Quo vadis, business process maturity model? learning from the past to envision the future

Abstract

To support companies in systematically improving their business processes, academia has developed and published various business process maturity models in recent decades. Tarhan et al. (2016) expressed initial doubts about the quality of many of the models in their literature review. This paper extends their review by five years (2015–2019) and additionally analyzes the publication outlets as an indicator of model quality. The results strongly provide that business process maturity models are mainly released in less-recognized journals. A reason for this might be problems with replicability and relevance, which are the main criteria for acceptance in higher-quality journals. This finding motivated the derivation of literature-based criteria to increase the transparency, the replicability, and the content relevance of these models. These criteria are a first step to support researchers in publishing more transparent and replicable business process maturity models and to guide reviewers when evaluating papers that are considered for publication. In addition, practitioners benefit from more useful and accessible models.