Business process management: Attempted concepticide?

INTRODUCTION The utopian picture of Business Process Management (BPM) is ubiquitous. It is “a fundamental change” (CSC, 2002), “the holistic business platform for the agile company of the future” (Smith & Fingar, 2002), “the monniker for the next Killer App” (Delphi, 2002), “the greatest return on investment” (Aberdeen, 2003) and “it will change industry; just like Deming” (Gurley, 2003). Not just skeptics may wonder whether we are witnessing yet another fashion (Abrahamsom, 1996). In this paper, we examine this suspicion. In the first place, we will focus on the supply side of BPM. We argue that overselling of the concept, while understandable to a certain extent, may be driven by very particular interests of IT vendors and market analysts. Secondly, from a content analysis it follows that unlike what BPM propagandists would suggest, there are important similarities with earlier IT/management solutions. The problem, however, is that these links are hardly acknowledged or plainly denied in literature. Our prime motivation for this paper is to warn for the equivocal qualities of BPM. As researchers being active in the BPM arena ourselves, we embrace the attention for this subject. At the same time, we fear the phenomenon of concepticide: the continuous and collective rejection of IT/management solutions that have been widely embraced only a short time before. Concepticide creates an atmosphere unfavorable to the academic ideology of accumulation. This implies that people (1) have to reinvent what others already knew, (2) continue to make the same mistakes and (3) are unable to deal with persistent problems. We hope that this paper enhances the sensitivity of IT academics and practitioners for this issue. The structure of our paper follows the main arguments we described. In Section 2 we focus on a surface analysis of the fashionable aspects of BPM and their perils. In Section 3, we explore on a more substantial level the reincarnation of earlier solutions under the BPM label. We present our conclusions in Section 4.