Integrating Exploitative and Explorative Thinking in Business Process Analysis: A Conceptual Model and Method

Ambidextrous BPM has gained increasing interest from researchers and practitioners in the last years. It refers to the ability to use exploitative and explorative capabilities in BPM projects. In this paper, we investigate how the integration of exploitative and explorative ideas can leverage the analysis of business processes. The key contributions of this paper are a conceptual model and a method that integrate ambidextrous thinking in a complementary way. Both artefacts were evaluated by means of an expert opinion survey. We also present a case study at an organisation that has implemented our proposed method. We believe that ambidextrous analysis of business processes enables organisations tackling current operational bottlenecks while simultaneously exploring external opportunities for designing innovation in business processes.