Conceptualizing Business Process Management Governance: Towards a Context-aware Understanding

Business Process Management (BPM) is a pivotal driver of operational excellence and sustained organizational performance. To effectively institutionalize BPM at the enterprise level, organizations must establish a robust BPM governance (BPM-G) that provides structure and guidance for all BPM activities. Despite its recognized importance in industry and academia, there remains a need for a comprehensive conceptualization of BPM‑G, particularly concerning its configurational diversity and embedding in the organizational context. In response, we develop a taxonomy of BPM‑G based on justificatory knowledge from the literature on BPM and corporate governance, as well as interview data from a diverse set of organizations. We demonstrate and evaluate the taxonomy in three steps, presenting three illustrative cases that showcase the usefulness of the taxonomy for describing and analyzing BPM‑G. Based on the evaluated taxonomy as our primary contribution, we then advance a context-aware understanding of BPM‑G. We specify the relation between BPM‑G and corporate governance as well as process governance, discussing how the design of BPM‑G is influenced by the organizational tensions of centralization vs. decentralization and standardization vs. flexibilization.