Abstract
Companies create value for customers and shareholders (value streams) via the effectiveness and efficiency of activities that flow across organization boundaries—often referred to as the firm’s cross-functional business processes. Business process management (BPM) spans both business and technology and provides a layer of visibility and control over the processes. To optimize and sustain business process improvements, it is essential to overlay some form of governance that creates the right structures, metrics, roles, and responsibilities to measure, improve, and manage the performance of a firm’s end-to-end business processes.
In this chapter we will therefore focus on the concepts of BPM governance from the angles of what it is, why it is needed, where it can be applied, and the benefits of applying it. We believe that the principles of BPM governance are essential to any organization.