Analysing factors impacting BPMS performance: a case of a challenged technology adoption

Business Process Management Suites (BPMSs) have been adopted in organisations to model, improve and automate business processes as they aim to increase the quality, efficiency and agility of their business processes. Yet, many organisations struggle to achieve the benefits they expected from a BPMS. This interpretive case study in a large South African financial services organisation explains factors found to negatively impact successful BPMS adoption. The paper describes how an IT team struggled to increase process agility with a BPMS in a large legacy application landscape. The dominant factors causing the struggle were the difficulty of integrating with other applications and a lack of governance around BPM. Interesting findings on the difficulties in resourcing BPM IT teams are presented. The impact of BPM strategy, culture and governance on BPM methods, resourcing, data and technology is explained. The BPM literature lacks empirical qualitative case studies and theoretical models. This paper aimed to contribute to both needs. The theoretical contribution of this paper is two models. The first inductively derived explanatory contextual model should be useful for practitioners wanting to adopt a BPMS. Using this study’s findings and models from the literature, a second, more generic explanatory model of information system performance is derived for a BPMS.