| dc.description.abstract | Business Process Management (BPM) is a special field for more than one reason.
First of all, BPM is a crossroad of multiple, quite different viewpoints. Business
managers are attracted to BPM because of its demonstrated ability to deliver improvements
in organizational performance, regulatory compliance and service quality.
Industrial engineers see BPM as an opportunity to apply well-trodden manufacturing
optimization techniques in the context of organizations that deliver services
rather than physical products. Finally, Information Technology (IT) specialists appreciate
the fact that BPM provides them with a shared language to communicate
with business stakeholders. Furthermore, business process automation technology
allows IT specialists to implement and monitor IT systems in a way that is aligned
with the vision that business stakeholders have of the organization. In other words,
BPM is a boundary-spanning field that serves as a melting pot for otherwise separate
communities. For those who have experienced how business managers, industrial
engineers and IT professionals often seem to live in different worlds, this shared
field of interest is a remarkable opportunity to achieve a joint understanding of the
inner workings of a business.
A second special characteristic of BPM is that it is both actively practiced and
actively researched. In other words, it is a field where there are both proven and established
practices as well as open challenges. Businesses around the world are carrying
out BPM initiatives with the aim to, for example, outperform their competitors
or meet the demands of regulatory authorities. Academics in fields like computer
science, management science, sociology, and engineering are working on the development
of methods and techniques to support such initiatives. It is appropriate to see
BPM as a “theory in practice” field. On the one hand, practical demands inspire the
development of new methods and technologies. On the other hand, the application
of these methods and technologies in practice feeds back to the drawing boards in
universities and research centers. | en_US |
