Business process management – at the crossroads

Business process management (BPM) has attracted much focus throughout the years, yet there have been calls questioning the future of BPM. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current state of the field through a dynamic literature review and identify the main challenges for its future development.

A dynamic co-citation network analysis identifies the “evolution” of knowledge of BPM and the most influential works. The results present the developed BPM subthemes in the form of clusters.

The focus within the field has shifted from facilitating wide-ranging business performance improvements to creating introverted optimizations within a particular BPM subgroup. The BPM field has thus experienced strong fragmentation throughout the years and has accrued into self-fueling subareas of BPM research such as business process modeling and workflow management. Those subareas often neglect related disciplines in other management, process modeling and organizational improvement fields.

The study is limited by the initial keyword choice of the authors. The subsequent co-citation analysis ameliorates the subjectivity since it produces a data set and contributions based on references.

A new combination of historical development and the state-of-the-art of the BPM field, by employing a co-citation and cluster analysis. This dynamic literature review presents the current state of the theoretical core and attempts to identify the crossroads that BPM has reached. The study can be replicated in the future to track the changes in the field.