Volume 2: People & Culture
- Expertise in Business Process Management
by Alexandra Kokkonen and Wasana Bandara - Business Process Management Curriculum
by Yvonne Lederer Antonucci - Dealing with Human-Driven Processes
by Keith Harrison-Broninski - Subject-Oriented Business Process Modeling
by Albert Fleischmann, Werner Schmidt, Christian Stary - Knowledge Engineering in Business Process Management
by Dimitris Karagiannis and Robert Woitsch - Culture in Business Process Management: How Cultural Values Determine BPM Success
by Theresa Schmiedel, Jan vom Brocke, Jan Recker - Cultural Change in Process Management
by Ulrike Baumöl - How Organizational Culture Facilitates a Global BPM Project: The Case of Hilti
by Jan vom Brocke, Martin Petry, Theresa Schmiedel, Christian Sonnenberg - Creativity-Aware Business Process Management: What We Can Learn from Film and Visual Effects Production
by Stefan Seidel, Katherine Shortland, David Court and Didier Elzinga - Business Process Management at an Australian Transport Provider
by Tonia de Bruin and Gaby Doebeli - Business Process Management in International Humanitarian Aid
by Hugh Peterken and Wasana Bandara
While information technology is often the enabler of required process changes, the success of BPM initiatives depends heavily on the contributions, active support, and engagement of all stakeholders. This section divides the human aspect of BPM into (a) the experiences and skills related to processes and process management (people), and (b) overall leadership and the organizational and individual acceptance of BPM (culture).
In this context, questions arise concerning how we can ensure that involved employees proactively initiate and drive process change and accept the proposed process changes, what is the BPM body of knowledge covering the skills required by BPM professionals, what is needed on the human side to enable a process change in the most effective and efficient manner, and what leadership skills are required to ensure that culture becomes an enabler and not an inhibitor of process change. This part of the BPM Handbook explores the role of the human factor in BPM from a variety of viewpoints.
The first two papers in this section focus on the competencies required in order to apply BPM successfully in an organization. In the first chapter, Alexandra Kokkonen and Wasana Bandara introduce the field of expertise in BPM, presenting a comprehensive model of expertise in the context of BPM that consolidates existing theories and related work. In the second chapter, Yvonne Lederer-Antonucci takes a closer look at the design of BPM course curricula. Since many organizations have assigned process-transformation leadership to business analysts, Lederer-Antonucci reviews the role of a business analyst in the context of BPM practice and suggests a curriculum designed to cultivate the skills required to fill the emerging role of the business process analyst.
In addition to skills, various factors resulting from the human perspective must be considered when managing change in business processes. These factors are considered in the next set of chapters. First, Keith Harrison-Broninski introduces human-driven processes, presenting an approach to analyzing and describing processes with a focus on human interactions that facilitates the management of teams, communication, knowledge, time, and plans by taking the role of human collaboration in BPM into account. Interactions and how they can be modeled is the focus of the chapter contributed by Albert Fleischmann, Werner Schmidt and Christian Stary. Subject-oriented BPM (S-BPM) follows a communication-oriented paradigm and by this presents an alternative to the common activity-centered proposals. The concepts of S-BPM are explained using an exemplary process. The approach is discussed in the context of social BPM and insights into the actual application of S-BPM are provided. In the next chapter Dimitris Karagiannis and Robert Woitsch focus on the critical role of “knowledge” and the intersection between BPM and “knowledge engineering,” contributing to the increasingly important domain of knowledge-sensitive BPM. The authors show how knowledge engineering can be incorporated into BPM, with a particular focus on frameworks, management methods, and deployment initiatives.
Culture is also a crucial element in the relationship between human capital and BPM. In the opening chapter of this section, Theresa Schmiedel, Jan vom Brocke, and Jan Recker introduce this emerging field of BPM research, reporting on three major research projects and providing an overview of the multi-faceted role of culture in BPM. Against the background of a conceptual framework, the BPM-culture model, the authors identify four values essential for BPM initiatives and present a BPM-culture tool with which to measure how well specific organizational cultures support BPM. In order to incorporate cultural effects, change management initiatives supporting BPM need to be considered. This is the focus by Ulrike Baumöl, whose contribution on cultural change in BPM provides an engineering perspective on how to implement change in an organization. The section continues with Jan vom Brocke, Martin Petry, Theresa Schmiedel, and Christian Sonnenberg’s real-life case of the Hilti Corporation, which analyzes the intersection of corporate culture and BPM success. The authors reveal that a cultural development initiative was instrumental in Hilti’s success with a global BPM project.
Both knowledge and culture contribute to the overall creativity of an organization. The phenomenon of the growing competitive relevance of BPM is discussed by Stefan Seidel, Katherine Shortland, David Court, and Didier Elzinga in the next chapter. Drawing from observations made at a leading postproduction studio, Rising Sun Pictures, the authors show how creativity impacts business processes and derive guidelines for management of the creativity-intensive processes that are of major importance to a wide range of industries today.
We conclude the section with two case studies on the role of people and culture in BPM. First, a case study of an Australian transport provider demonstrates the various interdependences among the six core components of BPM structuring the BPM Handbook. In their case Tonia de Bruin and Gaby Doebeli once more highlight the importance of understanding BPM as an organizational approach. Then the chapter by Hugh Peterken and Wasana Bandara reports on BPM in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The case demonstrates the tremendous challenges of BPM in international humanitarian aid organizations but also its significant contributions. The chapter illustrates how the six core elements of BPM must be integrated and aligned with respect to the specific context of the organization’s internal and external environments.