How the COVID-19 pandemic can stimulate more radical business process improvements: Using the metaphor of a tree

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations and employees worldwide to drastically rethink their way of working. While drastic process changes normally tend to fail or are challenged by employee resistance, the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced this impediment so that organizations actually experience how alternative (i.e., more simple and digitalized) working alternatives can look like. This opinion paper calls for more business process management (BPM) ambidexterity in organizations, so that the alternatives experienced during COVID-19 can be evaluated and remain after the pandemic. For this purpose, a BPM tree is proposed to outweigh incremental process improvements from more radical ones, in order for organizations to exploit good practices but also to better explore emerging opportunities.