Jan Recker

Blockchains for Business Process Management - Challenges and Opportunities

Blockchain technology offers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first reflect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond. We conclude our discourse with a summary of seven research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology in the context of BPM.

Development and validation of an instrument to measure and manage organizational process variety

Organizational processes vary. Practitioners have developed simple frameworks to differentiate them. Surprisingly, the academic literature on process management does not–it typically strives for one method to manage all processes. We draw on organizational information-processing theory to systematically develop a new, theoretically motivated classification model for organizational processes. We validate this model using survey data from 141 process practitioners of a global corporation. We derive three distinct types of processes and demonstrate that an understanding of process variety based on process dimensions can differentiate processes better than existing frameworks used in practice. Our findings can enable process managers to make informed decisions and serve as a basis for contingent process management.

The complexities of sustainability and design: How sustainable are our systems designs?: Can we design systems for sustainability?

Systems design is complex to begin with but even more so when requirements of ‘sustainable design’ are added. This notion is of particular relevant to communities interested in building systems that contribute to greening the planet, i.e., with environmental sustainability of technology-based systems. The solution potential of such ‘sustainability systems’ is immense but impact to date is sparse. Industry scandals like the Dieselgate affair also demonstrate the relevance, complexities and intricacies associated with such systems. In this keynote I will critically review systems design research concerned with sustainability. I will point to several challenges and problems that hamper progress and then present new insights into the ongoing development of a meaningful ‘grand’ theory of sustainable systems design with prescriptive design principles that can hopefully lead to more impactful solution-oriented systems design research on sustainability.