Understanding the value of business process configuration

Abstract

In order to deliver effective services, providers are being advised to `innovate' their service delivery systems. Innovation in this context often refers to technology, technique or restructuring improvements. However, the difficulty is that in the modern organisation, service delivery is dispersed across a complex network of numerous departments and units. There are greater pressures on organisational service systems to deliver a higher quality and more efficient service. Management must attempt to develop a greater understanding of organisational process and where improvements may be made using business process management (BPM). The network approach ultimately makes service innovations more difficult to implement. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how service innovation is managed across a service network. Specifically, we examine the effectiveness of a technique called `social network analysis' (SNA) in extending business process management to enhance the manageability of network based services. This paper sets out to provide a state of the art literature review on the short fallings of our ability to understand what triggers business value. It examines the effects of our inability to understand the influence of business process behaviour on service innovation. It also provides a conceptual account of how SNA can be a powerful tool for managers to understand organisational network performance and service interaction (e.g. behavioural, functional, and structural).