Disaster Recovery-New Challenges and Opportunities for Business Process Management Research and Practice

Abstract

Managing processes across community/NGOs, government and business agencies brings upon brand new challenges, yet to be explored by the Business Process Management (BPM) community. This research focuses on disaster recovery, as a prime example of such a complex cross-organisational environment. Even though every disaster is unique, when considered from the process perspective, disaster recovery could be seen as a set of operational processes – some of which are highly structured and predefined, while the others are knowledge-intensive i.e. highly emergent, ad-hoc processes that need to be designed in-situ and managed as they evolve. Through an in-depth review of the relevant literature published by the Business Process Management (BPM) and disaster recovery (DR) research communities this paper reports on the existing research on the management of DR processes. The literature was analysed through a theoretical lens combining two existing frameworks previously developed and used by the BPM community. Our research provides insights into the main characteristics of DR processes and the existing research gaps found across BPM and DR. These insights were used to identify relevant theories that could be used by information systems researchers to study different aspects of DR processes, in particular: (i) sharing and co-creation of process-related knowledge among very diverse process participants; (ii) management of data and information flows across different types of organizations (business, governmental and community/NGOs); (iii) flexible coordination mechanisms, and (iv) provision of more flexible IS support for these emerging knowledge-intensive processes.