Prioritizing business processes improvement initiatives: The Seco tools case

Abstract

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) face great challenges in prioritizing business process improvement initiatives due to limited resources and politics in decision making. We developed a prioritization and categorization method (PCM) for supporting CIOs' decision-making process. The method is designed in a collaborative research process engaging CIOs, process experts and researchers. In this experience paper, we firstly present the PCM, and then we describe the lessons learned when demonstrating the PCM prototype at a big international company, Seco Tools. The results show that the PCM can produce a holistic analysis of processes by eliciting the "collective intelligence" from process stakeholders and managers. The PCM activities create a top-down social process of process management. By using the PCM the company managed to prioritize business process improvement initiatives in a novel way. This paper contributes to theories/know how on business process management, as well as propose a novel method that can be used by CIOs of large corporations in prioritizing process initiatives. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.