Business process innovation based on stakeholder perceptions

The literature offers a multitude of modeling and assessment techniques to represent differing enterprise stakeholder perspectives and interests in business process innovation. While each technique yields valuable insights into possibilities for innovating business processes, these insights are limited as they are derived from a particular perspective. This paper presents an alternate approach that focuses on multiple stakeholders with differing and potentially conflicting perceptions of the state of current practice and directions for future innovation. The proposed approach can be used to capture, synthesize, and reconcile multiple stakeholder perceptions to yield a comprehensive foundation for business process innovation.

Rather than being constrained by pre-conceived formalisms, this approach begins with subjective perceptions of involved stakeholders. The approach results in an informal as-is model, assessments of its strengths and weaknesses, and recommendations for how to innovate the business process. The approach encompasses four stages: engage process stakeholders; collect process data; explicate process knowledge; and, design process innovations. The argument combines the business process modeling and stakeholder analysis literature; it draws upon a case study of process innovation in a knowledge-intensive enterprise; and, it provides practical lessons for how to organize and support business process innovation based on stakeholder perceptions.