Research On The Influence Of Business Process Management On Firm Value Creation

How to gain and sustain competitive advantage by better creating customer desired value is always a fundamental question for enterprise to keep living and developing. With the rapid development and wide adoption of information technology, firms nowdays are stepping forward to an era of digitial economy, and we have witnessed that hypecompetitive business environment is fostering a novel value creation pattern-Co-Creating Enterprise. Actually, there is a close relationship between the research on information technology usage and firm value creation. On the one side, the fast progressing of information technology is consistently changing the characteristics of business environment; on the other hand, information technology itself is a kind of important and useful tools to promote the effects of organization value creation activities. The existing IT business value literatures have pointed out that competitive advantage may be achieved with the effective leverage of information technology in the implementation of business process management best practices. However, as consumer are becoming more and more self-conscious in determining their desired object of value creation, traditional pattern of value creation is challenged by "Co-Creating" appeals. In IS literatures, there are very few empirical researches focusing on exploring the relationship among business process management, information technology leverage and organization performance by adopting a value co-creating perspective. The primary purpose of this paper is to undercover how business process management practice supporting by related information technology functions will influence value co-creation performance. We anticipate this research will facilitate enterprises to fully harvest the positive impacts of business process management and information technology on their value co-creation performance, and can also provide some theorectical foundations for enterprise to realize optimization in their value strategy under a more hypecompetitive and digital business environment.This paper firstly makes a clear definition and explanation about the relevant concepts. Then, through a broad literature review on business value creation, we proposed that it is important to study business process management and information technology usage from value co-creation perspective. Afterwards, by introducing the main idea of service-dominant logic theory, dynamic capability theory and the notion of ambidexterity, we show why and how they are suitable for us to further understand the relationship between business process management and value co-creation performance. In addition, we develop the theoretical frame about the impact of business process management on organizational value co-creation performance basing on the above three theories.We choose supply chain management processes of domestic enterprises as our empirical investigation objects. The first measurement model depicts several possible path connections between IT-embedded business process capability and organization value co-creation performance. Analysis results show that both GDL-based and SDL-based business process capability can positively influence value co-creation performance. However, the relationship between competitive advantage and two ambidextrous business process capabilities, which are reconfigurated basing on the organization ambidexterity theory, shows an obvious contigent characteristic and can moderated by firm size and value requirements uncertainty. The second model further examines the effects of IT-related operant resource on the development of business process capabilities. The results show that four identified operant resources, including IT-Partner relationship, IT department managerial skills, IT infrastructure flexibility and information security management skills, are helpful to the construction of GDL-based and SDL-based business process capabilities. But it is better for enterprise to leverage IT department decision power together with other IT-related operant resource (i.e., IT department managerial skills) to form a positive complementary effect.In the final part of this paper, we discuss the following aspects of our research on the impacts of business process management on organization value co-creation performance:research conclusions and contributions, practical and academical implications, and in the end, limitations and further research opportunities.