Knowledge-Intensive Healthcare Processes: Rethinking Business Process Ownership

Abstract

In very recent times, the pressing need to compete on the basis of process-related knowledge rather than process automation has expanded the field of Business Process Management (BPM) to include knowledge intensive business processes (BP). This paper focuses on one of BPM's core aspects - BP ownership, aiming to explore its main characteristics in the context of knowledge-intensive BPs. Using a combined theoretical lens of the process/knowledge continuum and boundary spanning, this research analyses an interesting case of BP ownership found in a real-life healthcare organization. Our results show that knowledge-intensive BPs, at least in the case organization, do require a different type of BP ownership than the one found in the BPM literature published over the past two decades. Rather than being focused on management and control, ownership of knowledge-intensive BPs is found to involve knowledge sharing, boundary-spanning, shared responsibility and grass-root leadership.