Abstract:
Business Process Management (BPM) is a pivotal driver of operational excellence and sustained organizational performance. To effectively institutionalize BPM at the enterprise level, organizations must establish a robust BPM governance (BPM-G) that provides structure and guidance for all BPM activities. Despite its recognized importance in industry and academia, there remains a need for a comprehensive conceptualization of BPM-G, particularly concerning its configurational diversity and embedding in the organizational context. In response, we develop a taxonomy of BPM-G based on justificatory knowledge from the literature on BPM and corporate governance, as well as interview data from a diverse set of organizations. We demonstrate and evaluate the taxonomy in three steps, presenting three illustrative cases that showcase the usefulness of the taxonomy for describing and analyzing BPM-G. Based on the evaluated taxonomy as our primary contribution, we then advance a context-aware understanding of BPM-G. We specify the relation between BPM-G and corporate governance as well as process governance, discussing how the design of BPM-G is influenced by the organizational tensions of centralization vs. decentralization and standardization vs. flexibilization.
