Factors and competences for business process managemant systems implementation

Abstract

The market for Business Process Management (BPM) software is growing rapidly, predictions for 2010 range from anywhere between 1 to 6 billion dollars, this means the market has more than doubled since 2005. Although there is a lot of publicity regarding BPM there is still much debate on what BPM is. This is also true for BPM software, commonly knows as Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Therefore this research provides an investigation on BPMS. More specifically the history and future of BPMS are described together with the issues concerning the implementation of BPMS. The main research question in this dissertation is: What factors and competences determine the success of Business Process Management Systems implementation in a particular situation? To answer this question the following research sub-questions were formulated: 1. What are the success factors of Business Process Management System implementations? 2. What are the competencies needed by stakeholders involved in Business Process Management System implementations projects? 3. How can an implementation method for Business Process Management System implementation be made context sensitive? Current BPM-Systems are derived from earlier business and IT innovations. However, the combination of functionality, concepts and characteristics in BPMS make new applications in IT possible. However current BPMSs are very much based on the agricultural- and industrial-based view of the economy. Currently western economies are rapidly moving towards an information and service economy in which the ratio of knowledge workers is rising dramatically. So while many organizations are initiating business process improvement projects to improve their processes, this is done with BPM-systems that are mostly only capable of supporting straight through processes and workflow processes but not dynamic and collaborative processes. Therefore we propose a new architecture for BPM-systems that include functionality to support knowledge workers in their dynamic and collaborative activities and processes. The success factors for BPMS implementation that are identified in this research are both qualitatively and quantitatively validated. A list of 55 success factors is constructed of which 14 are classified as critical success factors when implementing BPMS in a Dutch organization. Based on the factors found we can conclude that paying attention to the technique of process modeling is not crucial during a BPMS implementation, taking into account the culture of the organization is. Furthermore we researched the competences (knowledge, skills and attitudes) that project members involved in BPMS implementation projects. We found that during the implementation of a BPM-System there should be both business and Information Technology knowledge and skills available within the project team. Based on both the success factors and the competences that are identified a method is provided that establishes situational factors of and their influence on implementation methods. The provided method aims at enabling a more successful implementation project, because the project team can create a more suitable implementation method for business process management system implementation projects.