Norbert Ahrend, Konrad Walser and Henrik Leopold
quantitative study. Public administrations could use the identified factors for complementing their BPM implementation strategy.
5. Conclusion
In this paper we investigated the BPM implementation in the public administration of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. We conducted 13 interviews and compared three case studies with a set of systematically derived comparison criteria.
We found that the public administrations of all three countries have recognized the importance of BPM. Due to differences in culture, size, and technical preconditions, all three countries pursue their own BPM implementation strategy. Currently, Switzerland is ahead of Germany and Austria with regard to standardization. Germany, on the other hand, builds on an interorganizational platform including a wide range of free tools for process modeling. Austria is more focusing on the technical implementation and the harmonization of support processes. As a result, they currently have reached the highest degree of process harmonization.
Currently it is not possible to predict which BPM approach will be potentially more successful in the long run. In general, we concluded that political backing is one of the main factors for BPM success. Further, partnerships among the administration authorities represent a key point. Only by facilitating partnerships, a holistic management concept as BPM can be successfully implemented in the organizational environment of public administrations. Here, tools can effectively support such partnerships by offering social network components in the context of platforms. Although, the findings of the presented research are not generalizable, they might serve as an important guidance for research and practice. Due to the lack of research in that field, this work represents a first step towards an understanding of BPM in public administrations.
In future research, we plan to extend our study with cases from other European and also Non‐European countries. We further strive for increasing the total number of interviews such that our findings reach a higher degree of external validity. Finally, we will continue to investigate the three presented cases in order to learn how these BPM initiatives evolve.
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