Digitalization and Routines - Another Look at Business Process Management

摘要

This key note examines the changing role of business process management from a broader perspective of organizational change routines. It seeks to integrate and contextualize business process management with recent advances in theorizing about routines and their change in the context of deep digitalization of firm operations. While business process management emerges from the internal, computational view of business process management advocated by computer science community since the 80's where the driving concern has been for semantically correct computational processes and their efficient enactment, the research on organizational routines provides an external view of this focal phenomenon. Studies of organizational routines have emerged from evolutionary economics and organizational theory as scholars have sought to examine and explain the structuring, evolution and effects of business routines and their enactment in evolving organizational and industrial contexts. The main focus of these inquiries been to account for economic or organizational effectiveness of coordination and collaboration tasks enabled by varying routine constellations. In the process management stream the key concerns have been efficient process execution, its semantic correctness, consistent state maintenance, exception handling and possibility for process mining and discovery. In the latter the dominant issues have been environmental fit and change, adaptability, maintenance of organizational memory, performativity and learning from and for process execution. The talk will review both research streams and look for their strengths and weaknesses. We call also for better integration and receptivity of organizational theory concepts to process management and execution and the need for routine theory to recognize the relevance of computational perspectives in accounting for process change and execution. The need for integration has become increasingly relevant and intra and inter-organizational business processes are increasingly automated and engulfed with intelligence. Several examples of using routines as a framing device to study organizational change are offered to demonstrate the value and relevance of such view on process management scholarship.