P Willaert

A global investigation of key turning points in business process maturity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of research into the precedence of the maturity factors, or key turning points in business process maturity (BPM) implementation efforts. A key turning point is a component of BPM that stabilizes within an organization and leads to the next maturity level.Design/methodology/approach – Several years of data from over 1,000 companies in the USA, Europe, China, and Brazil that have completed a BPM assessment are analyzed to identify which components of BPM stabilize, when and in what order. Different analysis methods are employed in order to identify global commonalities and differences.Findings – The paper identifies key turning points from several different perspectives using several different approaches and develops some conclusions common to all methods used in this research.Research limitations/implications – The relationship between the components (dependencies) is only suggested but not statistically analyzed. Several data sets are also o...

The process-oriented organisation: a holistic view developing a framework for business process orientation maturity

Processes are the core of organisations. Business ProcessManagement (BPM) argues organisations can gain competitive advantage byimproving and innovating their processes through a holistic process-oriented view. An organisation can be more or less process-oriented depending on theirexperience in applying process thinking for better results. The aim of this paperis to define a framework for identifying characteristics of Business ProcessOrientation and to provide a valid tool for measuring the degree of BusinessProcess Orientation (BPO) of an organisation based on empirical research in 30international organisations. A holistic view on integrated process managementand change is taken as a starting point.

Drivers and Barriers for E-Business: Evolution Over Time and Comparison Between SMEs and Large Companies

The ups and downs of e-business investments are related to a hype cycle. This hype cycle strengthened the statement that companies are too willing to believe in the promises of the new Internet economy without really thinking about internet-ability. According to the data in this practice-oriented survey work, SMEs are more eager to follow the e-business hype cycle. We try to give some explanations for these differences in e-business between SMEs and large companies. This requires an examination of the planning, the drivers and the barriers for conducting business processes over a computer-mediated network. We found that larger companies are mainly driven by cost-cutting to implement e-business, while SMEs attach, next to cost-savings, high importance to cooperation between their suppliers and clients. Furthermore, we can observe that larger companies see more opportunities in translating their ebusiness strategy into a formal long-term plan. This explains perhaps why larger companies are less trend sensitive for investing in e-business than SMEs.