BPM Maturity and Digital Leadership: An exploratory study

When organizations start to digitize, this often means that processes will be changed. The management paradigm that is centered on the continues review and improvement of organizational processes is Business Process Management (BPM). To digitize processes, an organization should have the right competences to deal with both technological and process changes. However, currently, it is not known which competences are needed by leaders to guide an organization with digital process transformation initiatives. Hence, this paper consists of an explorative study based on interviews with five experts to find out if and how the competences related to digital leadership can guide such initiatives. The experts are employees within five different organizations. The interviews showed some interesting results. First of all, several competences of digital leadership were mentioned by various experts. Many of these competences corresponded with each other. In the interviews, the following competences of digital leadership were mentioned most often: Collaboration, Self-direction, Lifelong learning, and Flexibility. Secondly, there are many approaches to gain insight into processes within organizations. The use of models is necessary to create added value, to help coordinate information provision between the processes and the people who work for the organization. One such approach is the use of Business Process Management Maturity models, which provide insight into the process maturity level of an organization. According to the respondents, there is a relationship between BPM maturity and digital leadership