The Effect of Organization Size and Sector on Adopting Business Process Management

Abstract

The business process management (BPM) discipline is starting to recognize the importance of context-awareness. In spite of this recognition, few studies investigate the effect of diverse contextual factors on BPM. To fill this gap, the study statistically analyzes the effect of organization size and sector, as specific contextual factors, on the adoption of BPM. The latter is measured by means of BPM capabilities for which data was collected from 2309 employees in 72 organizations. The study relies on the Contingency Theory by hypothesizing that, in practice, organizations adopt BPM by taking into account factors that fit an organization’s context. Surprisingly, the results do not show a dependency between BPM adoption and organization size, suggesting that BPM adoption levels can equally be achieved by large or small organizations. In contrast, a dependency is found for organization sector (partly based on market velocity), suggesting different BPM adoption practices and/or speed in different sectors.