A in this context. Informed by these research insights, we then propose a new theoretical model of ongoing improvement of BI&A-supported KIBP and explain its significance using relevant literature. The model is also highly relevant for industry practitioners looking for new sources of competitive differentiation, beyond BI&A technology