Business Process Management Research As An Interdisciplinary Field

Business Process Management Research as an Interdisciplinary Field

Harry Yulong Jin, Danny Ho and Edward A. StohrWesley J. Howe School of Technology ManagementStevens Institute of TechnologyCastle Point on HudsonHoboken, New Jersey

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Introduction Although there has been a very large amount of research

in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), little attention has been paid to a systematic study of BPM research as a whole.

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Related Literature Kettinger and Guha (1997) identified 25 BPR

methodologies based on semi-structured interviews with BPR experts and vendors.

Stohr and Zhao (2001) reviewed existing workflow automation research and identified research opportunities.

Basu and Kumar (2002) investigated workflow research in the context of e-business.

Van der Aalst et al. (2003) conducted a survey of the then current status of BPM from a largely technical perspective.

Ho et al. (2009) collected and reviewed BPM articles published in ten leading IS journals (ranked by AIS) from 2000 to 2008.

…

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•The paucity of a systematic study of BPM research as a whole.

Issue

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Sociology

EconomicsPsychology

ComputerScience

Management Science

IndustryEngineerin

g

MISBPM

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Issue

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Issue

•The interdisciplinary nature of BPM.

Reason

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Issue

•Interdisciplinary nature of BPM.

Reason

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Issue

•Interdisciplinary nature of BPM

Reason

•BPM is often intertwined with many other related concepts.

Reason

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Issue


Reason

•BPM is often intertwined with many other related concepts

Reason

•Comprehensive coverage of different disciplines

Solution

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Issue


Reason

•BPM is often intertwined with many other related concepts

Reason

•Comprehensive coverage of different disciplines

Solution

• Overview from both technical and managerial perspectives

Solution

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Overview of BPM Field Managerial Perspective

Total Quality Management Lean Production Business Process

Reengineering Business Process

Management

Technical Perspective Office Information Systems Workflow Management

Systems BPM systems or simply BPM

Business Process Modeling Notation

Service Oriented Architecture

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Literature Selection Journal articles published by journals indexed by SCI

Expanded and SSCI from ISI Web of Knowledge In English-language “Business Process Management” in the topic field Published between 2000 and 2009 Verified one-by-one 115 articles were left for analysis

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Trend in BPM Publications

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 20090

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Popular Journals for BPM Research

JournalPrimary Discipline

ServedRecord Count

Percent of Total

Information and Software Technology Information Systems 9 7.8%Computers in Industry Practice 7 6.1%Data & Knowledge Engineering Information Systems 6 5.2%Decision Support Systems Information Systems 5 4.4%Lecture Notes in Computer Science CS/CEng 5 4.4%IBM Systems Journal Information Systems 4 3.5%Industrial Management & Data Systems Practice 4 3.5%Applied Artificial Intelligence CS/CEng 3 2.6%Expert Systems with Applications Information Systems 3 2.6%Fujitsu Scientific & Technical Journal Practice 3 2.6%Information & Management Information Systems 3 2.6%Information Systems Frontiers Information Systems 3 2.6%Information Systems Management Information Systems 3 2.6%International Journal of Production Research Industrial Engineering 3 2.6%Total Quality Management & Business Excellence

Industrial Engineering 3 2.6%

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Text Analysis of Content We wrote a Java program to collect keywords from each

paper. Then the keywords were analyzed by Textalyser - an online

text analysis tool.

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Most Frequently Used Phrases in Keywords

Expression Occurrences

1 web services 122 workflow management 11

3 service oriented 74 petri nets 65 process analysis 56 process mining 57 supply chain 5

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Text Analysis of ‘KeyWords Plus’ In a similar way, we analyzed the ‘KeyWords Plus’ field

provided by ISI Web of Knowledge. ‘KeyWords Plus’ contains frequently appearing words or

phrases in the titles of each article's references. ‘KeyWord Plus’ is a supplement to author-defined keywords

or a substitute for author-defined keywords.

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Most Frequently Used Words in the Titles of References

Word Occurrences1 management 302 systems 283 workflow 184 process 135 support 116 petri-nets 97 model 88 information 79 framework 7

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The Intellectual Roots of BPM To indentify “intellectually significant” papers, a co-citation

analysis was performed using the Knowledge Domain Visualization software, CiteSpace.

3252 references of the 115 papers were considered by CiteSpace for analysis.

The 258 nodes shown in the visualization were selected from the 30 most cited referenced papers in each of the 10 years 2000 – 2009.

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Intellectually Significant Papers and Clusters Identified by Citespace

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Intellectually Significant Papers/BooksCitations Author Year Title

16 Hammer, M. and Champy, J.

1993 “Reengineering the Corporation: a Manifesto for Business Revolution”, HarperBusiness

11 Georgakopoulos, D., Hornick, M., and Sheth, A.

1995 “An Overview of Workflow Management: From Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure”, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Vol. 3, No .2, p 119-153.

10 van der Aalst, W.M.P. 1998 “The Application of Petri nets to Workflow Management”, Journal of Circuits, Systems, and Computers, v8, No. 1, p.21-66.

3 Grefen, P., Pernici, B., Sanchez, G.

1999 “Database Support for Workflow Management: the Wide Project”, Kulwer Academic Publishers

8 Andrews, T., Cubera, F., Dholakia, H., Goland, Y.,Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D., Smith, D., Thatte, S., Trickovic, I., and Weerawarana, S.

2003 “Business Process Execution Language for Web Services version”, OASIS website: http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php

4 Alonso, G., Fiedler, U., Hagen, C., Lazcano, A., Schuldt, H., and Weiler, N.

1999 “WISE: Business to Business E-Commerce”, Proceedings of 9th International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering, p.132.

6 Leymann, F, Roller, D., Schmidt, M.T.

2002 “Web Services and Business Process Management”, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 41, Iss. 2

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Conclusion In this paper, we provide an overview of BPM field from

both managerial and technical perspectives, and analyzed recent BPM research published in high impact journals in different academic disciplines. This provides a comprehensive picture of BPM research as an interdisciplinary field.

We found that BPM is an emerging research area, because of the rapidly increasing trend in the number of published BPM articles in leading journals.

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Conclusion Hammer’s BPR book, which emphasizes organizational

issues is the most influential work in the BPM field based on co-citation analysis; however, the technical side of BPM is the mainstream of BPM research.

The hot topics within BPM from our keywords analysis are web service, petri-nets, process mining and supply chain management.

More comprehensive study is planned that would include conference proceedings and search on more keywords.

Documents

Business Process Management Research As An Interdisciplinary Field