Together with Marco Montali (Universitat Bozen-Bolzano, Italy), Ingo Weber (TU Berlin, Germany) and Mathias Weske (Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany), Manfred Reichert is guest editor of the BPM 2018 Special Issue of the Information Systems journal. This issue comprises extended versions of four selected papers from the 16th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2018), which was held in Sydney, Australia, in September 2018.
Background. The annual BPM conference is the premium forum for researchers, practitioners and developers in the field of BPM, covering all aspects of BPM research and practice, including theory, management, applications and technology. While BPM as a scientific field and as an industry practice has significantly matured and increased its span, it is not yet an established organizational management discipline, along other disciplines such as project management or risk management. Fostering true innovation rather than only incremental change, capitalizing on big data opportunities and accounting for processes that are increasingly flexible and generative rather than structured and stable, are some of the challenges that BPM needs to overcome in order to establish its firm position within organizations. These challenges add to existing areas of interest and relevance to BPM research and industry. They also attest to an increasingly interdisciplinary nature of BPM, which transcends its original scope at the intersection of information technology, organizational management and industrial engineering, to embrace other issues raised by behavioral science, big data, operations management, social computing, cloud computing, theory of processes and many more. In line with the above aims, the special issue features four advanced works in the BPM field.