Properties that influence business process management maturity and its effect on organizational performance

Remco Dijkman,Sander Vincent Lammers,Ad De Jong

doi:10.1007/s10796-015-9554-5

Remco Dijkman, Sander Vincent Lammers + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-015-9554-5

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Abstract

BPM maturity is a measure to evaluate how professionally an organization manages its business processes. Previous research provides evidence that higher BPM maturity leads to better performance of processes and of the organization as a whole. It also claims that different organizations should strive for different levels of maturity, depending on their properties. This paper presents an empirical investigation of these claims, based on a sample of 120 organizations and looking at a selection of organizational properties. Our results reveal that higher BPM maturity contributes to better performance, but only up to a point. Interestingly, it contradicts the popular belief that higher innovativeness is associated with lower BPM maturity, rather showing that higher innovativeness is associated with higher BPM maturity. In addition, the paper shows that companies in different regions have a different level of BPM maturity. These findings can be used as a benchmark and a motivation for organizations to increase their BPM maturity.

Highlights

Business Process Management (BPM) is a contemporary management technique that focuses on managing an organization’s operations in terms of ‘business processes’
They became popular with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) (Paulk 1993)
To answer the research questions, this paper reports on an empirical investigation into the relation between an organization’s innovativeness, BPM maturity level and performance

Summary

Introduction

Business Process Management (BPM) is a contemporary management technique that focuses on managing an organization’s operations in terms of ‘business processes’. BPM delivers the methods, tools and techniques to identify, analyse, execute, monitor and change these business processes, resulting in a cycle of continuous improvement (Davenport 1993). It is often contrasted with the more traditional function-based management, in that emphasizes customers and relations between activities and, by doing so, aims to achieve higher customer satisfaction and better collaboration between individual business functions (Dumas et al 2013). The CMM and other maturity models operate as a tool that enables organizations to rank specific processes according to how structured they are described, managed, measured and optimized. This claim is supported by a large number of studies (e.g.: Jiang et al 2004; Herbsleb and Zubrow 1997; Herbsleb and Goldenson 1996; Krishnan and Kellner 1999; Krishnan and Kriebel 2000), an overview

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