Exogenous Shocks and Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as continuous process improvement, process reengineering, process innovation, and process drift. However, exogenous shocks, which lead to unintentional and radical process change, have been neglected in BPM research although they severely affect an organization’s context, strategy, and business processes. This research note conceptualizes the interplay of exogenous shocks and BPM in terms of the effects that such shocks can have on organizations’ overall process performance over time. On this foundation, related challenges and opportunities for BPM via several rounds of idea generation and consolidation within a diverse team of BPM scholars are identified. The paper discusses findings in light of extant literature from BPM and related disciplines, as well as present avenues for future (BPM) research to invigorate the academic discourse on the topic.

Development and testing of an explorative BPM acceptance model: Insights from the COVID-19 pandemic.

When emerging technologies transform an organization's way of working, explorative business process management (BPM) becomes a new challenge. Although digital innovations can boost process efficacy and business productivity, employees do not necessarily accept the implied work changes. We therefore looked at the increased digitalization efforts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, during which employees were forced to drastically rethink work by heavily depending on technology for communication and almost all business tasks. This global setting allowed us to scrutinize disruptive work changes and how employees can cope with disruptive work adaptations. We also looked into the explorative skillset needed to adapt to these changes. To theorize about an explorative BPM acceptance model, eleven hypotheses were supported based on a solid theoretical foundation. We followed a quantitative research design using partial least squares for structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) at the university administration settings in two regions, including purposive sampling. Data analysis covered both a measurement model assessment and structural model assessment. Our findings reveal that employees' perceived work modalities, feeling creative and feeling flexible are more promising features than perceived influence and attitude related to explorative work and skill development. We also offer novel insights into explorative business process management (BPM) skills, and which skills are more productive in uncertain or dynamic working conditions. This research is a learning path for managers struggling with flexible or competitive business environments, and more specifically to facilitate employee willingness.

How the COVID-19 pandemic can stimulate more radical business process improvements: Using the metaphor of a tree

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations and employees worldwide to drastically rethink their way of working. While drastic process changes normally tend to fail or are challenged by employee resistance, the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced this impediment so that organizations actually experience how alternative (i.e., more simple and digitalized) working alternatives can look like. This opinion paper calls for more business process management (BPM) ambidexterity in organizations, so that the alternatives experienced during COVID-19 can be evaluated and remain after the pandemic. For this purpose, a BPM tree is proposed to outweigh incremental process improvements from more radical ones, in order for organizations to exploit good practices but also to better explore emerging opportunities.