Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Is the case study approach an appropriate methodology in public administration research? In contrast to the views of McCurdy and Cleary (1984), White (1986b), and others, Mary Timney Bailey posits that case study methods are central to the work ofphysics, chemistry, and other "hard" sciences which those critics seek to emulate in the study of Public Administration. She argues that properly structured case studies will live up to the scientific standards of rigor, including generalizability, transferability, and replicatability. In addition, Bailey addresses the argument against the practitionerfocused research by reasserting Dwight Waldo's contention that a bond exists between theory and practice in public administration. Research methods in public administration have been the subject of ongoing discussion in Public Administration Review in recent years. Articles on this subject include McCurdy and Cleary's (1984) study of doctoral dissertations in public administration, White's (1986b) replication and enhancement of their study, and Stallings's (1986) assessment of doctoral programs in public administration from the perspective of an outsider. White (1986a) also examined the theory-building potential of interpretive and critical research, and Kraemer and Perry (1989) studied the institutional setting for academic research in public administration. <s> BIB001 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> This paper provides exploratory evidence on the cross-sectional association between process management techniques and two profit measures: return on assets and return on sales. Using a sample of firms in two industries automotive and computer and four countries Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United States, we find that certain process management techniques improve profitability while others have little effect on financial performance. In particular, long-term partnerships with suppliers and customers are associated with higher performance in both industries. The value of other techniques such as statistical process control, process capability studies, and cycle time analysis, on the other hand, appears to vary by industry, reflecting differences in the stages of the two industries' process management practices. Finally, computer organizations following an innovation-oriented strategy earned significantly higher accounting returns regardless of the process management techniques employed, suggesting that these techniques have only a second-order effect on performance in this industry. <s> BIB002 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Abstract The use of field-based empirical methodologies in the production and operations management (POM) area has been steadily increasing over the past several years. One of the most prominent among these is the survey research methodology which has often been used to capture data from business organizations. However, to effectively contribute to theory development in the POM field, this methodology must be carefully implemented. Poorly designed and executed survey research is of little or no value. This paper attempts to provide a normative perspective on `good survey research practices'. In doing so, it attempts to bridge the gap between survey research and theory development. The paper liberally draws from work in other social science disciplines like psychology, marketing, organizational behavior, and other related fields that are more mature in the use of surveys, and applies it to the POM area. A set of ideal survey research attributes are identified, and existing POM survey work in four prestigious academic journals is evaluated with respect to these attributes. Results of assessing 25 survey-based articles published in these journals between 1990 and 1995 indicate that both exploratory as well as explanatory survey research is being conducted, with current emphasis being more on explanatory kind of research. In order to move the field forward, greater attention will need to be focused on employing multi-item constructs, assessing them for content validity, and purifying them through field-based pretesting. More sophisticated POM studies in the future would have to aim for testing theory with reliable and valid scales that are relatively free of measurement related errors. It is hoped that this work will act as a catalyst in compressing the learning curve with respect to survey research practices in POM, and also accelerate the use of greater methodological rigor in future empirical studies in the field. <s> BIB003 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs.Design/methodology/approach – An online survey was carried out in the years 2003‐2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands.Findings – The survey indicates that this “top ten” of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified.Research limitations/implications – The authors' estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research.Practical implications – The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs.Originality/value... <s> BIB004 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to defining the tasks necessary to process management, considering both conceptual and practical views.Design/methodology/approach – Bibliographic review for tasks mentioned as typically necessary to process management, plus a field survey involving professionals working in process management.Findings – The bibliographic review yielded a set of tasks that were grouped conceptually into “designing processes”, “managing processes from day to day” and “fostering process‐related learning”. These groups were then validated with practioners as valid constructs. The field survey produced two major findings: the first underlining the practical importance of the tasks identified as necessary to process management and the second demonstrating that most organizations where the study participants work are structured functionally, but have practices for managing cross‐functional processes or “end‐to‐end process”. The conceptual and practical comparison brings to lig... <s> BIB005 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – Extensive literature on business process management suggests that organizations could enhance their overall performance by adopting a process view of business. However, there is a lack of empirical research in this field. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the understanding of the process view and process maturity levels in a transition economy and to test the impact of process orientation maturity level on organizational performance.Design/methodology/approach – Empirical investigation combined an exploratory‐confirmatory approach using factor analysis and structural equation modeling.Findings – The investigation confirms the impact of business process orientation on organizational performance in a transition economy. The link is even stronger than in the original investigation. The results show that business process orientation leads to better non‐financial performance and indirectly to better financial performance.Practical implications – The research confirms that business process o... <s> BIB006 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Business processes have been discussed for more than a decade now. However, there are not as of yet comprehensive and substantial benefits that can justify the hype around the concept. This paper contrasts and summarises the main findings of literature research and a targeted survey conducted within the service industry in order to investigate the current state of research and practice regarding key aspects of business processes. The survey involved the participation of 25 respondents working in service industry sectors such as finance, public sector and consultancy. The paper demonstrates that although theoretical developments are dealing with sophisticated issues around business processes, the service industry is reluctant to adopt a similar perspective and still uses simple and manual techniques in dealing with business processes. The main reason is that the service industry is not convinced that a business process approach could bring significant tangible and measurable benefits. This is due to the fact that there is no comprehensive and systematic solution proposed in terms of a fully functional business process software suite. The requirements for an integrated business process management tool include some of the paper's findings. <s> BIB007 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore project types (PTs) of business process management (BPM). PTs are a key concept to describe development situations in situational method engineering (SME). SME acts on the assumption that generic methods need to be adapted to the specifics of the development situation in which they are to be applied.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on results from an empirical analysis directed at the identification of design factors of and realization approaches to BPM. It extends an earlier study through the inclusion of new data points that allow for the derivation and characterization of PTs. To this end, multivariate data analysis techniques such as regression analysis, factor analysis, and cluster analysis are applied. Albeit inherently behavioral, the research described in the paper constitutes an important foundation for subsequent design research (DR) activities, in particular for the engineering of situational methods.Findings – The analysis suggests... <s> BIB008 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – The paper aims at providing a survey of the development of empirical research in business process management (BPM). It seeks to study trends in empirical BPM research and applied methodologies by means of a developed framework in order to identify the status quo and to assess the probable future development of the research field.Design/methodology/approach – In order to analyse the development of the research field a systematic literature review of empirical journal articles in the BPM context is conducted. The retrieved literature is analyzed by means of scientometric methods and a developed reference framework.Findings – The steadily growing number of published articles in empirical BPM research shows an increase in interest in the research field. Research interests, applied methodologies, the underlying research paradigm and the level of maturity of empirical BPM research differ depending on regional aspects. BPM gains importance in the industry as well as in the public administration context... <s> BIB009 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Open Innovation' is a management perspective that suggests to systematically make use of knowledge that lies outside of an organization's boundaries for innovation initiatives. It has been heavily discussed for product innovation, however, an 'open' perspective on business process innovation - here referred to as 'open process innovation' - has not yet been taken. Examining open process innovation in the public sector, we draw from network management literature and develop an actor- and network-oriented analytical approach. The paper seeks to investigate into what are Business Process Management (BPM) networks, how do they constitute empirically, and are there differences between countries? With the help of a quantitative study in Germany and Japan, we show that the formation of public sector BPM networks is heavily impacted by politico-administrative system variables. The study provides evidence that open process innovation does take place, but different actor sets that play an important role in the respective countries. Based on these findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed, for instance, the network role and skill set requirement of the BPM Manager. <s> BIB010 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> This paper studies the role of business process management in creating a higher business process orientation. The purpose is to analyze previously suggested practices to identify those that are critical at a certain business process orientation maturity level and those that are not. A case study is used to identify the critical success factors. Then a statistical analysis of a sample of 324 companies is undertaken to operationalize the success factors in the form of critical practices. Organizations following these critical practices at a certain level will reach higher process orientation sooner. <s> BIB011 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – Several organizations choose a process‐oriented organizational design as a source for competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically the relationship between process orientation (PO) and firm performance. The paper considers PO as a multidimensional construct and examines how its underlying dimensions impact different aspects of organizational performance.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses an exploratory research design and investigates the effects of the different PO dimensions on profitability, customer satisfaction, product quality, and time‐based performance using a random sample of Austrian manufacturing firms.Findings – The empirical findings reveal that process performance measurement, a process‐oriented organizational structure, the application of continuous process improvement methods, and – in particular – a culture in line with the process approach, are significantly and positively associated with organizational performance.Originality/value – Whi... <s> BIB012 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> Purpose – In contemporary businesses, the importance of knowledge workers and the knowledge intensive business processes (KIBPs) is ever increasing, yet they seem very hard to control and manage. The purpose of this paper is to grasp the specific characteristics of KIBPs and how they differ from non‐knowledge intensive business processes (non‐KIBP), also to question how organizations are using business process management (BPM) to manage and improve KIBPs. The differences in maturity and effectiveness of both types of processes are also evaluated. ::: ::: Design/methodology/approach – Data for this research were collected through an online survey. The survey was designed based on a previously conducted exploratory study with semi‐structured interviews as well as the literature. The target group was BPM practitioners and the final sample included 98 respondents. Due to non‐normality, the analyses were conducted with non‐parametric tests. The research questions were analysed using Mann‐Whitney U test and Spearman's correlations. ::: ::: Findings – It was found that KIBP and non‐KIBP have clearly different characteristics, such as the level of complexity, repeatability and creativity required. Also it was found that these processes are not managed or improved differently than non‐KIBPs, and suggest that organizations need to take these differences into consideration while managing and improving these processes. Furthermore, the results suggest that applying methodologies that aim to provide operational improvements may not necessarily produce the best results for KIBPs. ::: ::: Originality/value – The paper answers a call for further development of the body of knowledge on knowledge‐intensive business processes, a rapidly emerging field of interest for BPM practitioners, where a clear gap in literature exists. <s> BIB013 </s> Surveys in business process management – a literature review <s> 707 <s> The information systems (IS) field continues to debate the relative importance of rigor and relevance in its research. While the pursuit of rigor in research is important, we argue that further effort is needed to improve practical relevance, not only in terms of topics, but also by ensuring contextual relevance. While content validity is often performed rigorously, validated survey instruments may still lack contextual relevance and be out of touch with practice. We argue that IS behavioral research can improve its practical relevance without loss of rigor by carefully addressing a number of contextual issues in instrumentation design. In this opinion article, we outline five guidelines – relating to both rigor and relevance – designed to increase the contextual relevance of field survey research, using case examples from the area of IS security. They are: (1) inform study respondents that a behavior is an ISP violation, (2) measure specific examples of ISP violations, (3) ensure that ISP violations are important ISP problems in practice, (4) ensure the applicability of IS security violations to the organizational context, and (5) consider the appropriate level of specificity and generalizability for instrumentation. We review previous behavioral research on IS security and show that no existing study meets more than three of these five guidelines. By applying these guidelines where applicable, IS scholars can increase the contextual relevance of their instrumentation, yielding results more likely to address important problems in practice. <s> BIB014
Surveys in business process management However, our analysis reveals that in some cases they do not cover all of them. Therefore, we recommend that authors of surveys should utilize reference frameworks (e.g.   or BPM maturity models to ensure that surveys get a comprehensive view of BPM. While we were analyzing the surveys from the content-based perspective, we found evidence in surveys of almost every class supporting the assumption that companies have a different BPM demand. Studies in class I reveal that organizations have a different demand on BP design or BP modeling which is likely to be influenced by internal and external parameters. Studies in class II operationalize BPM/BPO using scales measuring the organization's BPM/BPO (maturity) level. Some studies imply that a higher maturity level results in a better performance of the dependent variable. In any case, it might be interesting to know the "best" maturity level  . Further evidence that organizations follow a different approach to BPM is provided by some studies pooled in class III, since it was found out that organizations adapt BPM differently and mostly strive for a customized BPM approach BIB008 . It could be interesting to explore what a customized BPM approach constitutes and whether one for each organization or one "best-practice" for a particular industry exists. The authors of one study assigned to class V found out, among others, that practitioners ask for suggestions how to introduce BPM in their organizations and to determine the factors in order to choose the most appropriate BPM BIB005 . Research in this field can help organizations to design a tailored BPM solution that fits their internal and external environment. A misfit might result in expenses for an ineffective BPM solution which does not get paid-off  . In the future, scholars should, first, confirm this research gap by incorporating all research contributions, second, operationalize the BPM demand and explore the internal and environmental (external) characteristics that influence it and, third, explore how and why this is the case. However, such research endeavors could be hardly investigated using surveys (see the discussion at the end of this section). Subsequently, we analyzed the samples used in the surveys. The majority of authors of the analyzed surveys do not interrogate organizations of a particular industry. However, based on both our finding that organizations might have a different BPM demand and the claim of some authors for further research (e.g. BIB011 BIB012 , we conclude that it would be worthwhile to draw a sample of a particular industry to gather, for example industry-specific BP design/BP modeling requirements (class I), draw conclusions regarding the performance impact of BPO (class II), shed light on industry-specific development/evolution paths (class III), survey the status quo in an industry (class IV), collect the scientific research demand of the respective industry (class V) and, finally, develop industry-specific BPO scales (class VI). Our analysis reveals that BPM has been studied in different regions/countries to different extends. Mostly, BPM was studied in Europe (Germany, England, Holland, Croatia, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland and Slovenia), America (Brazil, Canada and USA) and Asia (China, India, Japan and South Korea). We did not found any study through our review that has appeared in a ranked journal/proceeding and explicitly surveyed organizations in African or Oceania countries. Therefore, future research might conduct surveys in further countries or regions that have hardly/not been addressed by BPM researcher so far. Such research endeavors contribute to the BPM body of 708 BPMJ 21,3 knowledge, by verifying the validity of theories in other countries (e.g. BIB006  BIB012 and by examining the effect of the country's specific contextual embeddedness on BPM (e.g. BIB010 BIB011 . Moreover, our analysis reveals that the targeted interviewees were mainly managers as well as quality-and processmanagers (role of interviewees). This might bear the risk of getting biased answers due to the lack of triangulation BIB003 . On the other hand, operative staff might not have the necessary insights to answer the questions properly. Nevertheless, further surveys should incorporate the answers of both the operational staff and managers. This allows a bigger and more comprehensive picture of BPM and especially about how BPM is recognized on the "shop-floor" to be drawn. Our literature review shows that a lot of surveys have been published in the BPM literature so far. We found descriptive surveys that present the status quo of BPM, explorative surveys that allow to become more familiar with BPM topics and explanative surveys that test theories BIB009  BIB003 . Although, survey research seems to be very useful for these kinds of research endeavors, they are accompanied by limitations and shortcomings (see, e.g. BIB003 as well as Bailey, 1992 for a discussion). Since surveys allow to collect quantitative data  and thus, cannot account for potentially but important variations related to the specific context BIB001 , there is the risk of producing "reliable but insignificant 'so what' results" (Bailey, 1992, p. 50) . Consequently, such research results can be helpful for practitioners as a starting point only but the latter ones ask for adaptable theories due to their different BPM demand (compare our conclusion above in this section). However, such theories allowing tailoring BPM implementations to specific requirements of practitioners could not be developed through survey research as they rely on quantitative data and do not consider the context. Some authors of the surveys incorporated in this review emphasize the importance of taking into account the context and suggest qualitative research endeavors to investigate the influence of the context on BPM (e.g. BIB002 BIB004  BIB013 BIB011 . As a result, in order to gain such insights, qualitative open-ended inquiries using qualitative data are necessary to develop "tentative theories"  . By developing such theories the scientific community could satisfy the specific requirements of the BPM practitioners more likely. Thus, we expect that the scientific community is the target audience of the surveys although in almost all contributions the authors claim implications for practice. From our point of view, these implications provide good starting points for practitioners. However, most of these implications seem to be too abstract for practitioners as they provide too less detail how to adapt them in order to exploit their opportunities or to resolve problems (cf. BIB014  . Our suspicion is supported by findings in some of the incorporated contributions (e.g. BIB005 BIB007 .