An empirical study about the status of business process management

Abstract

PurposeRecently, business process management (BPM) is among the most important managerial topics because it allows companies an agile adaptation to changing business requirements. Consultants and researchers are regularly proposing new methods and concepts based on BPM for further increasing the efficiency of corporate processes. However, from an empirical point of view it is crucial to determine the current status in practice and derive goals for research and technology transfer. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachFor this reason the survey “Status Quto Business Process Management” is carried out in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland on a yearly basis. This survey aims at identifying current trends and strategic plans of companies as well as its realization in practice and highlights the remaining steps towards the process (‐focused) organization (PFO). The paper summarizes the results of the survey carried out in 2006 among 185 decision makers and shows a comparison with the results of the previous years as well as comparable surveys.FindingsThis paper analyzes the current state of BPM in the market, analyzes the strategic, organizational and technical aspects of BPM in the participating companies. The survey shows that although the majority of the participating companies are involved with BPM initiatives, only a very small number of companies follows holistic approaches and has reached the status of a PFO.Research limitations/implicationsAs the survey especially focused on IT‐driven companies a limitation of this survey could be seen in the fact that it does not exactly cover the branch distribution of the population, e.g. the financial sector is over‐represented due to the fact that the survey included branch specific questions for the financial sector (note that these questions are not part of this paper). However, the comparison with the surveys “BP Report” and “State of BPM” shows that these surveys come with similar distributions of the branches.Practical implicationsThis paper provides a very useful source for companies in benchmarking their status regarding BPM. It provides them with information that allows to compare their status on the way towards a PFO with their competitors.Originality/valueThis paper provides a very useful source for companies in benchmarking their status regarding BPM. The survey does not only investigate what is being done by the participating companies but also interested in the reasons why it is done. Compared to existing surveys it: investigates connections between processes and business strategy, process risk handling, references models, as well as methods for evaluating the contributions of IT to the business processes; uses statistical methods for measuring the significance of the results and; has a specific focus on companies in the Germany‐speaking countries Austria, Germany and Switzerland.