Towards Managing Business Process Variants within Organizations - An Action Research Study

Understanding the Business Process Standardization (BPS) requirements of the operating model is one important aspect for the adequate design of the underlying Enterprise Architecture (EA). Moreover, the benefits and drawbacks of BPS have been discussed thoroughly in literature and the alignment of business processes and IT is considered to be of high importance for organizations. BPS especially deals with architecting and managing business process variants. However, there are hardly any specific methodologies available on how to identify and evaluate business process variants within organizations and how to properly design processes in this context. In order to close this gap, we develop a bi-directional rigorous procedure model that enables managers to design the organization's business architecture in the BPS context. We apply the developed procedure model and a construct for documenting process variants in an action research study, in order to test their applicability and utility.