Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
İzmir Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, cilt.5, sa.2, ss.88-107, 2023 (Hakemli Dergi)
Collaboration Patterns and Topic Trends in Business Process Management Conferences
One of the most important scientific activities in which business process management (BPM) research attempts have been presented is the BPM Conferences that have been organized since 2003. These conferences guide the future of the field concerning different aspects of the subject. This study focuses on the accumulated literature that BPM conferences have constituted. In this regard, it aims to investigate the portfolio of BPM conferences to pinpoint the trends that have been followed over the years. A bibliometric dataset of the proceedings between 2005 and 2020 was extracted. The methods of scientometrics and bibliometrics are adopted to reveal the collaborations and clusters regarding citations, co-authorships, co-occurrences of keywords, and topic structures, the trends, and summary statistics. Clusters have emerged around certain authors and these authors are pioneering researchers who direct international studies on BPM and have created many research and development opportunities with their research laboratories. The situation in author relations is also reflected in the statistics of institutions and countries. With the keyword and abstract analyses at different depths and dimensions, inferences were made about the topics discussed at the BPM Conferences. Co-authorship analyses regarding authors and countries revealed the clusters around the authors and their countries such as Van der Aalst (Netherlands), Mendling (Austria), Weske (Germany), Dumas (Estonia), La Rossa (Australia), and Reijers (Netherlands). It has been observed that the keywords that have been recorded intensively in the last five years are concentrated around the topics of industry 4.0, big data, internet of things, blockchain, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In general terms, it has been observed that especially the topics such as process mining, semantic structures of processes, business process execution language, and related projects have come to the fore. Findings emphasize that these topics have been affected by the business and technology dynamics of the relevant period. Keywords:Scientometrics, Bibliometrics, Business Process Management Conferences, Collaborations, Topic Modelling
İş Süreçleri Yönetimi Konferanslarının İşbirliği Örüntüleri ve Konu Eğilimleri
İş süreçleri yönetimi (İSY) araştırma girişimlerinin sunulduğu en önemli bilimsel etkinliklerden biri, 2003 yılından bu yana düzenlenen İSY Konferanslarıdır. Bu konferanslar, konunun farklı yönleri ile ilgili olarak alanın geleceğine rehberlik etmektedir. Bu çalışma, İSY konferanslarının oluşturduğu birikimli literatüre odaklanmaktadır ve bu bağlamda, yıllar boyunca takip edilen eğilimleri belirlemek için İSY konferans bildirileri portföyünü incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. 2005 ile 2020 yılları arasındaki yayınların bibliyometrik veri seti çıkarılmış, alıntılar, ortak yazarlıklar, anahtar kelimelerin birlikte oluşumları ve konu yapılarının yanı sıra eğilimler ve özet istatistikleri ile ilgili işbirliklerini ve kümeleri ortaya çıkarmak için bilimetri ve bibliometri yöntemleri benimsenmiştir. Bu alanda belirli yazarlar etrafında kümelenmeler ortaya çıkmıştır. Bu yazarlar, BPM konusunda uluslararası çalışmalara yön veren, araştırma laboratuvarlarıyla pek çok araştırma ve geliştirme olanağı yaratmış öncü araştırmacılardır. Yazar ilişkilerinde var olan durum kurum ve ülke istatistiklerine de yansımaktadır. Farklı derinliklerde ve boyutlarda gerçekleştirilen anahtar kelime ve özet analizleri ile BPM Konferanslarında ele alınan konular hakkında çıkarımlar yapılmıştır. Yazar ve Ülkeler ile ilgili ortak yazarlık analizleri Van der Aalst (Hollanda), Mendling (Avusturya), Weske (Almanya), Dumas (Estonya), La Rossa (Avustralya), and Reijers (Hollanda) gibi araştırmacıların etrafında kümelenmelerin olduğunu ortaya çıkarmıştır. Son beş yılda yoğun bir şekilde kaydedilen anahtar kelimelerin endüstri 4.0, büyük veri, nesnelerin interneti, blok zinciri, bulut bilişim ve yapay zeka konuları etrafında yoğunlaştığı görülmüştür. Genel çerçevesiyle, son yıllarda özellikle, süreç madenciliği , süreçlerin semantik yapıları, süreç uygulaması geliştirme dilleri ve ilgili projeler gibi konuların ön plana çıktığı ve bu konuların ilgili dönemin iş ve teknoloji dinamiklerinden doğrudan etkilendiği gözlenmektedir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Bilimetri, Bibliometri, İş Süreçleri Yönetimi Konferansları, İşbirlikleri, Konu Modelleme
INTRODUCTION
Business processes are considered as an organization’s main components since they have a significant effect on products and services, customer experiences, and income (Dumas et al., 2018). A business process is basically a structured, measurable set of activities designed to produce specifically defined outputs for a particular customer or market, with a flow that consists of a start, finish, and order of these activities by time and place, with clearly defined inputs and outputs (Davenport, 1993; Weske, 2003). Another definition by Hammer and Champy (1993) states that a business process is a set of actions that takes one or more types of input and transforms it into a useful output for the customers and it is a mechanism that has a goal and interactions with environmental factors and other processes. Ko (2009) emphasized the term “valueadded” in the definition along with the necessity of collaborations to achieve a common business goal. Various researchers have different statements on what a business process is. Burattin (2015) collected definitions created for various intents and viewpoints in this broad field and identified common elements. Accordingly, business process management is a concept that creates value in terms of the creation, redesign, and management of processes in enterprises as well as ensuring sustainability. The sustainability of enterprises in the future can be ensured along with the efficient and effective management that BPM would provide (Sun, Su, & Yang, 2016; Muellerleile, Ritter, Englisch, Nissen, & Joenssen, 2015). Different articles in international conference proceedings and books deal with BPM issues (van der Aalst, La Rosa & Santoro, 2016). The high number of citations for term business process management (BPM) seems to prove that BPM is an important field of recent research activities. The BPM issue is the point of research focused on technological or methodological solutions for the problems related to implementation (Jeston & Nelis, 2008).
One of the most important scientific activities, in which BPM research attempts have been presented, is the BPM Conferences that have been organized since 2003. These conferences guide the future of the field concerning different dimensions of the subject in various tracks in relation to BPM. Officially BPM (2021) describes the importance of these scientific events as “The BPM conference series embraces the diversity and richness of the BPM field and serves as a melting pot for experts from a mix of disciplines including Computer Science, Information Systems Engineering, and Management” In this regard, the purpose of this study is to present bibliometric research including the basic statistics, network relationships and topic structures of the portfolio of articles in the relevant literature on BPM enhanced with advanced visuals. In this context, related approaches are used along with bibliometrics and scientometrics methodologies. The dataset consists of the papers presented in these conferences and published in the proceedings between the years 2005-2020. Scopus was preferred since the data obtained from Scopus is better organized and consistent for proceedings. The dimensions of the dataset comprise the title, year, authors, keywords, citation counts, references, and abstracts. In the scope of scientometrics, basic statistics, text, and network analytics are adopted to highlight the trends and relationships. In this regard, cocitation, co-authorship, and co-occurrence analyses are conducted to reveal collaborations and relationships. Furthermore, topic structures are examined via Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a commonly used algorithm for topic modeling in text analytics. This study investigates the literature in BPM Conferences from different perspectives, e.g. authors, topics, countries, to pinpoint the trends that have been followed over the years. Since business processes and BPM are directly affected by the way organizations do business, the topic structures of the research and the distribution of the topics by years reflect the dynamics of the relevant period, as well as the technological and methodological developments in process design, modeling, and analysis. Industry 4.0 and related issues, which have left their mark in recent years, both increase the importance of BPM and provide data and analysis infrastructures that will facilitate initiatives in this direction. Accordingly, the technologies based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Factory, etc. help to improve processes based on effective process measurement, simulation, and application of predictive models (Steiner, 2019). With this transformation, BPM research has come to an even more important point in the literature as highlighted in the findings. From this perspective, this study presents findings that guide researchers in this field by drawing the big picture of network and topic patterns at BPM Conferences where leading and responsive BPM research is presented and discussed. The paper’s organization is as follows: the second section describes the theoretical framework and the position of the study in the literature; the third section describes the methodology of bibliometrics and scientometrics; the fourth section presents the findings and discussions. The fifth section concludes the paper.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Business Process Management (BPM) is a growing field of interest since the 1990s. It can be stated that the first seeds of BPM were taken with Fordism and then started to develop with the statistical approaches developed about quality control. In the assembly line, Henry Ford, undertook low-cost mass production by applying Taylor’s principles and the moving assembly line and achieved great success. In the 1920s, Taylor’s motion and time study were followed by Walter A. Shewhart’s statistical approaches in the 1930s. Then the methods were applied regarding statistical control under the leadership of W. Edwards Deming in the 1940s. The quality movements started in Japan in the 1960s and continued with the total quality management practices surrounding the whole world in the 1980s (Johanson & Carr,1995). With the widespread use of machines in the first industrial revolution, the mode of production changed. In the second industrial revolution, mass production became possible with the use of assembly lines. In the third industrial revolution, the digitalization age has started with the help of computers and automation and the production processes have begun to be conducted via automation. The fourth industrial revolution formally started in 2011 when it was declared in Hannover Fair as Industry 4.0. With Industry 4.0, cyber-physical system applications have started in industrial production, making smart factories possible. The innovations brought by Industry 4.0 and future technological developments have brought short and long-term sustainability perturbations to the agenda of enterprises (Ghobakhloo, 2018). Process management, as well as developing and improving business processes, integrates technologies and innovations for these developments into processes. With the help of this integration, they ensure a competitive advantage by keeping the process performances at the highest level (Wamba & Mishra, 2017). Due to reasons such as the growth of the size of the organizations, the increase in global competition and the developments in web-based business applications such as e-commerce and e-business, process management should be supported with software technologies. To be able to serve the developing and accelerating markets, companies can reduce their costs, increase efficiency, and reduce the processing time by using the relevant computer and software technologies in process management applications (Rahimi, Møller C, & Hvam, 2016). This story has still been handled in the recent studies to align the new developments and the revolutions with the improvements in the BPM research. Nowadays, the fourth industrial revolution is a hot topic in any field as if it is in BPM research because the business practices and the related technologies have a crucial impact on BPM. BPM proposes various methodologies and techniques for organizations in accordance with the above-mentioned purposes to model their businesses and monitor the performance levels. The improvements in both social and technological issues have a critical impact on this field. In this respect, various studies have been conducted for BPM research such as workflows, data and information flows, resources and roles, performance monitoring, and techniques and approaches to shed light on relevant business practices. It is possible to come across many review studies or literature analyses based on bibliometric data in the field of BPM. For example, Turra, Juliani, and Salla (2018) investigated the articles handling BPM research in Brazilian journals. Erdogan and Tarhan (2018) applied a systematic mapping approach for publications about process mining studies in healthcare to reveal the concept map of the related area. Although health data and associated techniques are challenging, they have concluded that these practices follow an increasing trend. Chaves, Ensslin, Andrade de Lima, and Ensslin (2017) conducted a bibliometric analysis on the publications related to organizational performance evaluation and process management to reveal the article, journal, and author statistics as well as keyword patterns.
Wamba and Mishra (2017) evaluated articles from 2006 to 2016 that dealt with the integration of big data and BPM in order to get a better knowledge of how BPM, business process reengineering (BPR), and business process innovation (BPI) can be integrated with bigdata. Veit, Lacerda, Camargo, Kipper, and Dresch (2017) put forth the bibliometrics of the Business Process Management Journal and recommended a structure for BPM research knowledge creation. In their analysis, they identified eight linked categories to reflect the range of research concerns and functional domains in BPM articles, i.e. Marketing and customer relationship management, performance measurement, knowledge management and innovation, complete quality control, auditing, electronic commerce, human resources, and supply chain management. Ensslin, Ensslin, Dutra, Nunes, and Reis (2017) presented the findings of the literature analysis in business process governance and stated the bibliometric parameters regarding the performance evaluation. Houy, Fettke, and Loos (2010) investigated the scientometrics of empirical research in BPM to reveal the subject trends and applied approaches to highlight the current state and opportunities for future works. The themes of business process management, six sigma, and the application of business processes in organizations have been placed at the forefront of related studies by researchers. BPM has gained traction in the literature, particularly in light of current challenges like Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Digital Twin, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The reason for this is thought that it is a field developed via the integration and tight interaction of many distinct disciplines such as Computer Science, Information Systems Engineering, and Management. As previously noted, numerous scholars in the area have conducted systematic reviews or bibliometric studies on a variety of topics linked to BPM and assessed various aspects of the field. Accordingly, the BPM Conferences are one of the field’s most significant scientific gatherings, where the field’s most knowledgeable and expert individuals hold groundbreaking conversations and analyze the field’s present and future. In this regard, this research focuses on the body of knowledge created by BPM Conferences.This study is not the first attempt at analyzing the research patterns of the BPM Conferences. At the tenth instance of the BPM Conference in 2012, van der Aalst (2012) provided an extensive analysis of research use cases as evident in BPM Conference papers between 2003 and 2011. Recker and Mendling (2016) extended van der Aalst’s analysis by widening the scope of the review structure to scientific, methodological, research and impact components. However, thus far, the reviews of BPM Conferences have only shown limited results in terms of dimension richness. Different from the previous papers regarding BPM Conference proceedings, in this study, the analyses are conducted through and integrated approach over the related bibliometric data. In addition to technological developments, the widespread effects of the results of these studies, which examine the topic from many different perspectives, are revealed by the publications they present to the literature. This study applies the methodologies of bibliometrics and scientometrics through bibliometric data retrieved from Scopus. The results are presented with summary statistics, tables, and graphs, as well as time and cluster-based network visualizations. Thus, both the leading studies and the academic social network formed by the authors in the conferences are discussed via analytical findings. The study provides a holistic view of the academic accumulation in the relevant field. It is complementary to the previous studies that were conducted with different methodologies in the past years. From the perspective of research in bibliometrics and scientometrics, it would contribute to the previous studies with its approach to extract the details about the topics and topic trends of the conference papers. This framework including several analyses can also be adopted by well-established conferences to monitor the trends and collaborations.
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