Advancing Business Process Management

Before exploring how actual working practices deviate from formal business process descriptions, it is helpful to begin with a general introduction to the basics of Business Process Management (BPM). BPM includes an organization’s capability of capturing, modeling, implementing, and controlling all activities taking place in the organizational environment in an integrated manner (Scheer/Nüttgens 2000). Table 3 provides definitions of BPM that address different issues they are related to. Properties that are addressed by research are mainly connected to the analysis and improvement of existing business processes. Using BPM organizations seek to achieve flexibility and rapid responsiveness to address challenges through better understanding of their business processes (Bandara et al. 2005; Davenport 1993). To recognize the success in BPM it is necessary to understand the context of the organization and the multi-disciplinary nature of business processes (Ko et al. 2009).

Therefore, organizations need to describe their formal business processes with regard to the tasks, the technologies and actual working practices.

Conceptual Background 14

Table 3: Definition of Business Process Management Source: Own illustration

Definition Issues addressed

“[BPM has a] management focused on using business processes as a significant contributor to achieving an organization’s objective through the improvement, ongoing performance management and governance of essential business processes.” (Jeston/Nelis 2014, 47)

- Achievement of objectives - Improvement and ongoing performance management

“Business Process Management (BPM) is a comprehensive system for managing and transforming organizational operations, based on what is arguably the first set of new ideas about organizational performance since the Industrial Revolution.“ (Hammer 2010, 3)

- Managing and transforming organizational operations - Comprehensive system

“Supporting business processes using methods, techniques, and software to design, enact, control, and analyze operational processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.”

(van der Aalst et al. 2003, 4)

- Support of business processes - Analysis of operational processes - Involving different sources of

information

“BPM is a structured approach to analyze and continually improve fundamental activities such as manufacturing, marketing, communications and other major elements of a company’s operation." (Zairi 1997, 64)

- Structured approach

- Analysis and improvement of fundamental activities

“Business process management (BPM) is a process-oriented management discipline. It is not a technology. Workflow is a flow management technology found in business process management suites (BPMSs) and other product categories." (Ko et al. 2009, 748)

- Process-oriented management discipline

“Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows, in support of enterprise goals, spanning systems, employees, customers and partners within and beyond the enterprise boundaries.” (Palmer 2015)

- Combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business activity flows

The interplay of the design and emergence of business processes adds challenging demands when it comes to their management (Beverungen 2014). Business processes are prone to variation as changing technologies and requirements lead to different actions. Therefore, a need to advance BPM research is induced by theorizing about the workings behind the drift of business processes and IS (Beverungen 2014). In research the focus is not always well aligned with the needs of industry as changing environments and evolving systems are yet not an integral part of BPM (Indulska et al. 2009).

Conceptual Background 15 In order to include demands from practice, literature suggests to use business process models to compare or represent to-be and as-is situations (Erol et al. 2010). Process modeling is supposed to be an instrument to understand the complexity of managing business processes (Becker et al. 2000). Process modeling is used to enable organizations to (1) identify process weaknesses, (2) adapt best practices, (3) document and communicate about the design of new business processes, (4) end-user training, (5) enhance compliance and risk management and (6) design and configure systems (Bandara et al. 2005). In practice business process models help to learn about organizational processes and to make decisions on the processes (Aguilar-Saven 2004) or they can be transformed into an executable model description (Erol et al.

2010). From a change perspective, process models are frequently used as an enabler of reorganization (Becker et al 2000). In line, a better understanding of organizational processes provides possibilities to identify areas of improvement (Jun et al. 2009) and aims to cope with the complexity of process planning and control (Becker et al. 2000).

Modeling business process is a fundamental requirement but still represents a significant challenge to many organizations (Indulska et al. 2009). Per definition business process modeling offers an approach to graphically display the way organizations conduct their business processes (Indulska et al. 2009). Providing a step-by-step framework for documenting a process is essential to enhance BPM (Ungan 2006). One approach to model business processes is provided by the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN is rich and expressive and provides an increasingly important standard for process modeling (Recker 2010). Using modeling techniques organizations are able to visualize their processes and thus, achieve consistency in operations. In practice there exist difficulties when achieving consistency because of the different ways that organizational members perform the same task (Ungan 2006). The main purpose is to capture business requirements with a focus on business process and their standardization (Bandara et al. 2005).

Research shows that a main challenge of standardization is the preservation of needed flexibility (Trkman 2010). Even if a process has identical inputs, operations, and intends to produce identical outputs, its standardization is far from easy (Ungan 2006). Thus, process models document existing or planned processes to ensure a shared understanding but are never immune against deviations in the form of workarounds (Jun et al. 2009).

Standardization makes process activities transparent and seeks to achieve uniformity across the value chain and across firm boundaries (Wüllenweber/Weitzel 2007). Instead of reducing process variations, standardization may lead to the paradoxical consequence of having more variability as organizational members may bypass the formal system entirely (Azad/King 2012). We are therefore interested on how actual working practices are considered when visualizing business processes (Alter 2015b). In his research, Münstermann (2010) reports on several examples which highlight the positive effect of standardization. For example Ramakumar and Cooper (2004) show that business process standardization proves profitability. Swaminathan (2001) asserts that process standardization provides immense benefits. Manrodt and Vitasek (2004) prove that global process standardization can benefit the company as well as its customers (Manrodt and Vitasek 2004). Nevertheless, several

Conceptual Background 16 studies reveal the challenges that excessive standardization may engender, for example alienation and rigidity (Andriopoulos/Lewis 2009).

Summing up, business process modelling enables a common and comprehensive understanding of working processes (Aguilar-Saven 2004). Nevertheless, current research is at its limits when it comes to model incongruence between formal process descriptions and actual working practices. There exist several approaches for representing adaptive or flexible process designs that integrate changes that may occur during the lifetime of a business process (Rosemann et al. 2006). For example Rosemann and van der Aalst (2007) provide a process modeling technique that supports adaptability by extending traditional techniques with variation points. Schmidt (2005) on the other hand suggests supporting process flexibility by web services. Narendra (2004) introduces an approach to support and manage adaptive workflows (Rosemann et al. 2006). Within this thesis we introduce the referred approaches and explain their shortcomings when it comes to illustrate workarounds. This thesis follows the assumption that flexibility needs to be considered in BPM and therefore provides an attempt to study incongruence between formal process descriptions and actual working processes in organizations.