Knowledge-Intensive Healthcare Processes: Rethinking Business Process Ownership

In very recent times, the pressing need to compete on the basis of process-related knowledge rather than process automation has expanded the field of Business Process Management (BPM) to include knowledge intensive business processes (BP). This paper focuses on one of BPM´s core aspects -- BP ownership, aiming to explore its main characteristics in the context of knowledge-intensive BPs. Using a combined theoretical lens of the process/knowledge continuum and boundary spanning, this research analyses an interesting case of BP ownership found in a real-life healthcare organization. Our results show that knowledge-intensive BPs, at least in the case organization, do require a different type of BP ownership than the one found in the BPM literature published over the past two decades. Rather than being focused on management and control, ownership of knowledge-intensive BPs is found to involve knowledge sharing, boundary-spanning, shared responsibility and grass-root leadership.