Understanding Knowledge-intensive, Practice-oriented Business Processes Olivera Marjanovic and Ravi Seethamraju Business Process Management Research Group Business Information Systems Discipline, Faculty of Business & Economics University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia {o.marjanovic, r.seethamraju}@econ.usyd.edu.au Abstract In order to create new opportunities for competitive differentiation, organisations are starting to shift their focus from transactional operational Business Processes (BPs) to other types of processes that cannot be easily replicated. Their key ingredients are human knowledge, experience and creativity that cannot be standardised, prescribed and easily acquired. While Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice will remain focused on highly structured operational BPs for quite some time, there is a need to better understand other types of BPs, especially their knowledge aspect. This is expected to lead to new knowledge management strategies and processes designed to better leverage human capital to ensure continuous improvement of business processes. This paper focuses on knowledge-intensive, practice-oriented BPs. It describes an exploratory case study of a complex practice-oriented BP in a large, multi-unit organization and illustrates how our research findings expand current BPM boundaries, especially in the area of BP improvement methodologies. 1. Introduction In recent times, the field of Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming increasingly recognised as an established field of applied research and practice. While the term BPM is still most frequently used to describe technologies for business process (BP) automation, in recent times, business leaders are starting to adopt a more holistic view of BPM, best described by a recent report published by Gartner [1]. Thus, “the BPM discipline employs methods, policies, metrics, management practice and software tools to discover, model, simulate, execute, analyse, optimize and govern ongoing adjustments to processes toward the goal of improving business agility and operational performance” (pg.2). At the same time, while looking for new opportunities for competitive differentiation, organisations are starting to shift their focus from more-or-less standard, transactional BPs at the operational level, to other types of BPs that cannot be easily replicated by their competitors. Their key ingredients are human knowledge, experience and creativity that cannot be standardised, prescribed and easily acquired. This emerging focus is starting to stretch the existing boundaries of the BPM field to also include other, more knowledge-intensive BPs. Consequently, this creates a need to better understand the knowledge aspect of BPs, in order to support them in a way that would not restrict flexibility and stifle human creativity. However, this need is yet to be met by the commercial BPM systems, as they are still best suited to support repetitive BPs at the operational level. In fact, the control-flow oriented coordination paradigm remains the most dominant in both research and commercial world of BPM. Even when more flexibility is provided by, for example, adaptive and dynamic workflow systems, majority of these systems still focus on operational, transactional business processes. One of the main reasons for this trend lies in the process structure that, in the case of operational BPs, can be represented by a BP model. Process structure is, in fact, derived from various procedures and policies used to regulate and control business processes at the operational level, including the order and structure of individual tasks, roles performing these tasks and organisational resources used by these tasks. This tendency to focus on process structure is so prevalent in the field of BPM that users of various BPM systems often start from the process structure in order to determine if a particular BP should be supported by BPM technology. Furthermore, the process structure is often used as the main focus of various emerging methodologies for BP improvement and redesign. Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2008 1530-1605/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 1