The BPM Competence Gap – An Empirical Investigation of the Demand and Supply Side

In this note, we discuss the findings of two studies on the demanded and supplied competencies in the Business Process Management (BPM) field that analyzed 1,507 BPM-related job advertisements and 10,405 profiles of BPM professionals, respectively. The studies show that, while organizations require a diverse set of BPMrelated competencies, employees report far fewer competencies in their public profiles. In particular, social and problem-solving competencies are underrepresented on the supply side. Perhaps the BPM workforce as a whole lacks such competencies, or employees consider them not worth declaring. Understanding of the demanded competencies and the gaps between them and the supplied competencies is of value for BPM educators who wish to help improve BPM curricula and for future BPM professionals who seek to enter and eventually advance in the BPM field. Introduction BPM professionals are an integral part of all BPM initiatives’ success (vom Brocke & Rosemann, 2015), as these professionals’ expertise and commitment is central to the efficient management of business processes. According to Kokkonen (2014), “[i]mproved BPM technology without effective people to work with it, is akin to an excellent orchestra playing on the sinking Titanic” (p. 47). Clearly, even with the most advanced software, organizational success with BPM initiatives would not be possible without motivated employees and managers who work to implement changing processes. Studies have shown a possible gap between the supplied and demanded competencies in the BPM field, such that not all employees in the field have the competencies that are required for improving business processes (e.g., Bandara et al., 2010; Gartner, 2008). However, this issue has received little attention in academic research. Identifying the individual competencies that are demanded and supplied in the BPM field is a prerequisite to revealing and then addressing this competence gap. Two studies investigated the competencies demanded in the BPM field and those supplied by BPM professionals. In the first study, BPM competency requirements were examined by analyzing a set of 1,507 BPM-related job advertisements collected from the Monster global online job platform (www.monster.com/about; Muller, Schmiedel, Gorbacheva, & vom Brocke, April 05, 2016 BPTrends – April, 2016 Class Notes Copyright © 2016 vom Brocke & Gorbacheva. All Rights Reserved. www.bptrends.com | 2 2014). The second study identified the competencies offered by 10,405 BPM professionals by analyzing their profiles published on the LinkedIn professional online social network (www.linkedin.com; Gorbacheva, Stein, Schmiedel, & Muller, 2016). The Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) text-mining technique was applied to the data analysis in both studies (e.g., Evangelopoulos et al. 2012; Debortoli et al. 2015; Muller et al. 2016). This note shares the results of these studies, compares their findings, and provides recommendations for BPM educators and future BPM professionals. The Demand Side: Studying 1,507 BPM-Related Job Advertisements on Monster.com The study on individual BPM competency requirements (Muller et al., 2014) analyzed 1,507 BPM-related job advertisements collected from the Monster online job platform in February 2012 using the LSA method. Seven categories of competencies, each of which contain competency sets that often occur together in BPM-related job advertisements, were identified (Table 1, abbreviated as [D1]-[D7]). These categories of competencies include Business Process Analysis [D1]; Business Process Compliance Management [D2]; Business Process Management Sales and Marketing [D3]; Business Process Improvement Management [D4]; ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Solution Architecture [D5]; IT-Business Strategy Management [D6]; and Technical Architecture [D7]. As the sets of competencies in each of the categories reflected the demand for competencies in the BPM labor market, a candidate who has any one of these sets of competencies would have a better chance of gaining and retaining employment than would a less qualified candidate. Table 1 Categories of competencies demanded in the BPM field