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The processes of an investment bank are considered to be particularly knowledge-intensive, because analysts need to extract or generate relevant knowledge from a variety of data. With increasing digitization, modern data science and business intelligence techniques are available to support or partially automate these activities. This study presents concrete use cases for front office processes of an investment bank as how knowledge management techniques can be used. For example, the article describes how expert systems can be used in the due diligence review or how fuzzy logic systems help in deciding whether to buy or sell securities. The article is based on 1079 texts (e.g. documented cases and articles) and serves researchers as well as practitioners as an application overview of data science techniques in the example area of knowledge-intensive banking processes.

Approaches of business process management (BPM) are always changing, because underlying business strategies and technological implementation are constantly evolving. Likewise, methodical approaches, how business processes are planned, optimized, managed and controlled, come and go. This article collects and systematizes the trends discussed at major BPM conferences of the year 2019. The identified hot spots include e.g. process mining, predictive BPM, BPM trust, modeling, BPM platforms, team-driven BPM.

Agility is often required in the context of digitalization/digital transformation, because more and more companies need flexible structures to quickly adapt supporting and comprehensive information systems. However, in the world of business process management the methods and rules of agile software engineering often are only implemented selectively or differently from the basic manifesto. Based on 17 recognized agility models, this paper first develops a well-founded literature overview of how agility is understood in business processes. In a synthesis, the models are compiled in a morphological box that shows development paths for increasing agility in business processes in twelve essential dimensions (e.g. communication, technology, process team, change). The resulting description and consulting model can serve researchers as a state of the art discussion of agility in process management. Software engineers see how the idea of agility is used in business processes. Process managers can use the model to successfully increase agility in their area of responsibility.

Agility is considered as a key concept to increase flexibility in company environments. Especially in times of digital disruptions, attempts are made to transfer the software engineering methods and rules (e.g., SCRUM) to other processes from other domains without having BPM standards so far. This article collected 17 known agility models relevant for BPM based on a literature review. Twelve essential dimensions to increase agility are described (e.g., communication, technology, process team, change), which might serve with specific values (e.g., frequency, channel and structure) as potential development paths for increasing agility in business processes.

A key objective of strategy management is ensuring the implementation of strategies in the day-to-day operational business processes of enterprises. For this purpose, researchers and practitioners developed an enormous body of methods for strategy management. However, the tremendous variety of strategy management methods makes it difficult to choose the most appropriate methods for a given challenge. In an effort to provide guidance for practitioners and researchers, this paper provides an integrated dataset of the 50 most widespread strategy design and implementation methods and links these methods to a large body of 100 case studies. Based on this dataset, commonly utilized methods, common challenges, typical objectives, and specifics of industries are examined.

Process orientation within companies is widely acknowledged to deal with modern business challenges. However, business processes usually run across many departments, creating organisational interfaces. Such interfaces often produce errors and thus weaken the line and workflow organisation of companies. This article first develops a list of factors that typically drive interface criticality (e.g., lack of common language of departments, absence of shared reward systems). In addition, to assess the criticality of an interface in business practice, this paper presents an evaluated assessment model. It helps process and team managers to measure or even predict the criticality of organisational interfaces using standard metrics. An IT prototype is given in the paper, which makes the application of the assessment feasible.

Although many companies implement business processes, workflows often run across functional units. As a consequence, business processes contain several organizational interfaces between various roles and functions. As such critical interfaces are subject to information losses and misunderstandings, they have a negative impact on the overall process and business performance. Organizations therefore aim to reduce interfaces and their negative effects. However, literature and business practice still lacks an effective model to assess or even predict interface criticality. This study is an initial attempt to develop factors evaluating the criticality of organizational interfaces. Drawing on the literature of related fields, this work in progress proposes 23 determinants of interface criticality from fields such as organizational structure, situational factors, organizational climate, individual factors, communication and mechanisms reducing interface criticality.

Adaptive case management (ACM) is an increasingly popular approach for supporting knowledge-intensive business processes. Being a new approach, it still lacks a similar degree of standardization as the more established business process management (BPM) approaches. This paper introduces the new Case Management and Model and Notation (CMMN) standard. Based on a set of ACM requirements, the applicability of CMMN for modeling ACM cases is examined thoroughly and extensions improving the ACM support of CMMN are proposed.

Successful companies use business processes for the transfer of long-term strategies in operational workflows. The modeling approach presented in this chapter shows how strategic objectives of a company can be combined with the S-BPM modeling notation. The new modeling approach is used in two case studies. First, redesign rules for the strategic optimization of workflow models are demonstrated in the case of the customer support processes of an international enterprise. A second case study introduces a company-wide monitoring system through the example of the product development process of a multinational company from Germany.

Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is a new paradigm to support dynamic business processes that are mainly unpredictable and knowledge-intensive. However, fundamental knowledge about this approach is currently scattered across a series of collective volumes and web blogs that tend to focus on isolated aspects or domain-specific challenges and solution approaches. As the ongoing discussion still lacks comprehensive theoretical literature, principles are driven mostly by individual circumstances and common ideas are not transparent. Therefore, the paper at hand provides a structured, domain-independent overview about the common principles in ACM and derives a set of distinct challenges in order to contribute to the general understanding of this paradigm. This work consolidates existing literature and subsequently focuses on the implied role of collaboration. To complement the theoretical discussion, a reference implementation demonstrates the key concepts.

Business processes should be aligned to the corporate strategy. However, implementing such a strategy in the day-to-day operations of a company is a challenging task as there is little support for holistically deriving actionable changes to business processes from a company’s strategy. This contribution proposes linking strategy maps with process models in order to close this gap. The resulting Strategy Process Map approach has been successfully applied in a case study at a large German automotive supplier.

A key objective of strategy management is ensuring the implementation of strategies in the day-to-day operational business processes of enterprises. For this purpose, researchers and practitioners developed an enormous body of methods for strategy management. However, the tremendous variety of strategy management methods makes it difficult to choose the most appropriate methods for a given challenge. In order to learn from field studies and to provide guidance for practitioners and researchers, this paper provides a dataset of the 50 methods from a body of 100 case studies focusing on strategy design and implementation in the field of business process management. Based on this dataset, commonly utilised methods, common challenges, typical objectives and the role of the management levels are examined. Researchers may use this freely available dataset as a foundation for their own further research.

Traditional S-BPM successfully focuses on standardized business processes which are performed according to a fixed predefined process model. Yet a substantial share of business processes is difficult to predict with exceptions to the core processes occurring frequently.