Creativity Management
BPTrends ▪ May 2008
Creativity Management—The New Challenge for BPM
Creativity Management – The New Challenge for BPM
Stefan Seidel, Michael Rosemann
Abstract
Besides classical criteria such as cost and overall organizational efficiency, an organization’s ability to being creative and to innovate is of increasing importance in markets that are overwhelmed with commodity products and services. Business Process Management (BPM) as an approach to model, analyze, and improve business processes has been successfully applied not only to enhance performance and reduce cost but also to facilitate business imperatives such as risk management and knowledge management. Can BPM also facilitate the management of creativity? We can find many examples where enterprises unintentionally reduced or even killed creativity and innovation for the sake of control, performance, and cost reduction. Based on the experiences we have made within case studies with organizations from the creative industries (film industry, visual effects production, etc.,) we believe that BPM can be a facilitator providing the glue between creativity management and well-established business principles. In this article we introduce the notions of creativity-intensive processes and pockets of creativity as new BPM concepts. We further propose a set of exemplary strategies that enable process owners and process managers to achieve creativity without sacrificing creativity. Our aim is to set the baseline for further discussions on what we call creativity-oriented BPM.
Introduction
Knowledge-intensive Processes are characterized by the involvement of what is commonly referred to as knowledge-workers (Davenport, 2005). Usually these processes are complex, unpredictable, and, as a consequence, difficult – if not impossible – to model in terms of their process flow. There is a vast body of knowledge on how knowledge-workers may be supported to carry out their tasks within such business processes. As
Creativity Management—The New Challenge for BPM
Creativity Management – The New Challenge for BPM
Stefan Seidel, Michael Rosemann
Abstract
Besides classical criteria such as cost and overall organizational efficiency, an organization’s ability to being creative and to innovate is of increasing importance in markets that are overwhelmed with commodity products and services. Business Process Management (BPM) as an approach to model, analyze, and improve business processes has been successfully applied not only to enhance performance and reduce cost but also to facilitate business imperatives such as risk management and knowledge management. Can BPM also facilitate the management of creativity? We can find many examples where enterprises unintentionally reduced or even killed creativity and innovation for the sake of control, performance, and cost reduction. Based on the experiences we have made within case studies with organizations from the creative industries (film industry, visual effects production, etc.,) we believe that BPM can be a facilitator providing the glue between creativity management and well-established business principles. In this article we introduce the notions of creativity-intensive processes and pockets of creativity as new BPM concepts. We further propose a set of exemplary strategies that enable process owners and process managers to achieve creativity without sacrificing creativity. Our aim is to set the baseline for further discussions on what we call creativity-oriented BPM.
Introduction
Knowledge-intensive Processes are characterized by the involvement of what is commonly referred to as knowledge-workers (Davenport, 2005). Usually these processes are complex, unpredictable, and, as a consequence, difficult – if not impossible – to model in terms of their process flow. There is a vast body of knowledge on how knowledge-workers may be supported to carry out their tasks within such business processes. As
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