Knowledge Management – The Foundation for a Successful Business Process Management

Abstract In today's dynamic business environment, organizations need up-to-date knowledge to execute their business in the best way. Through the ongoing digitalization and linked communities, companies and businesses, changing parameters as well as varying business framework conditions must be analyzed fast as possible to optimize the processes and gain the best direction for the own company. Therefore, organization use Business Process Management (BPM) to model and manage the existing processes. To perform BPM and optimize processes, data and information there have to be developed a knowledge inventory regarding all processes in order to model the organizational processes together with the required resources. In the following paper, this necessary knowledge process will be analyzed as foundation to perform BPM regarding the known BPM Trends. In addition, the relevance of digitalization will be matched to the Knowledge Management and BPM approach to underline the importance of the correct data and information as BPM infrastructure. Therefore, the mandatory terms will be defined and described theoretically. This literature research will be the starting basis for the approach and following scientific research. To evaluate the KM-BPM Model a survey with different companies has been developed. The research results will contributed to a combined Knowledge and BPM approach for the application in the business in times of digitalization.