A Study into the Critical Success Factors When Implementing Business Process Management Systems

摘要

Nowadays the interest in Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is rising enormously. There arc a lot of software developers and consultancy firms that arc jumping to the occasion and are selling Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that are based on these concepts (Hill, 2006). Hearing these companies talk, it is mostly about 'What' the BPM and SOA concepts are and 'Why' companies should start projects. Often the aim of such projects is turning a company's current application portfolio to a Service Oriented Architecture that can make the business more agile by using Business Process Management concepts and putting the business in the lead where it concerns the use of IT. Business Process Management Systems arc based on developments in both the business and IT domain (figure I). First, two major business trends that relate to BPM arc Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineer-ing (BPR) (Deming 1982, Hammer and Champy 1993). Second, we can identify a rise in the implementation and use of new types of information systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Workflow Management (WFM) systems, advanced planning systems and so on. What once started as the automation of a company's internal processes has now become digitization of supply chains (Davis and Spekman 2003). One of the key contributors to this has been the Internet and the associated network standardization. Because existing methods to implement management concepts were not equipped to handle complicated IT developments as part of a project (Kettinger et al, 1997), and IT implementations started to impact the way in which business were run more and more, all these trends slowly converged into new types of information systems, that some (Smith and Fingar 2003) call Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). A BPMS can be defined as "a generic software system that is driven by explicit process designs to enact and manage operational business processes" (Wcske ct al. 2004).