title: Organizational Ambidexterity – Exploring and Exploiting the Role of Business Process and Project Portfolio Management
Creators: name: Stelzl, Katharina
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Organizational Ambidexterity
subject: Exploitation
subject: Exploration
subject: Business Process Management
subject: Methods
subject: Models
subject: 000
subject: 330

description: Organizational ambidexterity (OA) is an organization’s dual capability to simultaneously engage in exploration and exploitation to sustain corporate success in today’s highly dynamic business environment. Exploration is an outward-looking activity associated with risk-taking, discovery, and experimentation striving for radical innovation of products, services and processes, whereas exploitation is an inward-looking activity associated with risk reduction, problem solving, and control striving for continuous improvement. Even though organizations have already recognized the importance of OA to survive in the face of change, many organizations are still struggling in becoming ambidextrous and the current literature fails to provide guidance on what exploration and exploitation activities are required and how they can be prioritized. To address this need, this cumulative doctoral thesis consists of five research articles investigating the development of an ambidextrous organization. One the one hand, the thesis examines how OA can be achieved on the organizational level, including the required structural, individual, and cultural change. On the other, ideas and principles of OA have been transferred to business process management (BPM) to investigate how OA can be achieved on the process level. To structure the development, project portfolio management (PPM) promises to be a sensible option as it helps to determine an appropriate mix of exploration and exploitation activities considering organizational contexts and available resources. Hence, this thesis is located at and contributes to existing knowledge at the intersection of OA, BPM, and PPM. Addressing the need to identify what exploration and exploitation activities help implement OA, the thesis provides models and methods for the effective identification of exploration and exploitation projects. On the organizational level, the thesis presents a maturity model that comprises actionable practices structured according to capability areas and maturity stages that build the foundation of OA (research article #1). On the process level, the thesis highlights the importance of context-aware BPM and proposes a method to assess and select BPM methods in a context-aware manner (research article #2). Following the call for explorative BPM methods, one is presented that assists organizations in identifying and integrating opportunities into new business processes (research article #3). Additionally, the thesis offers a Business Process Design Space to foster the systematic identification of alternative business process designs for exploration and exploitation (research article #4). Addressing the need on how to prioritize investments in exploration and exploitation, an economic decision model is presented that assists organizations in selecting and scheduling exploration and exploitation projects in an economically reasonable manner (research article #5).