Catchword: Business Process Management in the Large

1. Increasing Complexity of Business Processes In recent years Business Process Management (BPM) attracted considerable attention, both in academia and practice. A growing research community is designing and investigating BPM approaches and techniques which are meanwhile widely-used in private and public organizations. The quantity and quality of literature concerning BPM, the existence of specialized conferences (e.g. the International BPM Conference in the ninth year) as well as dedicated journals (e.g. the Business Process Management Journal) illustrate that BPM has become an established discipline. Despite the growing maturity of the BPM discipline, many approaches have problems dealing with the challenges posed by real-life BPM applications. Corporate reality is often more challenging than assumed by contemporary BPM approaches. This situation is similar to the situation of modeling enterprise data (Scheer und Hars 1992). Common enterprise-wide data