Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FITModern companies need customer-oriented, risk/return efficient, transparent and IT-supported business processes to conduct their daily business and to survive in the market. For this reason, Business Process Management (BPM) is considered a core task of organizational design. BPM identifies, defines, and models business processes. Once implemented and executed, processes are monitored, controlled, and refined to continuously improve upon them and innovate. Successful BPM also needs effective interaction of success factors like governance, methods, IT, culture, people, and strategic alignment.
The research group is interested in how decisions about process design, analysis, and change can be made in line with economic principles. Our focus is on decisions that occur during process industrialization, which consists of the systematic automation, standardization, flexibility, and improvement of individual processes using modern information technology. We are also interested in how BPM should be developed as an organizational ability, how process project portfolios should be managed, and how business process architectures should be designed.
To align process decision-making with economic principles, all business activities and decisions related to process design, analysis, and change must be valued according to their contribution to the company value. This approach is called Value-Based BPM because it draws from management sciences’ theory of value-based management. What is unique about Value-based BPM is that it adopts a business-case perspective and focuses on the organizational impact of process decision-making. Value-based BPM also expands upon the portfolio of research methods traditionally used in BPM with quantitative approaches from financial valuation and decision analysis.