DEVELOPMENT OF BPM CAPABILITIES – IS MATURITY THE RIGHT PATH?

Business Process Management (BPM) is an influential concept in information systems (IS) research and management practice. While a great number of studies dealt with developing methods, procedures, or tools for BPM, especially process modeling, today the question of how to assess and – from that point on – to develop BPM capabilities in a real-life organization has become key to BPM practice and is becoming a central element in BPM research as well. A plethora of BPM maturity models have been designed for the purpose of guiding the development of BPM capabilities in organizations. In this study, we take a critical perspective on maturity models for BPM capability development and present a case study example where maturity model-based guidance is rendered to be inadequate if not further considering organizational position and environment. Our theory discussion introduces alternative takes on BPM capability development, lays out implications for BPM practice, and presents potentially fruitful paths for future research and theory in the area of BPM capability development

Maturity Models Architecture: A large systematic mapping

Maturity models are widespread in research and in particular, IT practitioner communities. However, theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous and empirically validated maturity models are quite rare.  This systematic mapping paper focuses on the challenges faced during the development of maturity models. More specifically, it explores the literature on maturity models and standard guidelines to develop maturity models, the challenges identified and solutions proposed.  Our systematic mapping  revealed over six hundred articles on maturity models. Extant literature reveals that researchers have primarily focused on developing new maturity models pertaining to domain-specific problems and/or new enterprise technologies. We find rampant re-use of the design structure of widely adopted models such as Nolan’s Stage of Growth Model, Crosby’s Grid, and Capability Maturity Model (CMM). We also identify three dominant views of maturity models and provide guidelines for various approaches to constructing maturity models with a standard vocabulary. We finally propose using process theories and configurational approaches to address the main theoretical criticisms with regard to maturity models and conclude with some recommendations for maturity model developers

A Study on the Relation between BPM Maturity and Innovation

This paper presents a study of the relationship between business process management maturity and innovation in organizations. Data was collected with a questionnaire that was based on three theoretical models namely a BPM maturity model, and adoption of innovations model and the innovation values chain. Data was collected from several organizations ranging from small to large in several countries in Europe. The findings suggest a moderate and on occasion somewhat stronger relation between the core concepts. These relationship seem to differ when data was analyzed for the separate organizational sizes. The core recommendations are that that organizations need to asses their BPM maturity and \u27innovativeness\u27 before concerted efforts are made for improvement, and that an alignment of BPM and innovation may offer positive results in organizational performance

The Relation Between Process Management and Innovation – A comparison of the IT and Manufacturing Industries

This study investigates whether there are major differences between process management and innovation between the IT and more traditional industries. Although both industries are quite similar, the research results show that the IT industry is more innovative in comparison to more traditional industries. The traditional industries are more risk averse towards new technologies, which makes them less innovative than the IT industry

Business Process Governance: Theorizing and Empirical Application

Studies by Gartner (2010) or McKinsey (2008) suggest univocally that improving business processes is the undisputednumber one priority for organizations world-wide. Hence, organizations need adequate capabilities for Business ProcessManagement (BPM). However, these capabilities do not necessarily need to be developed in the organization itself – aninclusion using other sourcing structures (e.g. cooperation/network or market instead of hierarchy) is possible as well. Thispaper builds upon an understanding of BPM as a dynamic capability and a well-known distinction of governance strategies(market, cooperation, hierarchy) to develop a business process governance framework. Using an extensive case study weinitially test this framework in a European PRODUCTION company. Therefore, we make the following contributions: 1)development of a BPM theory that integrates dynamic capability and governance theory, 2) a model for understandingsourcing strategies in BPM, and 3) empirically sound factors explaining sourcing strategies in BPM. Our results suggest thatorganizations facing a low dynamic market environment do not employ dedicated resources for business process change butrely on ad-hoc measures. Moreover, they gather these resources mostly internally (hierarchical governance). The paper endswith implications for both research and practice, limitations, and potential avenues for future research

An investigation of Business Process maturity: a case study in a South African parastatal

Business Process Management (BPM) has become one of the management approaches adopted by many organisations that strive to survive in a turbulent and competitive environment. BPM offers the means to manage and optimize business processes with the objective of improved efficiency and effectiveness; thereby improving the potential of business success. However, the extent to which BPM influences business success is a matter of debate with diverse schools of thought finding it difficult to reach consensus regarding the critical success factors of BPM and the extent at which processes and people influence business success. The capability of an organisation or enterprise is the ability to deliver on a desired outcome. In this dissertation, the enterprise capabilities of BPM are investigated. The research sets out to investigate the BPM maturity level of a South African parastatal. The intention is to identify and improve on those factors that influence maturity of the enterprise capabilities and may have negative impact on stakeholders. The approach taken to address the research objectives drew on case study methodology. Fieldwork was conducted using company documents, observation, a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. The questionnaire responses were qualitatively analysed using the categories of Hammer's model of enterprise capability. The research findings identified weaknesses in all categories of enterprise capability though expertise appeared to be thriving. The findings further suggest that weaknesses in leadership and the leadership style in particular impact on the effectiveness of business processes. The leadership style was seen as the major driver to impede process effectiveness. The following themes describing leadership style were derived from interviews: creation of sense of belonging, degree of approachability and extent of collaboration. In order to improve the BPM in the case company, the following recommendations were made: communication sessions, awareness training and process remodelling. The research study also provides the opportunity to understand BPM in a broader context, thus having potential for transferability to other organisations

A Configurational Approach to Maturity Model Development – Using fsQCA to Build a Multiple-Pathway Maturity Model

Maturity models can be used as tools which depict the developmental trajectories of entity classes in domains and evaluate the relative position of an entity within this framework. However, their development process has been the focus of researchers and practitioners ever since, resulting in different procedures, development approaches, and conceptual models. Thus, a major criticism of maturity models is the often missing conceptual and theoretical grounding when it comes to the interpretation of the concept of maturity. To address this shortcoming, our research approach focuses on the rigorous development of a multiple-pathway maturity model. By following a sequential, theoretically grounded process, the resulting maturity model can be viewed as an instantiation of the predefined conceptual components and characteristics in a predefined domain. We present and discuss the instantiated sector and size-specific maturity model for innovation capability in small industrial firms, which is developed by applying configurational methods on a dataset and thereby offers multiple pathways to maturity. This concept of equifinality is central to our approach. It has rarely been considered in maturity model development research, although it offers the potential to build more realistic models with greater applicability, especially in domains with many interdependencies

Relying on heterogeneous data sources to detect business process change in process models

Due to changing customer needs, regulations, protocols, and technologies, an organi zation’s business processes must regularly change and improve. The Business Process Management (BPM) discipline guides organizations to perform these changes through the BPM life-cycle, in which business processes are modeled, analyzed, redesigned, and implemented. However, sometimes these changes bypass the BPM life-cycle, happening directly at the implementations’ operational level. Consequently, the respective process models need to be updated. Business process event logs can be analyzed to identify which models need updates, but not all implementations generate event logs. One possible approach to help detect business process changes is monitoring external sys tems, participants, documents, and other items used or produced by a business process. These items are observable entities, which are components required for a business pro cess execution. Monitoring change in these entities turns them into heterogeneous data sources, named as such because their data cannot easily be merged with event logs. We show that these entities can be used to create a framework for assisting in updating out dated process models, though it demands a method for identifying these entities. It also requires the mapping between entities and process models, allowing process analysts to quickly identify outdated models when the linked entities have suffered changes. In this thesis, we assess the feasibility of creating this framework. We evaluated and compared different frameworks of organizational change, business process analysis, and redesign with an investigation of the changes required to update 25 real process models. This comparison guided us to define a taxonomy of observable entities related to business process change, which we applied to manually classify 1329 process elements originating from 88 process models. The classification frequency of the process models was 57% on average. The classification was also used to train automated classifiers using machine learning. The best automated classifiers achieved F1-scores of up to 95.4%. Our method of semi-automated manual classification of process elements with process analysts is the primary method for identifying observable entities as required by our sug gested framework. In addition, we defined a set of recommendations to help build the mapping between entities and process models and ensure it stays consistent, as well as instructions on how to use the framework to identify outdated process models

Proposta de reestruturação do processo de gestão de reclamações na área de compras

Mestrado em Engenharia e Gestão IndustrialO presente trabalho resulta do estágio curricular concretizado na empresa Oliveira e Irmão, S. A.. O objetivo do trabalho incidiu sobre a importância da gestão de processos, mais especificamente na gestão de reclamações a fornecedores. Com base em dados estatísticos relativamente às ocorrências de reclamações durante o ano transato, foram aplicadas algumas ferramentas de qualidade de forma a sistematizar a informação obtida e, posteriormente, proceder ao tratamento da mesma. Através da ferramenta de gestão Business Process Management, foi realizada uma proposta de melhoria a fim de atingir mais eficiência e normalização do processo em causa. Durante a realização deste trabalho, pretendeu-se demonstrar ainda a importância que a gestão de processos representa na melhoria do desempenho da organização. Os resultados expectáveis de acordo com a proposta apresentada seriam proporcionar uma melhoria de 30% ao nível de recursos humanos, através de uma redução do valor de FTEs envolvidos no processo.This paper is the end product of an internship at the company Oliveira e Irmão, S. A. The main goal of this paper focuses upon the importance of process management, specifically in the management of complaints to the suppliers. Based upon statistical data on complaints regarding incidents which occurred over the past year, some quality tools were applied in order to systematize the information obtained and subsequently process the information obtained. Via the Business Process Management tool, a proposal for improvement was carried out in order to ensure the efficiency and standardization of the process in question. During this project, the importance of process management to improve the organization’s performance will also be demonstrated. The expected results according to the proposal would provide a 30% improvement in terms of human resources, through a reduction of FTEs value involved in the process