Codification of Knowledge in Business Process Improvement Projects

In times of globalization, new technologies and high market transparency, companies search for ways to raise the efficiency of their business processes and achieve long-term customer relationships. Therefore enterprises are strongly devoted to business process improvement (BPI) initiatives. However, in times of globally spanning inter-organizational business processes, conducting BPI initiatives is particularly challenging due to the necessary diverse and distributed knowledge. Successful BPI projects require the participation of a variety of employees who are directly involved in a business process. The employees have tacit process knowledge that needs to be transformed into explicit knowledge to derive improvement opportunities in a BPI project. To reach this, a set of easy to understand and well-structured BPI techniques is required to encourage employees to participate in corresponding initiatives. Further, the codification of the results gained in such initiatives is decisive to enable their proper documentation, communication and processing. The paper at hand introduces a BPI roadmap for coordinating the structured use of BPI techniques in a project. The roadmap is based upon a set of formal conceptual model types for codifying the results generated by each technique. In addition, reports are specified that process the model information and facilitate the communication and documentation of the results. The presented approach thus contributes to the systematic transformation of employees’ tacit process knowledge to explicit knowledge in the course of BPI initiatives. By applying the roadmap in a use case, its benefits for BPI initiatives are illustrated.