Understanding Knowledge-Intensive, Practice-Oriented Business Processes

In order to create new opportunities for competitive differentiation, organisations are starting to shift their focus from transactional operational business processes (BPs) to other types of processes that cannot be easily replicated. Their key ingredients are human knowledge, experience and creativity that cannot be standardised, prescribed and easily acquired. While Business Process Management (BPM) research and practice will remain focused on highly structured operational BPs for quite some time, there is a need to better understand other types of BPs, especially their knowledge aspect. This is expected to lead to new knowledge management strategies and processes designed to better leverage human capital to ensure continuous improvement of business processes. This paper focuses on knowledge-intensive, practice-oriented BPs. It describes an exploratory case study of a complex practice-oriented BP in a large, multi-unit organization and illustrates how our research findings expand current BPM boundaries, especially in the area of BP improvement methodologies.