With the increasing uncertainty and turbulence of the business environment, the share of unpredictable and exceptional scenarios in business operations grows as never before. Business process management (BPM) research reacts to this trend by adapting conventional BPM methods to the needs of knowledge-intensive business processes (kiBPs) that highly rely on the expertise of workers involved in their execution.

In practice, most organizations ignore the knowledge side of kiBPs and continue to manage these processes by applying conventional BPM methods only suitable for routine and repeatable processes, which undermines the performance of kiBPs. The reason behind the discrepancy between theory and practice is that business practitioners are mostly unaware of the drawbacks of conventional BPM methods in the context of kiBPs.

Therefore, the project aims to contribute to the emerging field of kiBPs research by showing the drawbacks of conventional BPM methods in the context of kiBPs and adapting them to the needs of kiBPs. In particular, we aim to re-examine the notion that a high process maturity leads to high process capability in the context of kiBPs by conducting case study research in knowledge-intensive firms.

Publications