Business process maturity models: A systematic literature review

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Abstract

Context

The number of maturity models proposed in the area of Business Process Management (BPM) has increased considerably in the last decade. However, there are a number of challenges, such as the limited empirical studies on their validation and a limited extent of actionable properties of these models in guiding their application. These challenges hinder the widespread usage of the maturity models in the BPM field.

Objective

In order to better understand the state of the research on business process maturity models (BPMMs) and identify opportunities for future research, we conducted a systematic literature review.

Method

We searched the studies between the years 1990 and 2014 in established digital libraries to identify empirical studies of BPMMs by focusing on their development, validation, and application. We targeted studies on generic models proposed for business process maturity, business process management or orientation maturity, and selected 61 studies out of 2899 retrieved initially.

Results

We found that despite that many BPMMs were proposed in the last decade, the level of empirical evidence that reveals the validity and usefulness of these models is scarce.

Conclusion

The current state of research on BPM maturity is in its early phases, and academic literature lacks methodical applications of many mainstream BPMMs that have been proposed. Future research should be directed towards: (1) reconciling existing models with a strong emphasis on prescriptive properties, (2) conducting empirical studies to demonstrate the validity and usefulness of BPMMs, and (3) separating the assessment method used to evaluate the maturity level from the maturity model which acts as the reference framework for the assessment.

Introduction

Many organizations realize the importance of business processes in delivering high-quality products and services [1], [2]. However, it is still difficult to manage business processes as the basic enablers in sustaining an organization's existence. One of the primary reasons for this is the diversity of concerns, such as Business Process Reengineering, Process Innovation, Business Process Modeling, and Business Process Automation/Workflow Management, under the title of Business Process Management (BPM) [3]. In addition, a business process also requires the incorporation of an organizational focus, as it cannot create business value without aligning itself with the business strategy of the organization. These issues lead to the question of how advanced different organizations are in the development of their BPM capabilities [3].

The notion of maturity was first proposed by Phillip Crosby [4] and is defined as ‘the state of being complete, perfect, or ready’ [5]. A maturity model is a conceptual model that consists of a sequence of discrete maturity levels for a class of processes in one or more business domains, and represents an anticipated, desired, or typical evolutionary path for these processes [6]. Some disciplines adopted the concept of a maturity model as a way to appraise and improve their competence. For example, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) [7] in the area of software engineering emerged at the start of 1990s as a means to improve software development processes to achieve higher quality, and has been used since then by hundreds of organizations worldwide.

The success of CMMI inspired the development of several maturity models in other domains, including BPM. In the last decade, researchers and practitioners in the BPM field have proposed maturity models with varied focus and depth [8,9]. The Business Process Orientation Maturity Model [10], the BPM Capability Framework [11], the Process and Enterprise Maturity Model [12], and the OMG standard Business Process Maturity Model [13] are among the ones commonly referred to in the literature.

Yet, despite the substantial number and broadened scale of available models [14] and the promising accomplishments of using maturity models in other domains (e.g. [15], [16]), the use of business process maturity models (BPMMs) has still not gained widespread acceptance in practice or in research. There are only a handful of studies in the literature examining the adoption of these models and their achieved benefits [9]. Furthermore, recent surveys report a decline in the attention shown by industry to certain maturity models [17]. Researchers and practitioners in this field indicate underlying challenges, such as the scarcity of empirical works confirming the validity and usefulness of the models [18], limited extent of prescriptive properties of the models impeding their application [9], [19], and the lack of a clear distinction between the maturity model and the assessment model that is applied to evaluate the level of maturity [20]. With the purpose of extensively investigating these arguments, we targeted at a systematic review of the literature to obtain an overall understanding of the existence, characteristics, and use of maturity models in the BPM discipline. A systematic literature review (SLR) is a means of evaluating and interpreting all available research relevant to a particular research hypothesis, topic area, or phenomenon of interest [21] and a literature review represents the foundation to strengthen the research in a particular field of study [22]. In the last decade, SLRs served as unified, verifiable, and trustable sources for further research [23]. An SLR can be applied to identify any gaps in current research in order to suggest areas for further investigation [22]. In software engineering, using SLRs helped to identify diversity in the models adopted [24] as well as to investigate motivations [25] or synergies [26] for adopting them. Similarly, using an SLR would allow us to pinpoint gaps in research related to maturity models in the BPM field.

In reviewing the existing literature, we elicited up-to-date model development, application, and evaluations, as well as the studies regarding model comparison and classifications in a bottom-up manner. We searched and examined the studies performed between the years 1990 and 2014 in a comprehensive set of academic digital libraries. We initially retrieved 2899 studies; 61 of which were finally selected in accordance to our selection procedure and criteria.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 overviews the related work. Section 3 provides the review protocol and the classification scheme that were developed and applied for the SLR. Section 4 presents the results and discussions, and final section concludes with a summary of findings, contributions and limitations.

Section snippets

Related work

There are a few studies that extensively analyze the literature on BPMMs. In this section we focus on the existing, comprehensive ones that describe and compare multiple BPMMs or that clarify the concepts related to BPM and its maturity.

Poeppelbuss et al. [18] reviewed 76 articles published in leading information systems journals and conference proceedings that report on the maturity models in the broad field of information systems. The authors investigate the maturity models from the

Research design

In our research, we focus on the models addressing business process management or orientation in an all-inclusive manner rather than with a narrow viewpoint that centers on a specific domain or aspect of BPM (e.g., knowledge management, supply chain management, etc.). The hypotheses that we defined for this research are given in Table 1.

Our first hypothesis has been built upon the findings of previous studies such as [14], [18], which assert the high number of maturity models but also the

Results and discussions

In this section, we present and discuss the results that outline the distribution of the articles and provide answers to the research hypotheses given in Table 1.

Fig. 3 shows the distributions of the articles by year (from 2001 to 2014) and publication type (journal, book section, and conference proceeding). The distribution over years indicates that the topic has picked up interest from 2007, with the year 2009 displaying the highest number (13 studies). In terms of publication type, the

Conclusions

The comprehensive nature of BPM brings some challenges and, partly in response to these, has triggered the development of a wide variety of models for its implementation. A set of best practices can be useful to enable BPM and ultimately business success. As such, a maturity model can be an effective reference for process improvement initiatives.

Although a rich set of maturity models for the BPM field exists, their use in practice is limited. We speculated that the empirical evaluations of the

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the 2219 program. The authors acknowledge this support as well as the supports of Hacettepe University and Eindhoven University of Technology as other enabling bodies for this joint research.

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