Boundary Spanning Practices in BPM: A Dynamic Capability Perspective

Collaborating with actors from outside of an organization, such as consultancies, customers, or suppliers, has proven to be a success factor for business process change. Research on business process change maturity views effective collaboration as a sign for mature organizations. It argues that establishing systematic cross-boundary collaboration and making use of business process change networks is a key challenge that, while not yet achieved, lies ahead of the majority of organizations. However, business process change practice seems to struggle with implementing these envisioned comprehensive collaborative policies. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, research has not yet been able to provide sufficient insight into potential barriers to establishing cross-boundary collaboration in business process change. Therefore, we conduct nine in-depth case studies and explore barriers to collaboration with firm-external actors. Drawing from the Resource-Based View, dynamic capability and boundary spanning theory, we identify a set of resource dependencies that hinder establishing collaborative business process change. Based on these findings, we lay out elements of a problem-oriented theory which contributes to coping with the challenges of and to harvesting the potential benefits of collaboration in business process change.