Why organizational / process culture? Part I: background questions
On organizations, organizational cultures, and change management
Table Of Contents
1. The general background
↳ a. (Business) Process Governance
↳ b. Organizational structures
↳ c. The organizational and especially process culture
2. Topics of our series: organizations, organizational cultures and change management
3. Why is it important to question the understanding of an organization, its culture and the associated change management approaches?
This post is the start of a new WAITS Software- und Prozessberatungsgesellsch. mbH series dedicated to the various concepts of
- Organizations
- Organizational and process cultures
- Change management.
1. The general background
When talking about digital projects in general and business process management initiatives in particular, the focus is often on the technical aspects.
This generally means: what software and hardware should be purchased, developed or extended?
In terms of business process management (BPM), the question is which tools (and how) to use for
- Process modeling
- Process mining
- Simulation of processes/tasks
- Process automation, i.e:
- No code / low code platforms
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Workflows in Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)
- Machine Learning (ML)
etc.?
Less attention is often paid to the so-called soft factors.
However, these tend to be the bottleneck that determines whether such technological initiatives are truly successful in an organization.
In business process management (BPM), the following soft factors are of utmost importance:
a. (Business) Process Governance
Business process governance or simply process governance refers to a framework for
- Coordinating / controlling business processes.
- The entire BPM lifecycle, which includes the related BPM (technology) projects.
b. Organizational structures
Organizational structures, such as
- Roles (process owners, etc.) and responsibilities
- Centers of excellence (CoEs)
and so forth, are also important in this context.
c. The organizational and especially process culture
Last but not least, the establishment of a viable process culture is decisive for the success or failure of BPM initiatives, because, as Peter Drucker famously said, culture eats strategy for breakfast —
and this includes (BPM) technology as well!
2. Topics of our series: organizations, organizational cultures and change management
The following series of posts will focus on
- Understanding an organization as a
- Collection of individuals
- Container
- Socio-technical system
- Socioemergent complex system that processes decisions (according to the sociologist Niklas Luhmann)
etc. - The corresponding conceptions of organizational culture, which include
- broad definitions of org culture as a conglomeration of values, norms, traditions, etc.
- and narrow definitions of org culture as the informal structure of the organization, i.e., the behavioral expectations that have emerged unintentionally through repetition mechanisms (see the works of the sociologist Stefan Kühl). - Various approaches to change management, in particular with regard to the desired transformation of organizational cultures.
3. Why is it important to question the understanding of an organization, its culture and the associated change management approaches?
The answer lies in the fact that various background assumptions determine the selection of recommendations and strategies to foster successful BPM initiatives within the organization.
Roughly speaking, it’s about the illusions of
- Intervention
- Management, and
- Control
that are cherished with regard to organizations and their cultures.
And the attitude towards those illusions, in turn, impacts the probability of a BPM project’s success or failure!
Thanks for reading and, hopefully, see you in the next post The mystery of the coordination of human behavior: from common sense to social emergence!
Author for WAITS Software und Prozessberatungsgesellschaft mbH, Cologne, Germany: Peter Bormann — November 2023.
