Jan vom Brocke

ERCIS - European Research Center for Information Systems · University of Münster

This chapter of the BPM Cases Book (Vol. 2) introduces the BPM Billboard as a tool for planning and scoping Business Process Management (BPM) projects and programs. The BPM Billboard is inspired by the belief that BPM is a means to an end, not the end itself. It serves to link BPM initiatives clearly to strategic objectives and to derive tangible B...

The only constant in our world is change. Why is there not a field of science that explicitly studies continuous change? We propose the establishment of process science, a field that studies processes: coherent series of changes, both man-made and naturally occurring, that unfold over time and occur at various levels. Process science is concerned w...

Digital trace data, along with computational techniques to analyze them, provide unprecedented means to study how organizational phenomena change over time. Yet, as digital traces typically lack context, it is challenging to explain why and how such changes take place. In this paper, we discuss temporal bracketing as an approach to integrate contex...

Information systems research has a long-standing interest in how organizations gain value through information technology. In this article, we investigate a business process intelligence (BPI) technology that is receiving increasing interest in research and practice: process mining. Process mining uses digital trace data to visualize and measure the...

Design science research (DSR) is an established research paradigm aiming to create design knowledge on innovative solutions for real-world problems. As such, DSR has the potential to contribute to the solution of real-world problems of great societal value. In this article, we discuss how DSR can maximize such practical impact. Reflecting on our lo...

Organizations have to adjust to changes in the ecosystem, and customer feedback systems (CFS) provide important information to adapt products and services to changing customer preferences. However, current systems are limited to single-dimensional rating scales and are subject to self-selection biases. The work contributes design principles for CFS...

Design science research (DSR) aims to generate knowledge about innovative solutions to real-world problems. Consequently, DSR needs to deal with the complexity related to problem and solution spaces involving sociotechnical phenomena that people perceive differently and are subject to constant change. This complexity poses challenges to sequential,...

Research transparency promotes openness and trust in the process, evidence, contributions, and implications of scientific inquiry. Information Systems (IS), as a pluralistic research community, must address transparency in relation to its use of multiple research methods appropriate to complex socio-technical contexts and challenging research quest...

Progressively, information systems (IS) researchers draw on digital trace data to capture the emergent dynamics of today’s digitalized world. Digital trace data enable researchers to generate highly-context specific insights into the features and dynamics of socio-technical phenomena. We suggest how IS researchers can use digital trace data to deve...

Emerging digital technologies require regulation that will avoid harmful effects but that also, ideally, fosters innovation. We report on a case study of how actors, representing a variety of perspectives (legal, regulatory authority, government, industry, and technology), interacted to construct a law on trustworthy technology in the European stat...

Research transparency promotes openness and trust in the performed process, produced evidence, claimed contributions, and actionable implications of scientific inquiry. The field of information systems (IS), as a pluralistic research community, must address transparency in relation to its use of multiple research methods appropriate to complex soci...

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, provide ample opportunities for organizational work. These models are capable of collecting, integrating, and generating information with no or little human supervision [1]. Despite their wide and rapid uptake, we lack systematic knowledge about how large language models can be used in business processes. Our...

The workshop intends to help publish rigorous articles from clinical research. With this, we intend to address all colleagues involved in practice interventions to achieve desired outcomes in information systems development, use, and management practice contexts. The intended audience for the workshop includes at least two kinds of participants:...

Business Process Management (BPM) is a holistic management discipline in which numerous facets and dimensions can be addressed within education and teaching. Especially for novices (in educational institutions and practice), the large body of knowledge can be perceived as overwhelming due to the pluralistic background and its resemblance to other r...

Purpose The ten principles of good business process management (BPM) support organizations in planning and scoping the organizations' BPM approach. Derived from literature and expert panels, the principles received much attention both in research and practice. This article develops a measurement instrument to operationalize the principles and to su...

Design Science Research (DSR) is a well-established paradigm in the Information Systems field generating knowledge on the design of innovative solutions to real-world problems. The maturity of DSR has increased due to many methodological contributions, including conceptualization of the design process, templates on how to plan and document, as well...

Non-fungible tokens(NFTs) are on the rise. They can represent artworks exhibited for marketing purposes on webpages of companies or online stores -- analogously to physical artworks. Lending of NFTs is an attractive form of passive income for owners but comes with risks (e.g., items are not returned) and costs for escrow agents. Similarly, renters...

Design science research (DSR) produces knowledge via the design and evaluation of innovative solutions to real-world problems. DSR provides an improved understanding of how and why the solutions work. While DSR is being widely embraced in many research disciplines, its educational pedagogy so far remains immature with little guidance on how best to...

While many recognize the relevance of creativity in design science, there is a lack of guidance in the field on how to use creativity methods effectively. In this article, we draw on the creativity literature to provide guidance on choosing effective creativity methods in the DSR process. A Creativity-Methods-Fit Framework suggests that the fit of...

Digital trace data offer promising opportunities to study dynamics and change of various socio-technical phenomena over time. While we see a surge of empirical and conceptual articles, we lack a systematic understanding of why, how, and when digital trace data are or can be used to study dynamics and change. In this article, we present the findings...

Nowadays, health-care organizations rely extensively on information technology and systems for providing high-quality services to their patients and exchanging data with external partners. However, these organizations, processes, and operations are vulnerable to criminal activities and digital security breaches, which has led health-care organizati...

Design science research (DSR) intends to contribute design knowledge to the scientific discourse in the field of Information Systems. However, such design knowledge is typically produced in isolated DSR projects and does not follow a systematic knowledge accumulation strategy in terms of refining or extending previous design knowledge. Towards a fi...

Commercializing data and data-related services has gained in importance in recent years. Driven by digitalization and the Internet-of-Things (IoT), companies and individuals continuously generate vast amounts of data. Data marketplaces have emerged to support these data providers in selling their data to different data consumers. However, data mark...

Design science research (DSR) intends to contribute design knowledge to the scientific discourse in the field of Information Systems. However, such design knowledge is typically produced in isolated DSR projects and does not follow a systematic knowledge accumulation strategy in terms of refining or extending previous design knowledge. Towards a fi...

A citizen-centric view is key to channeling technological affordances into the development of future cities in which improvements are made with the quality of citizens’ life in mind. This paper proposes City 5.0 as a new citizen-centric design paradigm for future cities, in which cities can be seen as markets connecting service providers with citiz...

Entrepreneurship scholars increasingly embrace the design science approach. While established design science methodologies from other fields have distinct strengths, they provide little guidance for a particularly relevant type of design science project for entrepreneurship scholars, namely exploration projects. In this article, we propose a method...

Several studies have shown that video games may indicate or even develop intellectual and cognitive abilities. As intelligence is one of the most widely used predictors of job performance, video games could thus have potential for personnel assessment. However, few studies have investigated whether and how virtual reality (VR) games can be used to...

An increasing presence of practitioners with doctoral degrees in Information Systems and related disciplines holds promise to advance Information Systems research. The prospect is to gain more knowledge from the practical experience of developing, using, and managing information systems in context. To scientifically capitalise on this opportunity,...

The amount of battery-powered IoT devices is strongly increasing. Predicting their battery health is important to maintain and proactively replace them to avoid outages. This paper gives an overview of the existing literature using the IoT functionality to track and predict battery health. We elaborate on battery health concepts commonly found in t...

This paper reports on a design science research (DSR) study that develops design principles for “green” – more environmentally sustainable – data mining processes. Grounded in the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and on a review of relevant literature on data mining methods, Green IT, and Green IS, the study identifies eig...

Business Process Management (BPM) is an integrative management discipline dedicated to understanding and shaping how organizations conduct and continuously improve the way they work (Becker et al. 2003, Hammer 2015, Dumas et al. 2018). As such, BPM recognizes the structured flow of activities, business processes, as an asset of significance and as...

As physical products are increasingly augmented with digital technology, manufacturing firms have become part of the development of so-called smart products and smart services. As such, manufacturing firms are challenged by new market participants and ecosystem partners, particularly from the software development industry, and by the dynamic nature...

In this paper, we respond to Grover and Lyytinen (2022). We agree with them that the advent of the digital age is calling for a reconsideration of the role of theory and theorizing. We also think their proposal does not go far enough. The time is ripe to question the role of theory in our field more fundamentally. We propose to instead focus on est...

Process mining is a fast-growing technology concerned with managing and improving business processes. While the technology itself has been thoroughly scrutinized by prior research, we are only beginning to understand the managerial and organizational implications of process mining. Creating such knowledge is essential for a successful adoption and...

This paper reports on a large-scale BPM initiative at Endress+Hauser (E+H), a globally operating leader for measurement and automation technology in process and laboratory applications. E+H have the opportunity of designing a BPM governance structure to integrate BPM into the existing organizational structure. Teaming up with E+H, we develop a tool...

This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on 'Design Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation' gives scholars and practitioners an opportunity to learn how to conduct design science in entrepreneurship and innovation. Building on the successful PDW last year, this year's PDW aims at digging deeper into methodical aspects of the design science...

In this emergent research forum (ERF) paper, we report on a project from a state-funded hospital located in one of Europe's microstates. The hospital is currently planning a new building site and, in addition, plans to adopt new information technologies (IT) to improve patient safety and enrich the patient journey. However, the hospital lacks a sys...

Digital agents with human-like characteristics have become ubiquitous in our society and are increasingly relevant in commercial applications. While some of them closely resemble humans in appearance (e.g., digital humans), they still lack many subtle social cues that are important for interacting with humans. Among them are the so-called microexpr...

While artificial intelligence (AI) governance is thoroughly discussed on a philosophical, societal, and regulatory level, few works target companies. We address this gap by deriving a conceptual framework from literature. We decompose AI governance into governance of data, machine learning models, and AI systems along the dimensions of who, what, a...

Information systems students need to be prepared to understand and manage unfolding dynamics in businesses operating in a digital world. We present a university course that systematically integrates knowledge from two streams of research that deal with dynamics: business process management and routine dynamics. Both streams of research study proces...

Implementing the Internet of Things (IoT) is associated with several multi-layered challenges and questions for practitioners and scholars alike. However, little knowledge is available to guide practitioners in the successful implementation of this emerging technology at the organizational level. In this research-in-progress paper, we report on a p...

Policies to fight COVID-19 have largely targeted at indoor spaces. Abundant empirical evidence showed that COVID-19 spreads more easily through aerosols in closed rooms. We have been utilizing Design Science Research (DSR) to develop a smart space management solution that draws from space-related trace data to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in indo...

The continuous rise of e-commerce and the resulting global transportation activities lead to an increased environmental load, specifically in the form of carbon emissions. While carbon offset donations offer the potential to mitigate the ecological harm, these voluntary options are not yet prevalent among e-commerce customers. Prior research has sh...

While AI provides many business opportunities across industries, the organizational implications of AI are still largely unclear. We investigate governance roles related to AI use in practice, and undertake first steps to define the role profiles of a Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and an AI Risk Officer (AIRO). We base our inquiry on two sources: a liter...

Design science in the entrepreneurship field holds the promise of developing relevant knowledge with scientific rigor. Yet despite the promise of this approach, the entrepreneurship field still lacks guidance on how to plan, conduct, and assess design science work. In order to develop theoretically grounded principles, we first make our perspective...

Explorative business process management (BPM) is attracting increasing interest in the literature and professional practice. Organizations have recognized that a focus on operational efficiency is no longer sufficient when disruptive forces can make the value proposition of entire processes obsolete. So far, however, research on how to create entir...

Organizations have to adjust to changes in the ecosystem, and customer feedback systems (CFS) provide important information to adapt products and services to changing customer preferences. However, current systems are limited to single-dimensional rating scales and are subject to self-selection biases. This work contributes design principles for CF...

Crowdfunding has reached enormous popularity among entrepreneurs, yet many struggle to fund their projects. For example, only 39.8% of all Kickstarter projects get funded. Why? Entrepreneurs need to set a predefined funding goal, which needs to be reached to get the project funded. If not reached, they do not get the money. To reach the funding goa...

Design Science Research (DSR) provides a rich body of frameworks, approaches, and methods to support researchers in conducting DSR projects. However, there is little tool support and guidance for effectively documenting DSR processes. In this article, we present a prototypical implementation of a conversational agent called "DSR Buddy" that is inte...

Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as...

Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as c...

Operators of complex, networked systems are constantly confronted with a large number of error events that are time-consuming to address. Events in one network component can trigger a cascade of events in other components leading to many intertwined sequences of a large number of error messages. Operators often only seek to identify and unders...

Keywords: artificial intelligence, deep learning, computational creativity. Abstract: While the potential of deep learning(DL) for automating simple tasks is already well explored, recent research has started investigating the use of deep learning for creative design, both for complete artifact creation and supporting humans in the creation process...

Inferring users’ perceptions of Virtual Environments (VEs) is essential for Virtual Reality (VR) research. Traditionally, this is achieved through assessing users’ affective states before and after being exposed to a VE, based on standardized, self-assessment questionnaires. The main disadvantage of questionnaires is their sequential administration...

At the latest since the COVID-19 pandemic, the notion of ‘resilience’ has become omnipresent. As Information Systems (IS) researchers, we are particularly interested in how IS can contribute to coping with exogenous shocks like the pandemic and help organizations and societies to become more resilient. However, a comprehensive overview of how resil...

Routine dynamics and Business Process Management (BPM) are two academic disciplines that investigate sequences of action for carrying out work in organizations. Even though they share this phenomenon of interest, there are fundamental differences that separate both research areas. In this chapter, we take a first step to overcome this divide. To do...

Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis , design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as...

COVID-19 vaccination has led to unrest within societies, and intense public debates are often carried out on social media platforms like Twitter. A better understanding of concerns, issues, and communication on COVID-19 vaccines is a first step to reduce tension within society and improve the negative effects of the pandemic. It can also contribute...

Design science research (DSR) aims to generate knowledge about innovative solutions to real-world problems. A comparably new stream of research, DSR has matured methodically, and is increasingly catching the interest of researchers, specifically for its potential to contribute to problem solving in society and the economy. Since research methodolog...

Situation faced: Listemann Technology AG (Listemann hereafter), a leading industrial service provider for heat treatment, brazing, sintering, electron beam welding, and engineering in the manufacturing industry, invests in new digital solutions to increase the value of its services for its customers. Even though Listemann has a digital production p...

An essential aspect in the evaluation of Virtual Training Environments (VTEs) is the assessment of users' training success, preferably in real-time, e.g. to continuously adapt the training or to provide feedback. To achieve this, leveraging users' behavioral data has been shown to be a valid option. Behavioral data include sensor data from eye trac...

This article presents a tool – the BPM Billboard – which has been developed to capture all relevant aspects of a successful BPM approach in a “one-page- representation”. The Billboard was first presented as part of the new BPM Cases Book (vom Brocke, Mendling, et al., 2021a) , and it is used in many projects, now, also supported by Signavio and SAP...

We present a framework to classify business processes according to their contextual management requirements. Our framework results from a real-world project with Hilti, a globally operating company. Following a design science research approach, we identify two key dimensions to classify business processes: variability and frequency. As these two di...

This chapter introduces the BPM Billboard as a tool for planning and scoping Business Process Management (BPM) projects and programs. The BPM Billboard is grounded in the belief that BPM is a means to an end, not the end itself. It links BPM initiatives to strategic objectives and ensures that BPM creates tangible results toward achieving those obj...

Scholars interested in topics of entrepreneurship and innovation are increasingly embracing the design science research (DSR) approach. DSR is rooted in Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial (1996) and aims at developing instrumental knowledge, that is scientific knowledge guiding action. While entrepreneurship and innovation scholars acro...

Design Science Research (DSR) is a highly context-dependent and iterative process. Design processes in DSR projects represent the actual strategy and execution of design knowledge inquiry and are typically unique. However, details of the actual design process are often lost as there is a lack of transparency in published DSR projects. In this resea...

Given the diversity of business processes, isn't it strange that BPM approaches aim at a unified management approach? We report on research challenging this common assumption: We present an approach to account for contextual differences of processes in BPM. Specifically, we report on research that has developed a matrix to classify business process...

In response to turbulent business environments, organizations are embarking on digital transformation journeys, often turning to “high speed” methods such as agile practices. These methods are key enablers for addressing time complexities in digital transformations, including time-to-delivery, cycle time, lead time, latency, real-time and velocity....

In this article, we point to the importance of considering the organizational context when deciding on an enterprise modeling approach. Based on extant research in the area of context-aware Business Process Management, we present results from an empirical investigation on how the context of an organization can be assessed regarding requirements for...

Innovation, especially digital innovation, is indispensable for organizations that want to remain competitive. Employees play a crucial role in developing innovations, but the use of digital technologies for innovation methods that foster employee-driven innovation has rarely been researched. Using a sample of 215 participants and two innovation me...

This report summarizes a large-scale online workshop series focusing on the connection be-tween digital innovation and business process management (BPM). The motivation behind our format was to complement the primarily conceptual claims in this field of research with in-depth insights from organizational practice. The format covered four consecutiv...

Business Process Management is a boundary-spanning discipline that aligns operational capabilities and technology to design and manage business processes. The Digital Transformation has enabled human actors, information systems, and smart products to interact with each other via multiple digital channels. The emergence of this hyper-connected world...

At the core of reward-based crowdfunding (RBC) is the reward menu. Carefully-constructed reward menus can impact fundraising success significantly. An oft-discussed approach to influencing purchasing decisions is introducing an irrelevant option into a consumer’s choice set—a decoy option—making another, often more valuable option more attractive....

Context awareness is essential for successful business process management (BPM). So far, research has covered relevant BPM context factors and context-aware process design, but little is known about how to assess and select BPM methods in a context-aware manner. As BPM methods are involved in all stages of the BPM lifecycle, it is key to apply appr...

Virtual reality has been proposed as a promising technology for higher education since the combination of immersive and interactive features enables experiential learning. However, previous studies did not distinguish between the different learning modes of the four-stage experiential learning cycle (i.e., concrete experience, reflective observatio...

For e-commerce retailers, even small increases in waiting times have been found to lead to user dissatisfaction and losses in sales. This paper investigates how contextual and behavioral factors influence the impact of latency on the website performance of a real e-commerce platform. The results show an increased impact of latency for users with fa...

In the globalized, turbulent, and rushed nature of contemporary work, organizations perceive an increasing pressure to master digital transformation. To do so, organizations are increasingly turning to 'high speed' methods such as agile and flow. We argue that the differentiating feature of these methods is how to address time complexity to increas...

Benefits and applications of virtual reality (VR) in higher education have seen much interest both from research and industry. While several immersive VR applications for higher education have been described, a structured analysis of such applications on the market does not exist. We use design elements from research for applying VR in higher educa...

This paper reports on a case study in collaborationwith an industry partner to explore the value creation potentials of Mixed Reality (MR) in construction. MR is a technology that allows for intuitive interaction with digital data through overlays on the real world, giving immediate access to the data of a construction site to quickly track or reso...