Factors Impacting Successful BPMS Adoption and Use: A South African Financial Services Case Study

Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) are being adopted in organisations to increase business process agility across a diverse application landscape. Yet many organisations struggle to achieve agile business processes when using a BPMS. This South African financial services case study explains factors found to negatively impact successful BPMS adoption and use. The Alter work system’s framework and the Rosemann and vom Brocke core BPM elements were used as theoretical lenses to understand the case. The paper describes frustrations of an IT team trying to increase process agility with a BPMS in a large legacy application landscape. The main factors driving this frustration were the difficulty of integrating with other applications and staff bypassing design and code approval procedures. The impact of BPM strategy, culture and governance on BPM methods, resourcing and technology is explained. The paper presents an explanatory model which should be useful for practitioners wanting to adopt a BPMS. The BPM literature lacks empirical qualitative case studies and theoretical models and this paper aimed to contribute to both.