A Taxonomy of Business Process Management Approaches

Both the design and the implementation of the Business Process Management (BPM) concept vary significantly from one organization to another. Organization-specific approaches to BPM are, among other things, influenced by organizational culture as well as by the maturity of the concept’s adoption in the respective organization. This chapter reports on findings from an empirical study and is aimed at answering the question of precisely how organizations deal with the process-oriented management concept – today and in the near future. To address this issue, 38 medium-sized and large organizations from various industries were surveyed. Out of 18 variables used to characterize individual BPM approaches, four distinct design factors of BPM are identified: the degree of process performance measurement, the overall professionalism of process management, the impact of process managers, and the utilization of established methodology and standards. Based on these design factors, four generic approaches to BPM can be differentiated. Furthermore, these results are complemented by an interpolation of this classification into the near future, leading to the differentiation of five BPM project types. This part of the analysis shows that all surveyed organizations strive to increase BPM maturity. There are however significant differences with respect to the particular design of the aspired approaches to mature BPM. The presented results are particularly useful for the engineering and/or adaptation of situational methods in the field of BPM. The chapter therefore concludes with the exemplary adaptation of the ‘process innovation’ method proposed by Davenport with respect to the identified five BPM project types. This adaptation also demonstrates the practical applicability of the presented findings.