Business process management and digitalization – a reciprocal relationship

Purpose

This study investigated the interplay between business process management (BPM) and digitalization in organizations and developed principles for designing their interaction.

Design/methodology/approach

This study was explorative and used a questionnaire-based survey that involved experts in BPM and digitalization who were actively engaged in these two domains in their organizations to come up with the design principles. The survey and the design principles were based on Rosemann and vom Brocke's (2010) six core elements of BPM.

Findings

Digitalization was seen as influencing how BPM is practiced in organizations by strengthening organizations’ focus on BPM, and conversely, BPM was perceived as beneficial for digitalization and digitalization outcomes. In addition, based on Rosemann and vom Brocke’s six core elements of BPM, we proposed six principles for designing the interplay of BPM and digitalization in organizations.

Research limitations/implications

Our empirical investigation was situated in a Norwegian context and included 104 respondents. While we have no reason to believe that our findings should not be valid and useful in other regions, this is a limitation in generalizing our findings, and a natural follow-up would be to investigate our research questions in other geographical areas. We are also aware of the potential response bias in our sample. Moreover, to outline the principles for designing the interactions of BPM and digitalization, we applied the six core elements of BPM by Rosemann and vom Brocke (2010) as our theoretical lens. We acknowledge that there are more issues related to the interplay of BPM and digitalization than we have dealt with in this study.

Practical implications

This study has several implications for organizations. First, managers may use our proposed design principles to decide how to integrate BPM and digitalization. Second, although this study showed that each discipline nurtures its own culture, building an organizational culture that combines values from each discipline can enable a process-oriented organization to innovate its operations and services with digital technology. Third, managers should align the responsibilities and tasks of process owners with the demands for the digitalization of business processes. Fourth, managers, when integrating BPM and digitalization, should take care not to impede the generative attributes of each discipline.

Social implications

Processes and digital technologies play important roles in society at all levels. BPM seeks to understand how processes unfold and explores how new practices may better serve individuals, organizations and society (vom Brocke et al., 2021), while digitalization is concerned with how various kinds of modern digital technologies may trigger organizational and social changes (Markus and Rowe, 2023; Suri and Jack, 2016).

Originality/value

This study is one of the first studies to investigate the interplay between BPM and digitalization – how digitalization affects BPM practices in organizations and how BPM influences digitalization outcomes. In addition, this study offers novel principles for designing the interaction between BPM and digitalization.