Using grounded theory for studying business process management phenomena

Abstract

Health care services in German hospitals are causing immense expenses. Successful IT Governance might help to support specific challenges for every organization with an adequate use of IT. The market structure of hospitals in Germany is very heterogeneous, e.g. in size and sponsorship. This paper analyses the state of the art of IT Governance based on a survey among 220 IT executives in German hospitals. The quantitative analyses of collected survey data reveal that hospitals govern their IT differently according to size and sponsorship. In addition, our analyses show that decision-making authority for the IT budget rises with hospital size and is positively correlated with the fraction of IT projects in the overall IT budget. We also show that the investments in innovative IT projects increase with hospital size. Our study revealed that a high number of private and larger hospitals lack a systematic IT Governance approach within the decision domain on IT projects. This study is the first to shed light into the empirical situation of IT Governance in German hospitals.

Creativity-intensive processes such as the development of marketing campaigns or the production of

visual effects increasingly find their way into the agenda of process managers. Such processes often

comprise of both well-structured, transactional parts and creative parts that often cannot be specified

in terms of their process flow, required resources, and outcome. Moreover, the processes’ high

variability sets boundaries for the possible degree of automation. In this paper we introduce the

concept of pockets of creativity as an analytic device which is hoped to support process managers in

their efforts to identify and describe creative sections in business processes. We argue that this step of

identifying and describing is imperative to successfully allocate resources, integrate creativity into the

overall process, and introduce process automation for those parts that are well-structured and can

actually be automated. Our argument rests in the examination of existent literature as well as in

findings from exploratory case studies that were conducted in the film and visual effects industry in

order to study processes that rely on creativity.

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