Research

Research interests

I am passionate about all topics related to business processes and improving an organization's way of working.

Some examples are:

  • the adoption and evolution of a process-oriented approach (e.g. maturity models)

  • organisational capabilities and the impact on culture, people, strategy, and structure

  • contextual factors affecting process realisations (e.g. contingency approach)

  • IT governance and soft skills

  • business (process) performance and outcomes

  • digital innovation with transformations triggered by emerging technologies

  • IT adoption and acceptance models

  • Sustainability issues for greening and humanizing digital work

  • process modelling (e.g. BPMN, UML, EPC)

  • process integration and inter-organisational (or cross-organisational) processes

Vision

We have developed and validated a framework with 17 capabilities that organisations can address to perform better, depending on their needs.


The capabilities in the framework are organised in a lower layer and an upper layer:

  • Lower layer = capabilities or characteristics per process, linked to the typical process lifecycle (e.g. modelling, deployment, optimisation, management)

  • Upper layer = capabilities or characteristics that impact on more or all processes in an organisation (e.g. culture, structure)

More details per capability can be found here (sections 3 & 4).


The framework also visualises a difference between:

  • Business Process Management (BPM) = lower layer

  • → focus of most research on processes

  • Business Process Orientation (BPO) = lower layer + upper layer

  • → new focus in the process literature


More details on this difference between BPM and BPO can be found here (section 3).