Business Process Management and Routine Dynamics

Routine dynamics and Business Process Management (BPM) are two academic disciplines that investigate sequences of action for carrying out work in organizations. Even though they share this phenomenon of interest, there are fundamental differences that separate both research areas. In this chapter, we take a first step to overcome this divide. To do this, we portray BPM by use of the business process lifecycle. The lifecycle well adopted instrument that allows us to describe how activities in BPM are interlinked and discuss the state of the art. Based on these insights, we develop multiple directions how routine dynamics and BPM can learn from and contribute to one another. We believe that a closer integration of both research areas can help to advance how we study and theorize about processes in organizations.

Keywords

Routines routine dynamics business process management business process process mining

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Cambridge Handbook of Routine Dynamics , pp. 513 - 524
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993340.042 [Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alter, S. (2014). Theory of workarounds. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 34, 1041–1066.Google Scholar

Altinkemer, K., Ozcelik, Y. and Ozdemir, Z. D. (2011). Productivity and performance effects of business process reengineering: A firm-level analysis. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(4), 129–162.CrossRef Google Scholar

Becker, M. C. (2004). Organizational routines: A review of the literature. Industrial and Corporate Change, 13(4), 643–677.CrossRef Google Scholar

Berente, N., Lyytinen, K., Yoo, Y. and King, J. L. (2016). Routines as shock absorbers during organizational transformation: Integration, control, and NASA’ s Enterprise Information System. Organization Science, 27(3), 551–572.CrossRef Google Scholar

Berente, N., Seidel, S. and Safadi, H. (2019). Data-driven computationally-intensive theory development. Information Systems Research, 30(1), iii–viii.Google Scholar

Beverungen, D. (2014). Exploring the interplay of the design and emergence of business processes as organizational routines. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 6(4), 191–202.CrossRef Google Scholar

Birnholtz, J. P., Cohen, M. D. and Hoch, S. V. (2007). Organizational character: On the regeneration of Camp Poplar Grove. Organization Science, 18(2), 315–332.Google Scholar

Bose, R. P. J. C., van Der Aalst, W. M. P., Žliobaite, I. and Pechenizkiy, M. (2011). Handling concept drift in process mining. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 6741 LNCS, 391–405.Google Scholar

Bucher, S. and Langley, A. (2016). The interplay of reflective and experimental spaces in interrupting and reorienting Routine Dynamics. Organization Science, 27(3), 594–613.Google Scholar

D’Adderio, L. (2011). Artifacts at the centre of routines: Performing the material turn in routines theory. Journal of Institutional Economics, 7(2), 197–230.CrossRef Google Scholar

Dittrich, K., Guérard, S. and Seidl, D. (2016). Talking about routines: The role of reflective talk in routine change. Organization Science, 27(3), 678–697.CrossRef Google Scholar

Dittrich, K. and Seidl, D. (2018). Emerging intentionality in routine dynamics: A pragmatist view. Academy of Management Journal, 61(1), 111–138.CrossRef Google Scholar

Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J. and Reijers, H. A. (2018). Fundamentals of Business Process Management, 2nd ed. Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar

Feldman, M. S. and Pentland, B. T. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94–118.Google Scholar

Feldman, M. S., Pentland, B. T., D’Adderio, L. and Lazaric, N. (2016). Beyond routines as things: Introduction to the special issue on Routine Dynamics. Organization Science, 27(3), 505–513.Google Scholar

Figl, K., Mendling, J. and Strembeck, M. (2013). The influence of notational deficiencies on process model comprehension. Journal of the Association of Information Systems, 14(6), 312–338.Google Scholar

Gaskin, J., Berente, N., Lyytinen, K. and Yoo, Y. (2014). Toward generalizable sociomaterial inquiry: A computational approach for zooming in and out of sociomaterial routines. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 38(3), 849–871.CrossRef Google Scholar

Goh, K. T. and Pentland, B.T. (2019). From actions to paths to patterning: Toward a dynamic theory of patterning in routines. Academy of Management Journal, 62(6), 1901–1929.CrossRef Google Scholar

Gonzalez-Lopez, F. and Bustos, G. (2019). Business process architecture design methodologies: A literature review. Business Process Management Journal, 25(6), 1317–1334.Google Scholar

Grisold, T., Wurm, B., Mendling, J. and vom Brocke, J. (2020). Using process mining to support theorizing about change in organizations. In 53rd Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2020).Google Scholar

Grover, V., Teng, J., Segars, A. H. and Fiedler, K. (1998). The influence of information technology diffusion and business process change on perceived productivity: The IS executive’s perspective. Information & Management, 34(3), 141–159.CrossRef Google Scholar

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar

Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar

Hompes, B. F. A., Buijs, J., van der Aalst, W. M. P., Dixit, P. M. and Buurman, J. (2015). Discovering Deviating cases and process variants using trace clustering. In 27th Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC).Google Scholar

Howard-Grenville, J. and Rerup, C. (2017). A process perspective on organizational routines. In Langley, A. and Tsoukas, H., eds., The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore,Washington DC, Melbourne: Sage, pp. 323–339.Google Scholar

Kettinger, W. J., Teng, J. T. C. and Guha, S. (1997). Business process change: A study of methodologies, techniques, and tools. MIS Quartely, 21(1), 55–80.Google Scholar

Kremser, W. and Schreyögg, G. (2016). The dynamics of interrelated routines: Introducing the cluster level. Organization Science, 27, 698–721.CrossRef Google Scholar

Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar

Kummer, T. F., Recker, J. and Mendling, J. (2016). Enhancing understandability of process models through cultural-dependent color adjustments. Decision Support Systems, 87, 1–12.CrossRef Google Scholar

Laguna, M. and Marklund, J. (2013). Business Process Modeling, Simulation and Design. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar

Leonardi, P. M. (2011). When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: Affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies. MIS Quarterly, 35(1), 147–167.CrossRef Google Scholar

Lindberg, A., Berente, N., Gaskin, J. and Lyytinen, K. (2016). Coordinating interdependencies in online communities: A study of an open source software project. Information Systems Research, 27(4), 751–772.Google Scholar

Mendling, J. (2016). From scientific process management to process science: Towards an empirical research agenda for Business Process Management. In Hochreiner, C. and Schulte, S., (eds.), 8th ZEUS Workshop (ZEUS 2016).Google Scholar

Mendling, J., Berente, N., Seidel, S. and Grisold, T. (2021). Pluralism and pragmatism in the information systems field: The case of research on business processes and organizational routines. The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, 52(2), 127–140.Google Scholar

Miller, K. D., Pentland, B. T. and Choi, S. (2012). Dynamics of performing and remembering organizational routines. Journal of Management Studies, 49(8), 1536–1558.CrossRef Google Scholar

Orlikowski, W. J. and Scott, S. V (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organizing. The Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 433–474.Google Scholar

Pentland, B. T. and Feldman, M. S. (2005). Organizational routines as a unit of analysis. Industrial and Corporate Change, 14(5), 793–815.Google Scholar

Pentland, B. T. and Feldman, M. S. (2008). Designing routines: On the folly of designing artifacts, while hoping for patterns of action. Information and Organization, 18(4), 235–250.CrossRef Google Scholar

Pentland, B. T. and Rueter, H. H. (1994). Organizational routines as grammars of action. Administrative Science Quarterly, 39(3), 484–510.CrossRef Google Scholar

Pentland, B. T., Vaast, E. and Wolf, R. (2021). Theorizing process dynamics with directed graphs: A diachronic analysis of digital trace data. MIS Quartely, 45(2), 967–984.Google Scholar

Polyvyanyy, A., Solti, A., Weidlich, M., Di Ciccio, C. and Mendling, J. (2018). Behavioural quotients for precision and recall in process mining. Technical Report, (March), 1–19.Google Scholar

Recker, J. (2014). Suggestions for the next wave of BPM research: Strengthening the theoretical core and exploring the protective belt. Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 15(2), 5–20.Google Scholar

Recker, J. (2015). Evidence-based Business Process Management: Using digital opportunities to drive organizational innovation. In vom Brocke, J. and Schmiedel, T., eds., BPM-Driving Innovation in a Digital World. Cham: Springer, pp. 129–143.CrossRef Google Scholar

Recker, J. and Mendling, J. (2016). The state of the art of Business Process Management research as published in the BPM Conference: Recommendations for progressing the field. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 58(1), 55–72.CrossRef Google Scholar

Reijers, H. A. and Mansar, L. S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: An overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4), 283–306.Google Scholar

Rosemann, M. and vom Brocke, J. (2010). The six core elements of Business Process Management. In vom Brocke, J. and Rosemann, M., eds., Handbook on Business Process Management 1. Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 107–122.Google Scholar

Speer, S. A. (2002). ‘Natural’ and ‘contrived’ data: a sustainable distinction? Discourse Studies, 4(4), 511–525.Google Scholar

Tsoukas, H. and Chia, R. (2002). On organizational becoming: Rethinking organizational change. Organization Science, 13(5), 567–582.CrossRef Google Scholar

Turner, S. F. and Rindova, V. P. (2018). Watching the clock: Action timing, patterning, and routine performance. Academy of Management Journal, 61(4), 1253–1280.Google Scholar

van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2002). Making work flow: On the application of Petri Nets to Business Process Management. In Esparza, J. and Lakos, C.,eds., Application and Theory of Petri Nets 2002. ICATPN 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2360. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 1–22.Google Scholar

van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2011). Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes, 2nd ed. Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar

van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2013). Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey. ISRN Software Engineering, 1–37.Google Scholar

van der Aalst, W. M. P., Adriansyah, A., De Medeiros, A. K. A., Arcieri, F., Baier, T., Blickle, T. … Wynn, M. (2011). Process mining manifesto. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2011) (pp. 169–194).Google Scholar

van der Aalst, W. M. P., ter Hofstede, A. H. and Weske, M. (2003). Business Process Management: A Survey. In International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2003).Google Scholar

Volkoff, O., Strong, D. M. and Elmes, M. B. (2007). Technological embeddedness and organizational change. Organization Science, 18(5), 832–848.Google Scholar

vom Brocke, J. and Mendling, J., eds. (2018). Business Process Management Cases. Cham: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar

vom Brocke, J., Zelt, S. and Schmiedel, T. (2016). On the role of context in Business Process Management. International Journal of Information Management, 36(3), 486–495.Google Scholar

Wurm, B. (2018). Patterns of stability and change in business processes. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Enterprise Modeling and Information Systems Architectures (EMISA 2018), pp. 21–28.Google Scholar

Wurm, B., Goel, K., Bandara, W. and Rosemann, M. (2019). Design patterns for business process individualization. In 17th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2019), pp. 370–385.Google Scholar

Wurm, B., Schmiedel, T., Mendling, J. and Fleig, C. (2018). Development of a Measurement Scale for Business Process Standardization. In 26th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2018).Google Scholar

Yeshchenko, A., Di Ciccio, C., Mendling, J. and Polyvyanyy, A. (2019). Comprehensive process drift detection with visual analytics. In Laender, A., Pernici, B., Lim, E. and de Oliveira, J., eds., International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2019). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 11788. Cham: Springer, pp. 119–135.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Book contents

Chapter 37 - Business Process Management and Routine Dynamics

Summary