Will Users of Process Management Systems Be More Innovative? A Study on Process Innovation and Process Orientation in the Financial Industry

How can the involvement of employees in process innovation be supported and fostered? In this study, we investigate how the use of business process management systems - tools to design, visualize and document business processes - leads to employees (= users) become more process oriented and thus get engaged in process innovation. Using data from a large-scale survey with 171 participants from the financial industry, we show that BPM system usage mainly drives users' involvement in process innovation implementation and championing but less in the true idea generation. Thus, our study contributes to the IT benefits literature in shifting the focus to individual use and 'softer', but yet highly important outcome dimensions (process innovation).