The Role of Culture in Business Process Management Initiatives

Business Process Management is a rather new concept in management that promises many advantages to the organizations. Implementation of this concept similar to the other management techniques needs to consider different factors. One of the factors that its importance has been mentioned in many research, is "culture". Despite of many research that have mentioned this factor as an important success factors, there are few research that consider the way that culture affects on BPM implementation. In this study a survey has been conducted between BPM experts to find the ways that culture affects on BPM implementation. SA framework that were introduced by Kettinger and Teng was used for specifying tasks during implementation. Different aspects of culture were extracted from the items that have been introduced by Alibabaei, Bandara et al. The results show that the culture affects Project Planning and Analyzing Process Problems phases more than other phases and has the least effect on Strategy Linkage phase. On the other hand, between culture items, management awareness of employeesexpectation, tendency for future planning and existing of documented process have more influences on the tasks in compare with other items.