Developing an Organizational Culture Supportive of Business Process Management

In recent years, a holistic understanding of business process management (BPM) has evolved in Information Systems (IS) research. This understanding considers organizational factors such as strategic alignment, governance, people, and culture as important aspects of BPM beyond Information Technology (IT) and methods. Particularly, organizational culture has been increasingly recognized as a critical success factor for the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes. While existing research already examined which cultural values determine a supportive environment for realizing BPM objectives and how these values can be measured, it has not been explored to date how such a supportive organizational culture can be developed. Based on a review of the literature, we therefore investigate the case of a global IT software provider to gain a first understanding of strategies organizations can implement to develop a supportive cultural setting for their BPM approach. We show how these findings extend recent studies in BPM research

Reviewing the Role of Culture in Strategic Information Systems Research: A Call for Prescriptive Theorizing on Culture Management

Culture is an important topic in strategic information systems (IS) research, particularly because information technology (IT) projects are often accompanied by cultural challenges. While culture has been widely analyzed in this discipline, there is a lack of research that systematically examines the role of culture in strategic IS research. With a structured literature review, we investigate the relation patterns between culture, strategy, and IS-related concepts in terms of dependent, moderating, and independent variables and the research approach in terms of descriptive, normative, and prescriptive. Four different patterns emerge, each one closely related to specific forms of theorizing and corresponding research designs. Research streams focusing on descriptive explanations of culture’s role are rather exhausted. IS research that builds on a normative understanding of culture exists in selected areas, while theorizing on the prescriptive management of culture has been largely neglected despite the relevance of cultural challenges in IS projects. We derive areas for future research and present two themes that emerged in our study to demonstrate how descriptive and normative approaches can provide a foundation for research on the prescriptive management of culture in strategic IS projects: the management of cultural clashes and the management of cultural identity

Towards A Conceptualisation Of BPM-Culture: Results From A Literature Review

Culture has been identified as an important success factor in BPM initiatives. Despite its relevance, little research systematically addresses culture as a distinct phenomenon in BPM. Recently, first key elements have been identified, conceptualising culture in BPM research. As a core element, the concept of a BPM culture has been distinguished as a set of values directly supportive of achieving BPM objectives. While there is some evidence for the construct as such, it has not been examined which exact cultural elements make up a BPM culture. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of a BPM culture. At this stage, we do this through a structured literature review. We systematically derive a set of BPM values that serves as a starting point for future research

The relation between BPM culture, BPM methods, and process performance: Evidence from quantitative field studies

Business process management (BPM) research conceptualizes BPM culture as a type of organizational culture that supports BPM. No quantitative fieldwork has so far examined how such a supporting role manifests itself. We study the relationship between BPM culture, BPM methods, and process performance empirically. Our analysis of multiple survey data sets from a total of 581 practitioners of multiple industries suggests that BPM methods indirectly contribute to process performance by establishing a BPM culture. This finding updates the prevalent assumption that the correct application of methods yields direct performance benefits. We discuss several implications for theory and practice

The Role of Gender in Business Process Management Competence Supply

While Business Process Management (BPM) was originally focused on Information Technology as a key factor driving the efficiency and effectiveness of organizational processes, there is now a growing consensus among practitioners and academics that BPM represents a holistic management approach that also takes such factors as corporate governance, human capital, and organizational culture into account. Studies show that the BPM practice faces a shortage of competence supply that stems from a shortage of qualified BPM professionals. At the same time, there is a distinct underrepresentation of women in technology-related fields; it has been suggested that gender stereotypes are one of the reasons for this underrepresentation. The goal of this research paper is, thus, to better understand the role of gender in the BPM competences supply. In this study 10,405 LinkedIn profiles of BPM professionals were analyzed using a text mining technique called Latent Semantic Analysis. Twelve distinct categories of supplied BPM competences were identified and it was investigated how far gender biases exist among BPM professionals. The nature of BPM-related competences is discussed, together with the differences in their presentation by male and female professionals, which indicate potential existence of gender stereotypes. Further, it is discussed how the apparent underrepresentation of women among BPM professionals can be addressed to close the competence gap in the field. The study contributes to both the call for research on human capital in the BPM field, and the calls for research on gender and gender stereotypes in technology-related fields

DEVELOPMENT OF A MEASUREMENT SCALE FOR BUSINESS PROCESS STANDARDIZATION

Process-oriented companies face the dichotomy of process standardization versus process diversity. On the one hand, multinational companies try to realize returns of scale by standardization. On the other hand, markets require businesses to adapt to local needs and government regulations. As of to-day, there is no framework available to measure the degree of process standardization. This is both a problem for companies that want to assess their degree of standardization as well as for research that aims to investigate standardization and its connection with other concepts. In this paper, we address this research gap from the perspective of scale development. We utilize a well-acknowledged method for devising a measurement instrument to specifically and directly measure the degree of standardiza-tion in business processes. Various application scenarios and future research areas are pointed out

Identifying and Quantifying Cultural Factors That Matter to the IT Workforce: An Approach Based on Automated Content Analysis

Organizational culture represents a key success factor in highly competitive environments, such as, the IT sector. Thus, IT companies need to understand what makes up a culture that fosters employee performance. While existing research typically uses self-report questionnaires to study the relation of culture and the success of companies, the validity of this approach is often discussed and researchers call for new ways of studying culture. Therefore, our research goal is to present an alternative ap-proach to culture analysis for examining which cultural factors matter to the IT workforce. Our study builds on 112,610 online reviews of Fortune 500 IT companies collected from Glassdoor, an online platform on which current and former employees can anonymously review companies and their man-agement. We perform an automated content analysis to identify cultural factors that employees em-phasize in their reviews. Through a regression analysis on numerical employee satisfaction ratings, we find that a culture of learning and performance orientation contributes to employee motivation, while a culture of assertiveness and gender inegalitarianism has a strong negative influence on em-ployees’ satisfaction in the IT workforce. Future research can apply our approach as an alternative method to quantifying culture and its impact on other variables

Development and validation of an instrument to measure and manage organizational process variety

Organizational processes vary. Practitioners have developed simple frameworks to differentiate them. Surprisingly, the academic literature on process management does not–it typically strives for one method to manage all processes. We draw on organizational information-processing theory to systematically develop a new, theoretically motivated classification model for organizational processes. We validate this model using survey data from 141 process practitioners of a global corporation. We derive three distinct types of processes and demonstrate that an understanding of process variety based on process dimensions can differentiate processes better than existing frameworks used in practice. Our findings can enable process managers to make informed decisions and serve as a basis for contingent process management

A theory of contingent business process management

Many researchers and practitioners suggest a contingent instead of a “one size fits all” approach in business process management (BPM). The purpose of this paper is to offer a contingency theory of BPM, which proposes contingency factors relevant to the successful management of business processes and that explains how and why these contingencies impact the relationships between process management and performance