Success factors of process digitalization projects – insights from an exploratory study

Abstract

PurposeIn an exploratory approach, the authors conducted a structured literature review to extract candidate process digitalization project (PDP) success factors (SFs) from the literature on business process management (BPM), project management (PM) and digitalization. After that, the authors validated, refined and extended these intermediate results through interviews with 21 members of diverse PDP teams. Finally, the authors proposed the PDP success model by linking the candidate SFs with relevant success criteria.Design/methodology/approachDigitalization substantially impacts organizations, which increasingly use digital technologies (DTs) to improve and innovate their business processes. While there are methods and tools for identifying process digitalization ideas and related projects (PDPs), guidance on the successful implementation of PDPs is missing. Hence, the authors set out to explore PDP SFs.FindingsThe PDP success model covers 38 PDP success factor candidates, whereof 28 are already backed by the literature and ten have emerged during the interviews. Furthermore, the SFs are structured according to seven categories from the literature covering a broad range of sociotechnical topics (i.e. strategy, structure, culture, people, process, project and technology) as well as equipped with preliminary success rationales.Originality/valueThe work is the first to systematically explore PDP SFs. The PDP success model shows that PDPs require a unique set of SFs, which combine established and hitherto underrepresented knowledge. It extends the knowledge on BPM and serves as foundation for future (confirmatory) research on business process digitalization and the successful implementation of PDPs.

Unlocking agility: Trapped in the antagonism between co-innovation in digital platforms, business analytics capability and external pressure for AI adoption?

“…Our findings also suggest that companies should be more receptive when it comes to agreeing on technological standards in the industry so that the adoption of this technology will be more efficient, the risks of technical incompatibilities between the company and the environment will be reduced, and even consensus on the regulatory framework will be reached more quickly. In this way, the company would have more resources available to devote to devising new ways of maximizing the use of artificial intelligence to improve OA (Baier et al ., 2022; Zhao et al ., 2022).…”

Business processes management as a tool to enhance intellectual capital in the digitalization era: the new challenges to face

“…Finally, PLC and DCS mainly push production planning and logistic and procurement processes, because they are devoted to the manufacturing activities. As previously declared, not only the digital tools are relevant to be explored to better implement the digital transformation of business processes, but also the effects and benefits that relate to BPM, as required by the literature (Eller et al, 2020;Gebauer et al, 2020;Kirchner et al, 2016), impacting in terms of value added (Baier et al, 2022) and in this sense, the research sheds light, answering to the second research question RQ2: What are the main benefits, also in terms of IC, of digital transformation regarding BPM in SMEs? -following Pirogova et al (2020) that recognized Intellectual capital as another type of asset.…”

“…Furthermore, the highly dynamic business environment forces organizations to rise up against changing business directives (Han and Trimi, 2022;Ashfaq et al, 2022;Denner et al, 2018;Matt et al, 2015), thus providing answers to the changing customer demands. Actually, digitalization is a complex socio-economic phenomenon that implies important consequences in terms of value added (Baier et al, 2022) and it is important to underline that digitalization is more than digitization, which means to move information into a digital format (Legner et al, 2017). Digitalization is an evolution of it, because it offers different value propositions, since products and processes incorporate DTs (Rajan and Dhir, 2020;Kerpedzhiev et al, 2020;Huber et al, 2019;Beverungen et al, 2019).…”

Examining and Comparing the Critical Success Factors Between Business Process Management and Business Process Automation

“…The study of success factors for explorative process change through digitalization is also insightful for BPM initiatives, while it mainly provides insights for innovation management and not necessarily covers process automation (Baier et al, 2022). This overview justifies the need for our inquiry into whether CSFs, which have an extensive and mature presence in the BPM context, are also relevant and applicable for BPA projects and different automation types.…”

“…Finally, an emerging field of digitalization-focused process innovation, explorative BPM, stresses that, for competitiveness, organizations need to continuously initiate projects for reengineering and development of completely new processes to provide new value offerings (Grisold et al, 2019). Literature explicitly states the need for guidance in explorative BPM initiatives (Baier et al, 2022;Lara Machado et al, 2022); thus, the investigation of CSFs for such initiatives is also a promising research line. Since such projects need to combine a high-level BPM view with a focus on process automation as an integral technology for transformational process innovation, our results can provide a starting point for such studies.…”