The role of process representations in business process redesign projects

Markets and the desires of customers change. Thus, also organizations and their business processes need to change at certain points in time. To achieve this, organizations engage in different activities related to Business Process Redesign (BPR). BPR involves, among others, analysing business processes and identifying suitable possibilities to improve them. One of the key steps preceding any business process redesign project is to appropriately capture and represent the respective processes of an organization. Over the past years, particularly process models have been advocated as the most suitable artefact for doing so. However, to the present day, there is no empirical evidence that process models are indeed a superior representation format in the context of BPR. While theory confirms that creative problem-solving tasks are highly dependent on the type and format of information provided to the problem-solvers, the general superiority of process models in this context has not been demonstrated. Therefore, in this thesis I will study the role of process representations in the context of BPR. To this end, I will adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct multiple case studies in organizations that have conducted BPR projects in the past. My overall goal is to shed light on the role and importance of process representation formats in BPR projects.