Abstract: The literature offers a multitude of modeling and assessment
techniques to represent differing enterprise stakeholder perspectives and
interests in business process innovation. While each technique yields valuable
insights into possibilities for innovating business processes, these insights
are limited as they are derived from a particular perspective. This paper
presents an alternate approach that focuses on multiple stakeholders with
differing and potentially conflicting perceptions of the state of current
practice and directions for future innovation. The proposed approach can be
used to capture, synthesize, and reconcile multiple stakeholder perceptions to
yield a comprehensive foundation for business process innovation. Rather than
being constrained by pre-conceived formalisms, this approach begins with
subjective perceptions of involved stakeholders. The approach results in an
informal as-is model, assessments of its strengths and weaknesses, and
recommendations for how to innovate the business process. The approach
encompasses four stages: engage process stakeholders; collect
process data; explicate process knowledge; and, design process
innovations. The argument combines the business process modeling and
stakeholder analysis literature; it draws upon a case study of process
innovation in a knowledge-intensive enterprise; and, it provides practical
lessons for how to organize and support business process innovation based on
stakeholder perceptions.
Keywords: Business process innovation, stakeholder analysis, soft systems thinking
