Business Process Management: Don't Forget to Improve the Process!

摘要

In this paper we stressed the importance of BPM research to focus on improving business processes rather than improving the artifacts produced by BPM techniques and tools, such as process models. We did so by reflecting on the contributions of the BPM research community, followed by a short history of the BPM discipline, to highlight, among others, its roots in Office Information and Workflow Management systems. Next, we defined what it means to build better processes in terms of process performance, as captured by KPIs and their target values. Finally, we sketched two possible research directions for bringing BPM research closer to the original BPM goal of process improvement, and concluded with an overview of the papers presented in this special issue.