Properties that influence business process management maturity and its effect on organizational performance

Abstract BPM maturity is a measure to evaluate how professionally an organization manages its business processes. Previous research provides evidence that higher BPM maturity leads to better performance of processes and of the organization as a whole. It also claims that different organizations should strive for different levels of maturity, depending on their properties. This paper presents an empirical investigation of these claims, based on a sample of 120 organizations and looking at a selection of organizational properties. Our results reveal that higher BPM maturity contributes to better performance, but only up to a point. Interestingly, it contradicts the popular belief that higher innovativeness is associated with lower BPM maturity, rather showing that higher innovativeness is associated with higher BPM maturity. In addition, the paper shows that companies in different regions have a different level of BPM maturity. These findings can be used as a benchmark and a motivation for organizations to increase their BPM maturity

A multi-party chain for requirements determination

No abstract

User-perceptions of embedded software reliability

Many researchers and practitioners have recognised that the perception of ‘reliability’ is largely influenced by personal view and application context. Depending on personal goals, interests and background, the interpretation of the reliability concept is, different per individual. Industrial organisations try to fulfil user-needs regarding reliability but those reliability requirements are not as unambiguous as they should be. Therefore most industrial organisations fall back to a zero-defects approach, which implies a focus on fault detection instead of fulfilling user requirements. This in itself is not sufficient. In this paper, an approach is suggested by which the different user perceptions on reliability are modelled, and can be addressed. This Multi-party Chain model supports the explanation of the various views on product reliability of all users. Discussion among the parties involved is therefore enabled. Based on consensus the appropriate measures can be selected. The model should operationalise the basic relation between process and product, it enables the definition of metrics to evaluate process improvements, and links engineering activities to user requirements. The usefulness of the model is validated in a case-study