The tension between business process modelling and flexibility: Revealing multiple dimensions with a sociomaterial approach João Porto de Albuquerque a,b,⇑ , Marcel Christ c a Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil b Chair of GIScience, Institute of Geography, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany c Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany article info Article history: Received 23 January 2015 Received in revised form 8 August 2015 Accepted 11 August 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Business process modelling Sociomateriality Business process management Organisational change Flexibility Actor-network theory abstract Business process modelling has contradictory effects on flexibility: on the one hand, recent approaches to process modelling in organisations have been used to pursue flexibility as a strategic goal. On the other hand, the display of organisational practices in models and adherence to these models might reduce the degree of organisational flexibility. In order to shed new light on this paradox, this article adopts a sociomaterial analytical approach based on the Actor-Network Theory to develop a multidimensional understanding of flex- ibility as a relational effect of sociomaterial networks. A case study, carried out of a process modelling project within a large aircraft maintenance corporation, shows that the influ- ence of process modelling on flexibility is not confined to the elements explicitly modelled in the diagrams (‘what’), but also span informal aspects of work practices (‘how’) and the extent of accountability in the organisation (‘who’). Therefore, the relative degree of flex- ibility that emerges from process modelling should be analysed along each dimension pro- duced within the sociomaterial networks of the organisation. Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Introduction In recent decades, the concept of ‘business process’ has gained popularity and become widespread as a basic construct for structuring organisational work in conjunction with information systems. The process-based approach attracted a great deal of attention in the 1990s, when radical business process re-engineering was associated with Enterprise Resource Planning systems (Davenport, 1990; Hammer, 1990). However, it was often observed that business process reengineering achieved contradictory results (Boudreau and Robey, 1996) and paid insufficient attention to flexibility (Fitzgerald and Siddiqui, 2002; Melao and Pidd, 2000). As a result, in recent years there has been the dawn of a so-called ‘third wave’ of Business Pro- cess Management (BPM) (Chang, 2006; Smith and Fingar, 2003; Weske, 2007). This more recent generation is attempting to draw on the combined benefits of past process management approaches by relying upon Business Process Management Sys- tems (BPMS) to model and manage processes with a view to improving the flexibility of organisations, i.e. their capability to adapt to new conditions and situations (Pentland et al., 2012). One of the core activities in BPM projects is the modelling of work practices in the form of diagrams, which is mostly car- ried out by using a flowchart-like, graphical notation such as the Business Process and Modelling Notation (OMG, 2011). These diagrams define the activities of a process and their mutual relations in a way that allows the prescribed activity http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2015.08.003 0963-8687/Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Avenida Trabalhador São-Carlense, 400 – Centro, São Carlos, SP 13566-590, Brazil. Tel.: +55 16 3373 8169. E-mail address: jporto@icmc.usp.br (J.P. de Albuquerque). Journal of Strategic Information Systems xxx (2015) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Strategic Information Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsis Please cite this article in press as: de Albuquerque, J.P., Christ, M. The tension between business process modelling and flexibility: Reveal- ing multiple dimensions with a sociomaterial approach. J. Strateg. Inform. Syst. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2015.08.003