Module 02: Critical Thinking - MGT 530

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Read the required article on business process management by AlShathry. Notice that Chapter 2 of your text discusses factors affecting productivity, like standardizing processes and procedures and quality issues. Write a 3-4-page paper that analyzes the outcomes AlShathry describes for Saudi Arabian organizations and how productivity is impacted. Make a recommendation as to how productivity may be improved in Saudi organizations.

Be sure to use at least two current, scholarly references beyond any required course readings. Current sources are those published within the most recent five-year period, and scholarly sources are those from peer-reviewed journals.

Make certain for each listed reference that you have at least one supporting citation in the body of your content. Your reference page is always the last page of the submission where all individual references get listed.

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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-7154.htm Business process management: a maturity assessment of Saudi Arabian organizations Omar AlShathry Department of Information Systems, Imam Mohammed Bin Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Business process management 507 Received 24 July 2015 Revised 20 September 2015 Accepted 7 November 2015 Abstract Purpose – Business Process Management (BPM) has become increasingly common among organizations in different industries. There is very limited research on the application of BPM in the MENA region and particularly in Saudi Arabia. The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical maturity assessment for selected Saudi Arabian organizations from broad range of industries. Findings showed that there is notable variability of BPM perception within the functional groups of the sample organizations. Organizations with holistic business strategy and resilient change management procedures showed more adherence to BPM practices than those with functionally driven or ad-hoc BPM initiatives. Design/methodology/approach – In this empirical study, structured interviews were undertaken with selected business functions owners from ten Saudi organizations. All selected organizations resides in the city of Riyadh with most of them having local and regional branches. The selection of the organization followed non-probability sampling technique whereby the selected organizations were those seemed easy to access and showed willingness to participate in the research. The sample organizations included different types of businesses in different industries. Even though the purpose of the study is not applicable to a particular industry type or sector, variety of business domains and variability in organizations size were considered in the selection process. Table 1 shows an overview of the organization business sector. Findings – This research investigates the current status of BPM implementation among Saudi Arabian organizations. Although there is positive favour towards BPM concepts among Saudi organizations, it seems that the practical understanding of BPM is yet to be matured. One of the noticed findings from the survey is the apparent sharp disjoint between information technology (IT) and business strategy. This segregation, from a BPM perspective, created two variants of BPM understanding; a business variant related to designing and managing business operations, and the IT one which focusses on configuring and installing BPM systems. There is a lack of a holistic view of business processes and its associated activities within an organization. Most surveyed organizations have either no clear business strategy or it is too complicated the thing that make it difficult to integrate it with BPM initiatives. Some organizations have no defined process owners for their main core business processes neither there are measurable goals for their performance. Their main BPM endeavour is mainly focused on the process activities rather than the process output and performance. Originality/value – This is the first research paper that provides empirical research on the status of BPM in the MENA region and particularly in Saudi Arabia. Keywords BPR, BPM, Business excellence, Work flow, Process maturity, BPTrend Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction The technological advancements of the last decade have driven organizations to occasionally invent new business models to stay ahead in the competition race. To cope with such important business changes, businesses have started to embrace a relatively new concept in today business world called Business Process Management (BPM). Recent studies showed that BPM has become the main criteria of success for business professionals and managers (Harmon, 2015; Lohrmann and Reichert, 2013; Harmon and Business Process Management Journal Vol. 22 No. 3, 2016 pp. 507-521 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1463-7154 DOI 10.1108/BPMJ-07-2015-0101 BPMJ 22,3 508 Wolf, 2014). It is seen as a vital approach for keeping business process in control by implementing continuous analysis, optimization and improvement activities the thing that results in clearer business visibility and better performance. The importance of BPM is confirmed by a recent report from Gartner (2010) showing that BPM is the most identified issue by CEOs for six consecutive years. The idea of process management is to manage the business process in a way it meets its intended customers’ requirements and hence ensures their satisfaction. This concept of BPM faced some criticism as being a barrier to the organizations creativity which may encourage them to find easier ways for making profit (McCormack et al., 2009; Sanders Jones and Linderman, 2014). The objective of this research is to conduct an empirical assessment study on the status of BPM application among Saudi Arabia organizations. Different organizations from varied sectors, which were believed to have BPM solutions in place, were selected and assessed against a proper BPM maturity assessment. This research intends not only to provide informed data about the BPM status of the surveyed organizations, but also to pave the way to them for process improvement plans. In the next section, a literature review is presented focusing on the BPM and process approach concept. In Section 3 the research methodology is presented, in Section 4 the results are analysed and discussed. Finally, Section 5 includes the conclusion and a short indication for future studies. 2. Literature review 2.1 Process approach and organizations The term “process” has evolved dramatically since the pre-historic times when people relied on themselves to produce the products they need (Dumas et al., 2013; Harmon, 2015). The consumer and the producer of a product, at that time, was the same individual. This concepts has changed dramatically following the development of societies in the ancient times, where people had become specialised in producing specific types of products, i.e., different activities for producing different products. At the inception of the industrial times, the concept of process improved further when individuals have become specialised in part of an activity in the production process of a product, rather than being the sole designer of the product. Generally, a process is defined as a sequence of activities that convert an input into an output. In business term, business process consists of a set of independent activities that are purposefully structured to deliver a specific output which can be an event, an input or a trigger to other business applications or human actors. In other words, a business process is a series of processes that function in business context. Business in this definition can be an organization or a division in an organization responsible for providing goods or services (Sanders Jones and Linderman, 2014). Organizations who have variety of processes started to adopt the process approach in order to integrate multiple functional areas related to their day to day operations (Sanders Jones and Linderman, 2014; Harmon, 2015). Porter and Rosemann and vom Brocke (2015) defined two set of processes: core processes and support processes. Core processes include processes that are linked in the creation of value product/services to the organization. The support processes, on other hand, are processes that enable and allow to the creation of the first category processes, such as; human resource (HR), information technology (IT) infrastructure procurement, etc. (Rosemann and vom Brocke, 2015). Other categories of process types were proposed which include management-related process such as corporate governance. The number of business processes in an organization relies on its ability to provide management resources to coach and monitor such processes. 2.2 Business process models There are plenty of business process frameworks or methodologies organizations can adopt to design their business work flow. Some of these methodologies have a holistic, enterprise nature of business process like Six Sigma, Lean BPTrend, Rummler Brache, CMMI, etc. Others are more specific at the implementation level like ARIS, UML BPMN. However, BPM should not be looked as set of steps to be completed, but it has to be viewed as an organization capability which is incubated by supportive factors. Rosemann and vom Brocke (2015) proposed six elements (components) defined as success factors that are to be integrated in any BPM initiative. These elements are: strategic alignment, governance, methods, IT, people and culture. Thomas Kohlborn et al. (2014) proposed ten principals that guides successful implementation of BPM. Figure 1 shows an overview of business process methodologies wrt to the business hierarchy. Business process management 509 2.3 BPM maturity assessment Since the early invention of capability maturity model integration, the term “maturity” has begun to be the defacto for measuring a business capability in performing specific functionality. Maturity models are a set of criteria or standards that are used by organization and business owners to assess the level of their process management efficiency and compliance. It is an approach by which the ability of an organization towards a class of application domain is portrayed in a level-based sequence (Rosemann and vom Brocke, 2015; Becker et al., 2009). Maturity models are designed as a set of levels each of which has its own requirements that have to be addressed by an organization to be considered compliant to that level. The current level of an organization describes its business capability and how this capability can evolve by achieving higher levels. Many BPM maturity models were proposed in the past years. Notwithstanding the scope of this research is not to evaluate such models efficiency, it is important to give a short overview about some of the common widely applied models. Generally when referring to process maturity there are two types of maturity models: process-based models and the organizational-based ones (Rohloff, 2011). In other words, there are models that assess the attributes of a process in terms of its documentation, control and management, etc., and others that assess the holistic Enterprise Level Strategy, Process Architecture, Process Management, BPM Governance and Planning More Comprehensive Methodologies More Specialized Methodologies • Enterprise Adoption of Six Sigma • Rummler-Brache-PDL Methodology • Balanced Scorecard Perf. Eval. and Strategy • CMMI-BPMM Process Management Change • SCOR (Bolstorff-Rosenbaum) • xBPL Methodology (Business Genetics) • Business Rules Methodologies (Ross) • BPTA Enterprise Methodology Enterprise Process Management Business Process Level Process Documentation, Redesign and Improvement Business Process Improvement Projects Implementation Level • Lean Six Sigma (DMAIC) • BPTA Process Redesign Methodology Projects Undertaken to Develop Resources to Support New Processes • BPM Methodology • RIVA and HIM Human Resource Infrastructure IT Infrastructure Physical Plant and Hardware Used Source: Harmon (2015) • IDEF0 Methodology • ARIS (IDS Scheer) • Unified Software Development Process (Rational, UML methodology) Figure 1. Business process pyramid BPMJ 22,3 510 organization capability towards BPM (Roglinger et al., 2012). These models vary in their application and efficiency wrt the size of enterprise or the business domain. Many researchers argue that a good selection of a maturity model should consider aspects like its validity, reliability and more on its cost effectiveness (Simonsson et al., 2007). The CMMM model was intended to assess the software development contractors for their ability to perform software development projects (Roglinger et al., 2012). This model has improved to a more standardized process-oriented version CMMI for software development process. At present CMMI has three model standards for process improvement: product and service development (CMMIDEV), service acquisition (CMMIACO) and service establishment and management (CMMI-SVC)(Rohloff, 2011). In 2007, Harmon (2007) proposed BMP model which is derived from the CMM model. He separated process maturity from business maturity by proposing the process audit approach that forms competencies checks for both the process and the business. Another model by Rummler-Brache Group, proposed a set of success factors that key business process shall comply to in order to achieve the required business excellence (Van Looy et al., 2010). Curtis adopted CMM into the business process using similar levels-based approach (Curtis and Alden, 2007). The incremental approach of the model insists on completing the previous level before moving up to higher maturity levels. Curtis model is now supported by Object Management Group as a Process Maturity Model (BPMM). BPMM is a detailed specifications following the evolutionary approach of CMM on how organizations assess their business process maturity. Rosemann and De Bruin (2005) proposed a three dimensional model that account for five factors: IT/IS alignment, methodology, performance, accountability and culture. These factors are considered as main drivers for successful implementation of the model. Despite having rich tools of supportive surveys and case studies that aids in its implementation, Rosemann’s model has received criticism in regard to its complexity. A detailed literature on process assessment maturity models can be found in Roglinger et al. (2012) and Van Looy et al (2010). Apart from using assessment models, some researchers addressed areas that are believed to have impact on the efficiency of BPM adoption; like using process aware infrastructure (ERP, CRM, etc.), the understanding of the organization culture etc. (vom Brocke and Sinnl, 2011; Schmiedel et al., 2015). 2.4 BPM in Saudi Arabia There is little literature that provides a comprehensive view on the current status of BPM among Saudi Arabia organizations. A study by Nader Abdul-Hadi et al. (2005) surveyed 33 organizations in the construction industry for the barriers affecting business process re-engineering (BPR) implementation. Among the 29 barriers found, lack of proper implementation methodology was the main prominent one. Another study surveyed 88 Saudi organizations against the level of awareness towards BPR procedures (Rahali et al., 2008). Findings showed that there is positive awareness among Saudi organizations, however, it could be improved by having better BPR strategy that encapsulate all business functions and responsibilities. The other available literature seen relative reviewed BPM in the context of change management analysis (Schierholz and Al-Mudimigh, 2007), role of IT in organizations or the adoption of quality standards or eServices (Magd, 2006; Alsmadi et al., 2012). It would seem that there is lack or even limited literature covering the area of BPM application among Saudi Arabian firms. The lack of such literature could be attributed to the infancy of such concept among world businesses. Thus, this research contribute to the literature by providing an empirical study on the status of Saudi Arabian organization wrt BPM. 2.5 Goals of this research The main objective of this research is to have a clear picture of the current status of BPM in Saudi Arabia. It also aims to assess the organization BPM efficiency and gives business stack holders an overview of their gaps and conformities to BPM best practices which in turns helps them for future improvements. It also aims to give organizations the confidence on their current BPM level of compliance to BMP best practices. Business process management 511 3. Methodology 3.1 Sample design In this empirical study, structured interviews were undertaken with selected business functions owners from ten Saudi organizations. All selected organizations resides in the city of Riyadh with most of them having local and regional branches. The selection of the organization followed non-probability sampling technique whereby the selected organizations were those sounded easy to access and showed willingness to participate in the research. The sample organizations included different types of businesses in different industries. Even though the purpose of the study is not applicable to particular industry type or sector, variety of business domain and variability in organizations size were considered in the selection process. Table I shows an overview of the organization business sector. The selection of the sample organization ensures that all organization have been active for at least ten year with a considerable annual profit earning. The sample organizations of our study have achieved annual revenue in 2014 financial year in the range from SR 12 million SAR to 850 million SAR (Figure 2). Sector No. of organizations Telecommunication Oil and Gas Manufacturing Government agencies Healthcare 2 2 2 2 2 Table I. Surveyed organizations overview Annual Revenue 45% 25% 15% < 10 15% 10 - 100 100 - 500 > 500 Figure 2. Annual growth of sample organizations in million SAR BPMJ 22,3 512 3.2 Cross-functional areas It is impractical to survey the entire population of an organization as the effort and time required would be too high. The selection of respondents within the organizations was undertaken on the basis of a sampling method called stratified sampling. Stratified sampling is a type of probability sampling techniques which allows for sampling a group or sub-population from the overall population under study (Neuman, 2005). The term “population” refers to the group of people to whom the findings and results of this survey could be applicable and extendible. The process of stratified sampling is done by dividing the population into homogeneous groups or strata. Every stratum categorize the population of an organization based on participants’ roles and the functional areas they belong to. The following identified sub-populations or strata are applied to every organization in our sample: • business executive: management role in the organization; • IT function: any matured IT function individual; • human resource: any senior HR individual; • finance manager: any senior finance individual; and • line manager: sub-ordinate to HR manager who administrate production line of services or products. The classification of the sample groups or “strata” were based on their exposure and involvement to BPM activities in their organizations. The scope of the study is meant to include five levels of the organization business authorities. The enterprise level, by targeting business executive members, the mid-level represented by the supportive functions of the organization like IT, HR and finance, and finally the line manager level where we target process owners of a main core functional area. Business executives or enterprise-level member pose important knowledge on the organization functional areas and the cross-functional activities of the main business processes. IT function along with line managers hold shared knowledge regarding the organization business processes and how IT is facilitating the execution of their day to day work (Ray et al., 2004). Therefore, representatives from those two categories are expected to provide more in-depth view of how business processes are orchestrated throughout the organization. 3.3 Interview specification The interviews were guided by ten questions all of them were asked to every respondent in the same order. The questions are completely derived from and follow the same fashion of Harmon survey of BPM maturity assessment (Harmon and Wolf, 2014). Every question holds weight of 1 to 5 mapped qualitatively into a maturity scale of five levels (from never to always) as follows: if the respondent shows no signs of performing this activity before, a value of one is assigned. If, on the other hand, the interviewee shows positive awareness to the practices involved in the activity in a way that it is part of the routine work (100 per cent of the time), a value of 5 is assigned. Other scale values are assigned depending on the researcher judgement and analysis. The feedback from all functional areas in an organization is calculated (Table II) w.r.t every maturity question, and then aggregated to produce a mean value mapped to a proper maturity scale. Organization 1 Maturity question/functional area IT function HR function Line manager Finance function Business executive Average value (/25) Maturity level (never →always) Organization 2 Organization 10 Maturity-level result Maturity level (never→always) Scale value Never did it Occasionally Frequently Most times Always Q1 4 5 Q2 5 4 Q3 1 4 Q4 1 2 Q5 3 4 Q6 4 1 Q7 5 5 Q8 2 3 Q9 1 3 Q10 4 2 Business process management 513 ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Occurrence (%) 0 1-30 31-60 61-99 100 Value 1 2 3 4 5 Table II. Maturity assessment form 4. Maturity assessment result 4.1 Are work processes documented? Business processes should be fully documented in terms of its procedures, policies, models, etc., so that process users know how to follow the process proper execution. Based on our interviews with the domain experts of the sample organizations, it would seem that four organizations (40 per cent) responded that they document their main business process frequently, i.e., 31-60 per cent of the time (Figure 3). One organization responded that they do not usually document their main business processes. In total, 20 per cent (two organizations) have good process documentation of their business processes with a relatively clear process charts and description. One of those two organizations works in the oil and gas industry and has ISO health and safety certification. Mr A.N., a line manager of a massive ITIL compliant incident management process in a telecom company which uses BMC software, Are Work Processes Documented? 20% 10% 30% 40% Never Occasionally Frequently Most Times Always Figure 3. Documentation of business processes BPMJ 22,3 514 quoted that “we know what we should do every time, we have become matured enough and familiarized in working with coming incidents without referring to any process documentation”. 4.2 Do units that perform similar activities use standard or similar processes? The main aim of this question is to check the level of consistency between business processes among organization divisions. Large companies with hundreds of business processes may share complete or segments of their business processes in different business functions. These business processes should be implemented and executed similarly using the same structure and tools to avoid discrepancy of process performance. Also, some organizations may have different business processes that serve the same goal, leading to inconsistency and low-performance records. One witnessed case from our survey is for an organization which has two variants of order fulfilment process, one in the sales function and the other in the materials acquisition; both processes have two different performance and efficiency levels. M. S., an IT executive in a government agency quoted “Some of our units were previously separated units each of which has its own business model, but we are trying to fine-tune them into a single business model”. This statement was in response to our inquiry to the reason of having two variants of a capacity management process. With respect to our survey (Figure 4), two (20 per cent) organizations showed good level of standardization for their main business processes and sub-processes. Both organizations belong to the IT service sector where ITSM compliant process engines are in place. It is noted that most of the IT service organizations benefits from common ITSM frameworks like ITIL to manage their IT processes which represent their core business, and this has reflected on high standardization levels of such processes. 4.3 Are standard process models defined for each major process? Organization processes whether supportive or core ones may span through different business functions and functional areas within the organization; to form what so called value chains. Such business architecture, which organizations are reliant on to generate values, has to be well maintained to sustain consistency and to improve performance. The questions in this aspect is to do with the availability of process charts, models or even an understanding of the major processes that belongs to a specific value chain. Based on our respondents’ feedback (Figure 5), one organization (10 per cent) showed a well-defined process model for their major business process, 30 per cent of the organizations showed no signs of having such models for their major process neither an understanding of value chain concepts. Do Units That Perform Similar Activities Use Standard or Similar Processes? 10% 10% 30% 30% 20% Figure 4. Standardization of business processes Never Occasionally Frequently Most Times Always Business process management Are Standard Process Models Defined for Each Major Process? 10% 30% 30% Never Occasionally Frequently 30% Most Times Always 515 Figure 5. Availability of process models 4.4 Are standard process measures defined for each major process? This part of the survey emphasizes on the importance of having key performance indicators KPI, performance criteria or any sort of measurement to help organizations assess the performance level of their single or major value chain processes. By looking at our survey responses in Figure 6, it was surprisingly discovered that around 40 per cent (four out of ten) organizations showed no signs of having process measurement for their main business process that represent the main value chain of their core business. In total, 20 per cent of the respondents have process measurement for part of their main business process, especially those work in the IT service sector. One organization, on the other hand, showed satisfying signs of having active process metrics for all of their main business processes and sub-processes. There is notable misunderstanding of the way a process should be assessed by most of our sample organizations. They have confusion as to define the best process metric whether it is the quality of service, or the value generated by the process output, or even the compliance level of the process towards certain business or government regulations. Mr K.A., a QA manager in a healthcare organization quoted “One of the KPI used to maintain the appointment handling process in our department is the help desk agent idle time which is calculated and reviewed monthly”. This KPI would be true for evaluating the business value of the process rather than the process performance itself where the level of satisfaction, active and waiting calls etc., would be much more appropriate. One of the IT service providers from the telecom industry has implemented a set of KPIs for their incident management process, which should theoretically be reviewed by the process owner for process performance assessment. However, none of their KPI’s account for user satisfaction or customer feedback. Are Standard Measures Defined for Each of the Major Processes? 10% 40% 30% Never Occasionally 20% Frequently Most Times Always Figure 6. Availability of process measurements BPMJ 22,3 Some organizations have established many KPI’s for their provisioning management process with the same level of prioritization, which indicates that the process owner is keeping attention to all of the process functionality. A senior manager of the admission office in a hospital failed to express knowledge about common KPIs for his department such as readmission rate, time spend in emergency room, etc. 516 4.5 Is support provided by automated applications consistent with the processes? In today vibrant business world, business processes are entirely reliant on software applications for executing business activities especially for paper-heavy processes. This execution may require partial HR interaction or may completely be automated for cost saving and better performance targets. However, these automation supportive tools should in line with the existing business process models and be flexible enough to any modifications to the way business process is undertaken. They are meant to bridge the gap between IT division and the business mindset in an organization so that business rules are executed and optimized in the real time. According to our survey findings (Figure 7), 20 per cent of the sample organizations showed no signs of consistency between their business process and software applications running them, 40 per cent have occasional consistency and notably 10 per cent have fully compliant business applications. This findings may be attributed to the lack of available BPMS in the market which is fully tailored to support business processes. One respondents from a government agency who have recently introduced Ultimus as a BPM suite, stated that the automation have changed the way we conduct our tasks, I used to have different roles from other work mates working in the same function but they are not fully addressed. This statement indicates that some business process needs to care about the needs and responsibilities of the process users as indicated to in the abstract process model, if existed, or by carefully discovering the as-is process model. Automation should be built on a matured and effective business process so as to increase its efficiency or its throughput rate, rather than automating already ineffective process which may increase the inefficiency. It was also surprising that most surveyed organizations showed no indication of automating repetitive procedures like the regulatory compliance requirements given the huge impact that such compliance have to the business. A business senior when asked about this responded that “compliance stuff is tedious, we just can’t stand it”. 4.6 Are the skills needed to perform the tasks defined and documented? Organizations are expected to clearly define the required skills and training needs for process owners running their business processes. Some business activities require Is Support Provided by Automated Applications Consistent with the Processes? 10% 20% 10% Figure 7. Consistent business automation tools 20% Never Occasionally 40% Frequently Most Times Always specific skills and competency levels that are important for their running and execution. Organizations should have their staff training needs tailored on the basis of the employees’ levels and responsibilities. One of the main skills that may be of interest in this aspect is the knowledge of process owners to BPM concepts like process monitoring, redesign and the ability to deal with work flow notations like UML activity diagrams, BPMN, etc. Based on Figure 8, it would seem that 20 per cent (2/10) showed no signs of having such skills documented neither records of past training sessions to their process owners. Surprisingly, one of those two organizations have previous ISO 9001 certification for major service lines of their business. Two organization (20 per cent) showed good signs of having a well detailed documentation of the required skills for their process owners, these organization falls in the manufacturing sector with an active ISO 9001 certification. Business process management 517 4.7 Are managers trained to do process redesign and to manage processes? This question investigates the training programs the organization offers to its line managers and processes owners to improve their skills in areas like: project management, process redesign, etc. It is worth saying that almost all of the interviewees who participated in this study and are in a senior positions like business executives or managing director, showed no past experience of BPM or have even ever heard of it. As shown in Figure 9, four organizations (40 per cent) showed no skills of process analysis and design, three organizations provided frequent training workshops and only one organization showed good training skills for their managers. This result were surprising for some organizations who have their own BPMS running for a long time. Are the Skills Needed to Perform the Tasks Defined and Documented? 20% 20% Never Occasionally 30% 30% Frequently Most Times Always Figure 8. Definition and documentation of required skills Are Managers Trained to Do Process Redesign and to Manage Processes? 10% 40% 30% Never Occasionally 20% Frequently Most Times Always Figure 9. Management skills of process owners BPMJ 22,3 518 Mr J.O., a production engineer at an oil and gas organization, said “we use Honeywell Process Knowledge System (PKS) and Wonderware Statistical process to manage the production process”. He also added “W.r.t process redesign skills, we have experienced process engineer available at our plant who has better experience with international standards and local regulations”. 4.8 Does your organization have process managers who are responsible for processes? In this question, we look for defined process managers within the organization who are responsible for the process coordination and governance. Matured organization should show signs of process approach across their functional areas and business functions. When a clearly defined process owner for a single process exists, he/she is kept responsible for its final output. As seen in Figure 10 organization from the oil and gas industry showed excellent process centric architecture among their functional areas where there is a known process owner and process accountable for major value chain processes. Two organizations also showed evidences of having process owner for many business processes along with well-known RACI model for assigning responsibilities among process stakeholders. Although having positive feedback for this questions, most of the organizations showed lack of synchronizations among process owners within the business functions or among the value chain processes. A business analyst of an IT unit has failed to understand his process ownership role for a business solution that he is literally its process owner. 4.9 Do process managers use performance data to manage processes? Process owners should have updated performance reports of their running processes to evaluate their performance. Although having process owners in place is seen as a maturity indication of the organization towards BPM, this has to be supported by the frequent analysis of the process data. In Figure 11, two organizations reported that they run periodic performance audit checks for their processes. One organization from the telecom industry has developed performance checks for their outsourced call centre process. Ali, a webSphere administrator at a case organization quoted “we have IBM process manager server and I use to monitor key application bottlenecks but the metrics we use is not updated nor prioritized?”. This may indicate that setting a goal and value target is vital for managing process performance as monitoring can react to incidents instead of suggesting improvements. Does Your Organization Have Process Managers Who Are Responsible for Processes? 10% 20% Figure 10. Availability of defined process owners 20% Never 10% 40% Occasionally Frequently Most Times Always Business process management Do Process Managers Use Performance Data to Manage Processes? 20% 10% Never 30% 40% Occasionally Frequently Most Times Always 519 Figure 11. The use of process performance data 4.10 Are process improvement programs in place to maintain processes This questions refer to the continuous improvement activities maintained by organizations to improve the performance of their business processes. Findings to this questions (Figure 12) came moderate with five organizations have occasional process improvement programs (once every two year of key processes), one organizations showed active process improvement cycles, and three organizations showed no signs of such activities. Mr N. AlG., a sales manager in a dairy company said that, “we have efficient process improvement actions that monitor the sales staff performance, sales agents’ relationships, etc. Some proposed improvement to our processes was making two levels of sales staff to handle orders, improving the year targets of sales agents in accordance with the demand growth using Siebel systems to maintain marketing plans and better relationship with our partner”. Another respondent from a manufacturing company said that “we follow a rigorous Statistical Process Controls (SPC) to maintain any deviation in our production lines from specific thresholds”. This statement indicates that there is a lack of preventive actions process or in other words an active BPM that is triggered as a result of undertaking periodic checks of a process performance against its predefined qualities targets. 5. Conclusion This research investigates the current status of BPM implementation among Saudi Arabian organizations. The purpose of this research was to give insight about the level of adoption and conformance towards BPM practices, the thing that will help organizations in their future improvement plans. This research is not intended to Are Process Improvement Programs in Place to Maintain Processes? 10% 10% 30% Never Occasionally 50% Frequently Most Times Always Figure 12. Availability of process improvement programs BPMJ 22,3 520 address the current weakness related to BPM adoption nor to explore the success factors of BPM implementation, which may be considered in future research. Although there is positive favour towards BPM concepts among Saudi organization, it seems that the practical understanding of BPM is yet to be matured. It appeared from our careful observations and interviews that most organizations lacks a holistic value-based view towards BPM that encompasses the involvement of all organization stakeholders. One of the important noticed findings from our survey is the apparent disjoint between IT and business among organizations. This segregation, from a BPM perspective, created two variants of BPM understanding; a business variant related to designing and managing business operations, and the IT one which focusses on configuring and installing BPM systems. Some organizations have no defined process owners for their main core business processes neither there are measurable goals for their performance. Their main BPM endeavour is mainly focused on the process activities rather than the process output and performance. There is lack of end-to-end holistic view to institutionalize business processes and its associated activities within an organization. Organizations should believe in that BPM adoption is a methodology issue which requires a holistic top-down view rather than a technology solution handled by the internal IT unit. Most surveyed organizations have either no clear business strategy or their business strategy is too complicated to be integrated to their existing BPM systems. References Abdul-Hadi, N., Al-Sudairi, A. and Alqahtani, S. (2005), “Prioritizing barriers to successful business process re-engineering (BPR) efforts in Saudi Arabian construction industry”, Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 305-315. Alsmadi, M., Lehaney, B. and Khan, Z. (2012), “Implementing Six Sigma in Saudi Arabia: an empirical study on the fortune 100 firms”, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, Vol. 23 Nos 3-4, pp. 263-276. Becker, J., Knackstedt, R. and Poppelbuß, D.-W.I.J. (2009), “Developing maturity models for IT management”, Business & Information Systems Engineering, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 213-222. Curtis, B. and Alden, J. (2007), “The business process maturity model (BPMM): what, why and how”, BPM Trends, pp. 1-4. Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J. and Reijers, H.A. 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(2006), “An investigation of ISO 9000 adoption in Saudi Arabia”, Managerial Auditing Journal, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 132-147. Neuman, W.L. (2005), Social Research Methods: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches, Volume 13, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA. Rahali, E., Chaczko, Z., Agbinya, J.I. and Chiu, C. (2008), “Business process re-engineering in Saudi Arabia: a survey of understanding and attitudes”, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Broadband Communications, Information Technology and Biomedical Applications, Gauteng, pp. 148-155. Ray, G., Barney, J.B. and Muhanna, W.A. (2004), “Capabilities, business processes, and competitive advantage: choosing the dependent variable in empirical tests of the resourcebased view”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 23-37. Roglinger, M., Poppelbuß, J. and Becker, J. (2012), “Maturity models in business process management”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 328-346. Rohloff, M. (2011), “Advances in business process management implementation based on a maturity assessment and best practice exchange”, Information Systems and e-Business Management, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 383-403. Rosemann, M. and De Bruin, T. (2005), “Application of a holistic model for determining BPM maturity”, BP Trends, pp. 1-21. Rosemann, M. and vom Brocke, J. (2015), “The six core elements of business process management”, Handbook on Business Process Management 1, Springer, pp. 105-122. Sanders Jones, J.L. and Linderman, K. (2014), “Process management, innovation and efficiency performance: the moderating effect of competitive intensity”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 335-358. Schierholz, R. and Al-Mudimigh, A.S. (2007), “The role and impact of business process management in enterprise systems implementation”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 13 No. 6, pp. 866-874. Schmiedel, T., vom Brocke, J. and Recker, J. (2015), “Culture in business process management: how cultural values determine BPM success”, Handbook on Business Process Management 2, Springer, pp. 649-663. Simonsson, M., Johnson, P. and Wijkstrom, H. (2007), “Model-based IT governance maturity assessments with Cobit”, ECIS, pp. 1276-1287. Thomas Kohlborn, P.J.P., Mueller, O. Dr, Maximilian Roeglinger, D. Dr, vom Brocke, J., Schmiedel, T., Recker, J., Trkman, P., Mertens, W. and Viaene, S. (2014), “Ten principles of good business process management”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 530-548. Van Looy, A., De Backer, M. and Poels, G. (2010), “Which maturity is being measured? A classification of business process maturity models”, 5th SIKS/BENAIS Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pp. 7-16. vom Brocke, J. and Sinnl, T. (2011), “Culture in business process management: a literature review”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 357-378. Corresponding author Omar AlShathry can be contacted at: shathry@gmail.com For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm Or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com Business process management 521 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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Running Head: CRITICAL THINKING

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Analysis of business process management for Saudi Arabian organizations
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CRITICAL THINKING

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Analysis of business process management for Saudi Arabian organizations
According to Nadarajah & Kadir (2016), business process management (BPM) connote
processes that aim at improving performance through managing business processes. Example of
business processes includes distribution & marketing, purchasing, inventory management, sales
management, finance and accounting, human resource management, employee relationships
among others. Based on the research conducted by Alshathry, aimed at assessing business
process management among Saudi Arabian organizations, BPM was established as imperative in
an organization’s growth and prosperity. Most importantly, BPM in organization assists in
improving productivity through standardizing processes and procedures. Research by Alshathry
focused on ten Saudi Arabian organizations (city of Riyadh) as the sample design methodology.
In order to avoid extraneous factors and improve quality research, Alshathry sampled ten
organizations across five sectors. Among sampled ten sectors included telecommunication, oil
and gas, government agencies, manufacturing and healthcare. Interview questions were directed
to the respondents of organization functions including IT, HR business executive of the
organization. Therefore, the paper purpose to discuss the outcome of BPM assessment for Saudi
Arabian organizations by Alshathry and impacts of productivity. The paper will also recommend
how productivity can be improved in Saudi organizations.
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