Business process management: a maturity assessment of Saudi Arabian organizations

Purpose – Business Process Management (BPM) has become increasingly common among organizations in different industries. There is very limited research on the application of BPM in the MENA region and particularly in Saudi Arabia. The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical maturity assessment for selected Saudi Arabian organizations from broad range of industries. Findings showed that there is notable variability of BPM perception within the functional groups of the sample organizations. Organizations with holistic business strategy and resilient change management procedures showed more adherence to BPM practices than those with functionally driven or ad-hoc BPM initiatives. Design/methodology/approach – In this empirical study, structured interviews were undertaken with selected business functions owners from ten Saudi organizations. All selected organizations resides in the city of Riyadh with most of them having local and regional branches. The selection of the organization followed non-probability sampling technique whereby the selected organizations were those seemed easy to access and showed willingness to participate in the research. The sample organizations included different types of businesses in different industries. Even though the purpose of the study is not applicable to a particular industry type or sector, variety of business domains and variability in organizations size were considered in the selection process. Table 1 shows an overview of the organization business sector. Findings – This research investigates the current status of BPM implementation among Saudi Arabian organizations. Although there is positive favour towards BPM concepts among Saudi organizations, it seems that the practical understanding of BPM is yet to be matured. One of the noticed findings from the survey is the apparent sharp disjoint between information technology (IT) and business strategy. This segregation, from a BPM perspective, created two variants of BPM understanding; a business variant related to designing and managing business operations, and the IT one which focusses on configuring and installing BPM systems. There is a lack of a holistic view of business processes and its associated activities within an organization. Most surveyed organizations have either no clear business strategy or it is too complicated the thing that make it difficult to integrate it with BPM initiatives. Some organizations have no defined process owners for their main core business processes neither there are measurable goals for their performance. Their main BPM endeavour is mainly focused on the process activities rather than the process output and performance. Originality/value – This is the first research paper that provides empirical research on the status of BPM in the MENA region and particularly in Saudi Arabia.