Business process management: public sector implications

Business process management has received much attention in the industrial engineering and management literature, and its benefits are well known. Much less has been written in the public sector management literature, and what has been written has been very general. Hence, there is confusion among public managers about how business process management concepts should be implemented. How should public organizations reorganize to accommodate business process management? How are existing or new enterprise systems aligned with business process management methodologies? This paper addresses these issues, and concludes that public organizations will have to change their organizational structures radically as well as their enterprise systems in order to implement business process management concepts successfully. The paper also discusses the benefits of public sector process management, and focuses in some detail on two of the reasons that public organizations have incentive to implement business process management methodologies. Why business process management? Business process management is as old as the discipline of industrial engineering. Localized implementations of process management (e.g. manufacturing processes, shipping processes, etc.) have been prevalent for years[1]. The process management approach involves: Documenting the process to obtain an understanding of how work flows through the process[2]. The assignment of process ownership in order to establish managerial accountability. Managing the process to optimize some measures of process performance. Improving the process to enhance product quality or measures of process performance. Process management was firmly established on the shop floor, but it was more difficult to establish as an enterprise management strategy, primarily because it was extremely difficult to control large systems of integrated processes. Hierarchical models that emphasized strict managerial control were the models of choice for industrial-age managers. Computers were new and integrated systems were non-existent. Insufficient managerial information was present to support a distributed process management model. Managerial control was the primary reason for selecting the industrial-age hierarchical model. T h e r e s e a r c h r e g is t e r f o r t h is jo u r n a l i s a v a i la b le a t http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregisters T h e c u r r e n t is s u e a n d f u l l te x t a rc h iv e o f th is jo u r n a l i s a v a i la b le a t http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1463-7154.htm