[AISWorld] Final CFP: EJIS Special Issue on Business Process Management and Digital Innovation (Deadline 1 October 2018)

[Recker, Jan]

Contribute to our special issue on Business Process Management and Digital Innovation
Guest Editors: Jan Mendling, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Brian T. Pentland, Michigan State University, Jan Recker, Queensland University of Technology

Deadline: 1 October 2018

See also http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/jmj02771-tjis-si-business-process-management-and-digital-innovation

Business Process Management combines knowledge from information technology and management science to create methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes (van der Aalst, 2013; vom Brocke & Rosemann, 2014; vom Brocke & Rosemann, 2015). One traditional focus of BPM research has always been the role of information technology in enacting, managing and innovating business processes. This focus has led to the rise of workflow management systems, BPM suites, process mining technology and other key technological innovations.

This special issue will explore how digital technology and innovation enables, constrains, transforms or otherwise upends the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. We will also look at how technology, techniques and theory from the management of business processes can assist an understanding of innovation and change processes. Recent innovations in Process Organization Studies (Langley and Tsoukas, 2017) and Routine Dynamics (Feldman et al, 2016) also provide a rich set of ideas for theorizing processual phenomena from the ground up.

The timing of this special is motivated by the on-going infusion of new digital technologies - mobile and distributed computing, social media, digital platforms, data analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchains, cloud computing, and so forth - into various aspects of business processes. These innovations generate new possibilities and increase uncertainty for how business processes operate, how they should be managed, and how process innovations unfold (vom Brocke & Schmiedel, 2015; vom Brocke & Mendling, 2018).

With this special issue, our aim is to highlight the need to further our understanding about the dialectic between business process management and digital innovation: how is business process management affected by, and affects, digital innovation?

We envisage (but in no way limit) attention to at least four broad themes:
*         The nature of business process management in the digital age: how do digital innovations transform business process management methods, tools, systems, architectures, skill set, capabilities, organizational culture? What does process management look like in world of constant change?

*         New digitally enabled management and innovation forms for business processes: how does digitalization affect business processes on an individual, process, organization or ecosystem level? What are new types of processes and new ways of designing, operating, monitoring, inventing and potentially emerging processes?

*         Methodological and empirical opportunities of studying business processes in the digital age: what affordances does the digital age provide for collecting, analyzing and theorizing about and with process trace data? What are opportunities to further our understanding of routines and artefacts, temporality and sequence?

*         Digital technologies, platforms and ecosystems for business process management: How do digital technologies change certainty, boundaries, relationality or specificity of business processes? What are relationships of digital objects in business processes to time, cost, quality, process standardization, flexibility, creativity, variability, adaptability, structuredness, knowledge-intensity and other well-known notions?

Important dates

  *   Initial Submission of full papers: 01 Oct 2018
  *   First round reviews sent to authors: 10 Jan 2019
  *   Revised papers due from authors: 31 Mar 2019
  *   Second round reviews sent to authors: 30 Jun 2019
  *   Final revision due from authors: 31 Aug 2019
  *   Publication of special issue: End 2019

Submission instructions

Submissions must be made via the EJIS submission system at https://ejis.msubmit.net<https://ejis.msubmit.net/>. Please indicate that you are submitting to the special issue. The EJIS instructions for authors apply.

Further inquiries

Authors are encouraged to discuss potential submissions with the guest editors. Please contact us at bpm.digital.ejis at gmail.com<mailto:bpm.digital.ejis at gmail.com>.

References

FELDMAN MS, PENTLAND BT (2003) Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change. Administrative Science Quarterly 48(1), 94-118.

FELDMAN MS, PENTLAND BT, D'ADDERIO L and LAZARIC N (2016) Beyond routines as things: Introduction to the special issue on routine dynamics.  Organization Science 27(3), 505-513.

LANGLEY A and TSOUKAS H (Eds.) (2016) The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

VAN DER AALST WMP (2013) Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey. ISRN Software Engineering 2013, 1-37.

VOM BROCKE J and SCHMIEDEL T (Eds.) (2015) BPM - Driving Innovation in a Digital World. Springer, Cham, Switzerland.