Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) represents one of the core concepts enabling companies to flexibly react to the constantly changing business environment. The actual relevance of business process management is, for instance, illustrated by the size of the BPM software market. A recent study of Global Industry Analysts forecasts that the global market for BPM software will reach a volume of over 5 billion US dollars by the year 2017 [18]. The importance of BPM in academia is demonstrated by its constant presence among top-ranked information system conferences [32, 2, 1, 271]. In fact, this also highlights that BPM has become one of the core areas of information systems research. The range of addressed topics goes from general organizational aspects of BPM to specific technical issues concerning business process models. Due to the importance of business process models for documenting and redesigning the operations of companies, many researchers have focused on aspects of process model design and process model quality. Nevertheless, there are still many significant aspects that have not been addressed by prior research.