Introduction
The management and research discipline of business process management (BPM) covers a wide range of activities such as the identification, analysis, design, implementation, and continuous improvement of organizational processes (Dumas et al., Rosemann, vom Brocke 2015). While early contributions in BPM were focusing on the design and re-design of single processes within organizations, nowadays, contemporary research is concerned with a more holistic view on managing organizational (business) processes (vom Brocke, Mendling 2018). Hence, BPM aims to develop corporate capabilities in order to meet the organization's strategy (vom Brocke et al. 2014). The discipline also evolved from an analyzing and improving practice towards a holistic and comprehensive management approach: Besides the deployment of modern information technologies, BPM also deals with task- and people-related issues, including strategic alignment, governance, methods, technology, people, and culture (Rosemann & vom Brocke, 2015; vom Brocke & Rosemann, 2015).
In this article, we present a tool – the BPM Billboard – which has been developed to capture all relevant aspects of a successful BPM approach in a “one-page-representation”. The Billboard was first presented as part of the new BPM Cases Book (vom Brocke, Mendling, et al., 2021a) , and it is used in many projects, now, also supported by Signavio and SAP to assist organizations in implementing Business Process Intelligence (see: https://www.signavio.com/downloads/short-reads/bpm-billboard).
The BPM Billboard
Planning, communicating, and coordinating BPM initiatives demands systematic execution along with the corporate strategy and its organizational capabilities. We would like to introduce you to the BPM Billboard, as presented in Figure 1. It outlines the essential elements constituting a BPM approach.
The BPM Billboard is a new tool and device for both scholars as well as practitioners to plan and scope their BPM initiatives and to derive tangible projects to deliver the strategy. The BPM Billboard helps professionals to link important and essential elements, such as a corporations' strategy, its organizational capability areas in its specific context. It can also be denoted as a reference model to implement such elements according to their individual (organizational) requirements.
What elements does it consist of? This holistic tool, presented on one page, is structured along four interrelated layers and can be compared to other holistic approaches such as the BCG matrix (Hambrick et al., 1982), for example. In essence, the BPM Billboard supports practitioners and various stakeholders to build a consistent and intuitive narrative on the relationships among the following five components. The tool is based on extensive BPM research, as e.g., on the BPM capabilities (Rosemann & vom Brocke, 2015; vom Brocke & Rosemann, 2015), the 10 principles of good BPM (vom Brocke et al. 2014), BPM governance (Markus, L. 2015), BPM culture (Schmiedel et al., 2015), context-aware BPM (vom Brocke et al., 2021, 2021), BPM skills (Müller et al., 2016), BPM strategy and value (Burlton, R.T. 205; vom Brocke & Sonnenberg, 2015), to name but a few. The billboard puts all these considerations on one page and, thus, makes it easy to consider them in practice, e.g. when planning or communicating BPM (vom Brocke, Mendling, et al., 2021b). The billboard consists of the following components:
- Strategy: BPM's strategic alignment with the organization
- Context: BPM's relationship to the organization's context
- Capability: identifying and developing the organization's BPM-related capabilities
- Projects: actual BPM-related projects that provide a strategic impact
- Results: achieved by the different projects and programs
To illustrate the BPM Billboard, let's have a look at the SAP Case called “How to Move from Paper to Impact in Business Process Management: The Journey of SAP” (Reisert et al., 2018) and presented in the BPM Cases Book Vol. 2 (vom Brocke, Mendling, et al., 2021a). SAP reported having significantly simplified its internal processes and raised overall productivity.
Strategy: The SAP case is oriented to the clear strategic objective of “producing innovative solutions faster and more simply,” which gave focus to the BPM program as it was being designed. Defining a clear focus for the BPM initiative helped SAP deliver tangible, valuable results.
Context: Planning and scoping the BPM initiative required paying close attention to SAP's unique context. SAP's innovations enable more than 300,000 customers in 190 countries to work together more efficiently and use business insights more effectively. Hence, the approach faced a number of challenges, such as those related to the company's size and the global distribution of the units and people involved.
Capabilities: SAP initiated a comprehensive approach to develop organizational capabilities in all core areas, including methods, IT, strategic alignment, governance, people, and culture.
Project: Each of these measures was implemented in projects like developing the SAP Process Map and analyzing and communicating SAP's key processes, roles, and responsibilities. Thus, the BPM initiative was run as a portfolio of projects, each leading to the further development of BPM capabilities to meet the strategic objective to “produce innovative solutions faster and more simply.”
Results: In each of the projects at SAP, a strong emphasis was put on specific results to be achieved. For instance, regarding the development of a process improvement culture, specific artifacts have been defined to deliver such culture, namely the process excellence newsletter, summit, and award.
The Billboard and Real-World Cases
The BPM Billboard is presented in the BPM Cases Book “Digital Transformation – Strategy, Processes and Execution” edited by Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling and Michael Rosemann. This book gives a thorough introduction to the billboard (vom Brocke, Mendling, Rosemann, 2021).
The BPM Cases collection presents 43 real-world cases in two volumes including many well-known international companies, such as SAP, Siemens, Autogrill, Software AG, Zalando, Lufthansa, Bilfinger and others. This collection aims to provide contemporary and comprehensive industry insights in the context of BPM in complex work environments (vom Brocke et al. 2018). Besides presenting and discussing lessons learned from successful or failed attempts in BPM, it provides documented experiences. Each chapter and case takes a holistic and multi-dimensional approach. As such, the cases are described from a multi-dimensional perspective by covering the organization's strategies, deployed systems, and infrastructure, their governance structure and culture, as well as developed models and executed processes.
Access to the BPM Cases Book
The publisher – Springer Nature – has made the billboard paper publicly available open access: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-662-63047-1_1.pdf
An author version is available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345661487_Planning_and_Scoping_Business_Process_Management_with_the_BPM_Billboard
The entire book can be accessed here: https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783662630464
Executives and managers from world-renowned organizations have commented very positively about the book: “Digital technologies do not just facilitate innovative process designs, but enable entire new strategic options. This book provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of how to create process-enabled strategies in an opportunity-rich environment”, says Martin Petry, Hilti CIO. Also, Gero Decker, Signavio CEO, puts the holistic perspective of BPM in the foreground: “This is the first book to present the BPM Billboard – A new management tool to plan and scope BPM initiatives. The Billboard together with the insightful real-world cases offers valuable guidance towards BPM success from a holistic perspective.”
Signavio has created a poster on the BPM Billboard, which can be ordered for free to be shipped to you. Also, there is an online Version, which you can download on the Signavio Website. Check out, also, the many Webinars and Practice Sharing events run by Signavio and SAP on accelerating your BPM approach with the BPM Billboard.
Access to the BPM Billboard Poster
Signavio and SAP have created a poster for putting the BPM Billboard into practice, which is available for free both as a print and online version.
https://www.signavio.com/downloads/short-reads/bpm-billboard/
How to Get Started
Feel free to get in touch with us in order to get started using the billboard. We regularly run 360° Assessments online and workshops with companies to plan and scope their BPM imitative using the billboard. Just get in touch with us, you can assess all relevant information on the website: https://bpm-billboard.com.
Contribute Your Own Case
Have you ever wanted to report about your BPM initiatives and projects with a scientific and practice-oriented community? We are already working on the next volume (“BPM Cases Vol. 3”) and are looking forward to include your case. We welcome any submission, empirical, conceptual, or narrative in nature. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us! We are looking forward to it!
References
Hambrick, D. C., MacMillan, I. C., & Day, D. L. (1982). Strategic attributes and performance in the BCG matrix—A PIMS-based analysis of industrial product businesses. Academy of Management Journal, 25(3), 510–531.
Burlton R.T. (2015) Delivering Business Strategy Through Process Management. In: vom Brocke J, Rosemann M (eds) Handbook on business process management, vol 2, 2nd edn. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 311–332
Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, M., Reijers, H. (2018), Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Springer 2018.
Markus ML, Jacobson DD (2015) The governance of business processes. In: vom Brocke J, Rosemann M (eds) Handbook on business process management, vol 2, 2nd edn. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 311–332
Müller, O., Schmiedel, T., Gorbacheva, E., & vom Brocke, J. (2016). Towards a typology of business process management professionals: Identifying patterns of competences through latent semantic analysis. Enterprise Information Systems, 10(1), 50–80.
Reisert, C., Zelt, S., & Wacker, J. (2018). How to Move from Paper to Impact in Business Process Management: The Journey of SAP. In J. vom Brocke & J. Mendling (Eds.), Business Process Management Cases. Management for Professionals. Springer.
Rosemann, M., & vom Brocke, J. (2015). The Six Core Elements of Business Process Management. In J. vom Brocke & M. Rosemann (Eds.), Handbook on Business Process Management 1 (pp. 105–122). 2nd Edition, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Schmiedel, T., vom Brocke, J., & Recker, J. (2015). Culture in Business Process Management: How Cultural Values Determine BPM Success. In J. vom Brocke & M. Rosemann (Eds.), Handbook on Business Process Management 2 (pp. 649–663). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
vom Brocke, J., Baier, M.-S., Schmiedel, T., Stelzl, K., Röglinger, M., & Wehking, C. (2021). Context-Aware Business Process Management. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1–18.
vom Brocke, J., Mendling, J., & Rosemann, M. (Eds.). (2021a). Business Process Management Cases Vol. 2: Digital Transformation—Strategy, Processes and Execution. Springer Verlag.
vom Brocke, J., Mendling, J., & Rosemann, M. (2021b). Planning and Scoping Business Process Management with the BPM Billboard. In J. vom Brocke, J. Mendling, & M. Rosemann (Eds.), Business Process Management Cases—Digital Transformation—Strategy, Processes and Execution (Vol. 2). Springer.
vom Brocke, J., & Rosemann, M. (2015). Business Process Management. In C. L. Cooper (Ed.), Wiley Encyclopedia of Management (Vol. 7, pp. 1–9). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
vom Brocke, J., & Sonnenberg, C. (2015). Value-Orientation in Business Process Management. In J. vom Brocke & M. Rosemann (Eds.), Handbook on Business Process Management 2 (2nd ed., pp. 101–132). Springer.
vom Brocke, J., Maaß, W., Buxmann, P., Maedche, A., Leimeister, J. M., Pecht, G. (2018). Future Work and Enterprise Systems. Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE), 60, 357-366.
vom Brocke, J., Weber, M., & Grisold, T. (2021). The BPM Context Matrix—A Framework for Context-Aware Business Process Management (BPM). BPTrends Class Notes: BPM Research and Education. https://www.bptrends.com/class-notes-the-bpm-context-matrix-a-framework-for-context-aware-business-process-management-bpm/
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