قابلیت های فرآیند مدیریت کسب و کار در دولت های محلی:مطالعه چند روشی

Business Process Management (BPM) is a topic of greatest relevance to government innovation. While the concept originally stems from the private sector, public sector organizations have established BPM capabilities and are in the move of developing these further. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, literature does however not yet provide a comprehensive picture of BPM capabilities in governments. In this paper, we thus examine BPM capabilities on the local government level by means of an intertwined quantitative survey and (representative) qualitative in-depth case study. We identify a set of BPM challenges and reflect on the power of prevalent BPM capability assessment and development models, mostly maturity models, to provide good guidance. We suggest taking into account organizational positions in order to overcome the significant shortcoming of the ‘maturity’ concept, especially the focus on convergence towards an “ideal” state. Thus, we argue for developmental models following divergence theories. Implications for practice and potentially fruitful avenues for future research are discussed in the light of our findings.

Business Process Management (BPM) is an established approach to managing and improving organizational processes in both the private and public sectors. The improvement of business processes is currently the top priority for CIOs around the world (Gartner Inc., 2010). BPM is a means of improving business processes, thus improving efficiency and effectiveness, and ultimately gaining and sustaining competitive advantage (Broadbent et al., 1999 and McKinsey, 2008). The concept has its roots in Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR). As such, it is a well established approach, combining both incremental and radical measures of process change. Notably, BPM is not only applied in the private sector: It is a key concept in e-government and public sector reform (Becker et al., 2006, Kubicek et al., 2003, Niehaves et al., 2012, Scholl, 2004, Scholl et al., 2007, Stemberger and Jaklic, 2007 and Weerakkody et al., 2011). It appears to have established as common sense that public sector organizations need to reevaluate their business processes: cost-cutting, especially in times of the financial crisis, citizen and service quality-orientation, electronic government (Becker et al., 2006), transformational government (Irani, Elliman, & Jackson, 2007), and other reform concepts have called for a program of business process change in public organizations (Scholl, 2004). Most recently, for the case of European governments, the European Union (EU) Service Directive (the so-called Bolkestein Directive) requires the establishment of a single point of contact for all administrative services and provides yet another major impulse for BPM initiatives (Weber & Sure, 2009). Developing BPM capabilities constitutes a key challenge for organizations. BPM being an established concept, contemporary research in the field revolves around the development of organizational BPM capabilities (Fisher, 2004, Rosemann and De Bruin, 2005, Rosemann et al., 2006 and Zwicker et al., 2010). Several models exist for assessing and guiding the development of BPM capabilities, a comprehensive picture of BPM capabilities in the public sector is however still missing in the extant literature. We seek to address this research gap by means of a multi-method approach that involves an intertwined quantitative survey (n = 357) and an in-depth qualitative case study (12 interviews). Our research objectives are a) to provide a comprehensive picture of public sector BPM capabilities as well as related problems and b) to discuss normative models, especially maturity models that claim to be of help when it comes to further BPM capability development. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we discuss the concept of BPM capabilities and review prevalent BPM capability assessment and development models. We then set out the methodology and the results of a quantitative survey on BPM capabilities in local governments. Based on our survey data, we identify a representative case organization that bears the potential to reveal typical BPM capability issues in local governments. The methodology and the findings of the in-depth case analysis are presented in Section 4. The final sections are concerned with the theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research.

In this article, we set out to provide a comprehensive picture of public sector BPM capabilities and to discuss normative models that claim to be of help in developing these capabilities. For this, we conceptualized BPM as a collection of dynamic capabilities to adapt existing business processes and create new ones to achieve a fit with the organizational environment. These capabilities can be employed for achieving both revolutionary and evolutionary improvements in the corresponding business processes. Based on this understanding, we analyzed five different BPM maturity models that were created to describe and prescribe the development of BPM capabilities. Based on the capability areas used in two of these models (Strategic Alignment, Governance, Methods, Information Technology, People, and Culture), we conducted a quantitative survey of German local government administrations (n = 357). This survey suggested that the BPM capabilities are on an intermediary level. Moreover, we used the data to select one typical municipality and analyzed it in terms of a comprehensive case study. The results of the case study suggest some bias towards less developed BPM capabilities, which might be due to the quantitative results being self-reported. Hence, we argue that the BPM capabilities of local governments are developed to a low level while outliers exist in both directions (ad RQ1). Based on this information, maturity models would give the guidance to develop further until all BPM capabilities are developed to the maximum level. This is in line with convergence theory. Convergence theories argue for a movement towards an “ideal” state. However, our case study data and the theoretical understanding of BPM suggest that other variables, especially organizational positions play an important role. This understanding leads to a divergence theory perspective which suggests that an “ideal” state does not exist and that organizations should develop only specific dynamic capabilities. Based on both our conceptualization of BPM and the rich case study data we argue that, for the case of α-ville, the guidance given by divergence theory is more appropriate. This study contributes several new insights to the body of e-government knowledge. First, to our knowledge it is the first broad assessments of BPM capabilities in the public sector. So far, public sector researchers often had a feeling that BPM capabilities are under-developed. This feeling can now be supported with solid arguments. Our empirical findings show that especially BPM capability area “methods” is yet under-developed in public sector practice. Second, our research could show that the concept of BPM capability development is applicable to the public sector, especially with regards to the six capability areas. Moreover, our research makes important contributions to a more general literature on developmental models. We depicted maturity models as following a convergence theory perspective. Our results suggest that this perspective is not suitable for the development of BPM and dynamic capabilities in general. These dynamic capabilities need to fit to the organizational position. Divergence theory appears to be better able to inform decision makers for building dynamic capabilities than maturity models. However, stage models might be suitable to describe the development of organizational capabilities (Andersen and Henriksen, 2006 and Klievink and Janssen, 2009). Overall, we find that BPM maturity models show severe shortcomings of which their concept-inherent and context-invariant development recommendations can be regarded as the most crucial ones. However, there are other issues such as often overlapping and mutually dependent capability dimension (such as alignment and governance). Another challenge is the measurement of capabilities by specific measurement items. In our case, due to technical reasons, we opted for a single-items measurement approach which opens up for a discussion of other (eventually multi-item) approaches to quantitative capability measurement. Finally, with often lacking a sound theoretical foundation, cohesion is another issue in many BPM maturity models. It remains unclear to a large degree why certain BPM capabilities should be developed and what (positive) effects can be expected as a consequence. With our dynamic capability approach, we make a first step to address these shortcomings. Our suggest list of new variables (e.g., financial assets, reputational assets and technological assets; see Teece et al. (1997) and Table 4) may be used to create theories for BPM capability development that take into account the organizational position of the public administration. Our study shows most public sector decision makers the clear need to build dynamic capabilities for BPM. However, this capability development should not only be guided by convergence theory based maturity models but also by the organizational positions as suggested in the dynamic capability literature (divergence theory). With our study, we put primary focus on understanding BPM capabilities in the public sector. With dynamic capability theory and capability development in general being well applicable in the private sector as well, we would argue that the integration of the two in terms of our theoretical model should be applicable to studying private sector organizations too. We consider it a potentially fruitful avenue for future research to test this assumption and to empirically compare private and public sector findings. As every research, our study is limited to a certain extent. Acknowledging that our case study observations might be subjective, we still believe that other researchers would make very similar ones. Together with the quantitative data we argue that the conclusions drawn are almost independent of the researcher. As we selected the case study based on the quantitative data the results should be replicable in any other municipal organization that falls in a certain range. Moreover, organizations on other administrative levels should deliver similar results. Last, the conclusions drawn with regards to developmental models are valid independent of the specific organization. We strongly believe that they are also valid independent of the sector (public or private) and hold true for the development of all dynamic capabilities. Nevertheless, this belief must be tested by future research in the private sector and on other dynamic capabilities. Moreover, future research could also work on incorporating the organizational position in a specific model. Last, other models describing change could be studied, too. For example, Van de Ven and Poole (1995) describe three other theories explaining organizational development apart of stage logic: evolutionary theory, teleology, and dialectic.