Abstract
This paper investigates how firms configure their business process management efforts in different industries. We generate a business process management (BPM) skills taxonomy through the computational linguistic analysis of job ads from Monster.com. We apply the taxonomy to LinkedIn.com resumes of professionals employed at retailer Walmart, pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and investment bank Goldman Sachs. We find that Walmart and Pfizer distribute change- and operations-related BPM skills among the same roles whereas Goldman Sachs distributes both kinds of skills among more separate roles. This separation reflects a trilateral configuration where line managers and analysts focus on operational BPM tasks related to running processes while change-related tasks are covered by project managers. At Walmart and Pfizer the tasks of the BPM project manager are shared among managers and analysts, reflecting a bilateral configuration. Comparing each firm’s regulatory environments and BPM technology capabilities, we conjecture that the organizational configuration pattern is influenced by a firm’s ability to reliably automate business processes, since this affects how much attention line managers and analysts have to spend on monitoring processes and on reconciling issues and exceptions. This attention could otherwise be spent on regulatory-imposed process change efforts. This configural logic suggests a reconfiguration of BPM professionals towards a bilateral configuration when an organization transforms its business with digital technology, because the focus of such efforts includes process and decision automation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A list of publications released can be provided by the authors on request.
- 2.
A list of high-probability words per topic can be provided by the authors on request.
References
Ashby, W.R.: An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London (1956)
Baldwin, R., Scott, C., Hood, C.: A Reader on Regulation. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1998)
Barney, J., Felin, T.: What are microfoundations? Acad. Manag. Perspect. 27, 138–155 (2013)
Benner, M.J., Tuschman, M.L.: Exploitation, exploration, and process management: the productivity dilemma revisited. Acad. Manag. Rev. 29, 238–256 (2003)
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I.: Latent Dirichlet allocation. J. Mach. Learn. 3, 993–1022 (2003)
Boyd-Graber, J.L., Mimno, D., Newman, D.: Care and feeding of topic models: problems, diagnostics, and improvements. In: Handbook of Mixed Membership Models and their Applications. CRC Press (2014)
vom Brocke, J., Zelt, S., Schmiedel, T.: On the Role of Context in Business Process Management. Int. J. Inf. Manag. 36, 486–495 (2016)
Executive Office of the President: National Industry Classification System (2017)
Feldman, M.S., Pentland, B.T.: Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Adm. Sci. Q. 48, 94–118 (2003)
Felin, T., Foss, N.J., Heimeriks, K.H., Madsen, T.L.: Microfoundations of routines and capabilities: individuals, processes, and structure. J. Manag. Stud. 49, 1351–1374 (2012)
Frey, C.B., Osborne, M.A.: The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerization. University of Oxford (2013)
Haveman, H.A., Russo, M.V., Meyer, A.D.: Organizational environments in flux: the impact of regulatory punctuations on organizational domains. Organ. Sci. 12, 253–273 (2001)
Hickson, D.J., Pugh, D.S., Pheysey, D.C.: Operations technology and organization structure: an empirical reappraisal. Adm. Sci. Q. 14, 378–397 (1969)
Iliev, P.: The effect of SOX Section 404: costs, earnings quality, and stock prices. J. Finance 65, 1163–1196 (2010)
Jurafsky, D., Martin, J.H.: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (2009)
Krishnan, J., Rama, D., Zhang, Y.: Costs to comply with SOX Section 404. Audit. J. Pract. Theory 27, 169–186 (2008)
Lohmann, P., zur Muehlen, M.: Business process management skills and roles: an investigation of the demand and supply side of BPM professionals. In: 13th International Conference on Business Process Management (2015)
Martin, J.A.: Dynamic managerial capabilities. Organ. Sci. 22, 118–140 (2011)
Martinez-Moyano, I.J., McCaffrey, D.P., Oliva, R.: Drift and adjustment in organizational rule compliance: explaining the “regulatory pendulum” in financial markets. Organ. Sci. 25, 321–338 (2017)
Molloy, J.C., Barney, J.B.: Who captures the value created with human capital? A market-based view. Acad. Manag. Perspect. 29, 309–325 (2015)
Nelson, R.R., Winter, S.G.: An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1982)
Ocasio, W.: Towards an attention-based view of the firm. Strateg. Manag. J. 18, 187–206 (1997)
Rafaeli, A., Oliver, A.L.: Employment ads: a configurational research agenda. J. Manag. Inq. 7, 342–358 (1998)
Röglinger, M., Schwindenhammer, L., Stelzl, K.: How to put organizational ambidexterity into practice – towards a maturity model. In: Weske, M., Montali, M., Weber, I., vom Brocke, J. (eds.) BPM 2018. LNBIP, vol. 329, pp. 194–210. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_12
Tibshirani, R., Walther, G., Hastie, T.: Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic. J. Roy. Stat. Soc. B 63, 411–423 (2001)
Woodward, R.E.: Task complexity: definition of the construct. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 37, 60–82 (1986)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lohmann, P., zur Muehlen, M. (2019). Regulatory Instability, Business Process Management Technology, and BPM Skill Configurations. In: Hildebrandt, T., van Dongen, B., Röglinger, M., Mendling, J. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11675. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_27
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26618-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26619-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)