Selecting which processes to improve plays a critical role in the first phase of the business process management lifecycle, but it is a step with known pitfalls. Decision-makers rely on subjective criteria and their knowledge of the alternative processes put forward for selection is often inconsistent. This leads to poor quality decision-making and wastes resources. The purpose of this paper is to examine the proposition that decision-makers armed with context-enriched criteria make more logical, better-quality decisions. The context in question is qualitative, sensitive to decision-making bias and politically charged.
We applied a design-science approach, engaging 70 industry decision-makers through a combination of research methods to assess how different contextual configurations, in a hypothetical scenario adapted from the Australian banking industry, influenced and ultimately improved the quality of the process selection step.
The study highlights the impact of framing effects on context, and the need to adapt framing to decision-maker behavior and provides five guidelines to improve process selection effectiveness.
Process selection research to date has largely focused on quantitative evaluation techniques, with little attention paid to the role of context and the behavioral interplay of decision-making styles in practice.
