The Evolution of Business Process Management: A Bibliometric Analysis

Received February 20, 2021, accepted March 2, 2021, date of publication March 17, 2021, date of current version April 8, 2021. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3066340 The Evolution of Business Process Management: A Bibliometric Analysis HENRY LIZANO-MORA1, PEDRO R. PALOS-SÁNCHEZ 2, AND MARIANO AGUAYO-CAMACHO2 1School of Business Administration, Technological Institute of Costa Rica, Cartago 30101, Costa Rica 2Department of Financial Economy and Operation Research, University of Seville, 41018 Seville, Spain Corresponding author: Pedro R. Palos-Sánchez ([email protected]) ABSTRACT This paper will present the research results for the analysis of the presence and evolution of the term Business Process Management (BPM) in the period 2000-2020 using a literature review with bibliometric analysis. This research sought to evaluate the quantity and quality of empirical support for the use of this tool in organizations. This allowed the researchers to acknowledge and confirm this discipline as an important investigation domain with great potential for helping companies achieve strategic alignment between business and information and communication technologies in the future. The Science Mapping Workflow methodology was used with database and search criteria applied to a total of 1,706 articles related to the subject, which resulted in a total of 624 articles selected for further research. This study identifies the journals that have the most publications about BPM. It concludes that the most promising perspectives are the ones related to Management, Framework and Performance. Even though, from a conceptual viewpoint, performance is the most valued perspective. Lastly, this research is of great interest for academics and professionals who hope to strengthen their knowledge about the BPM concept and find the historical path and the main authors and issues that contribute to knowledge in this scientific field. INDEX TERMS Business process management, science mapping workflow, bibliometrix, business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management. I. INTRODUCTION Organizations are becoming increasingly conscious of the importance of their integral management processes. This is due to the intense competition in a global market where only the best leading companies in different industries can survive in the long term. Acknowledging the importance of business processes has constantly, though slowly, become a fact in the most developed economies since the mid-eighties, as demonstrated when Porter defined the concept of value chain in 1980. Moreover, the whole contemporary organizational structure emphasizes the role of business processes [1]. Thus, process management is becoming an important part of operational business in organizations as well as in new projects to improve performance. [2] divide the history of BPM into three periods or waves. The first wave began at the beginning of the 20th century, when [3] proposed a management theory, in which we find The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Saqib Saeed . the origin of modern process management. The second wave peaked with the movement of reengineering business processes in the mid-1990s [4], while the third wave began in the early 21st century with the advances and synthesis of previous and technical methods in the area of business processes that were merged into a single discipline that became known as Business Process Management (BPM). [5] defines BPM as achieving an organization’s goals with the improvement, management and control of essential business processes. The definition given by [1] also matches the previous one, as it defines BPM as a management discipline that focuses on improving the efficiency of an organization by managing its component processes. BPM is one of the most effective methodologies. It is being used to improve the efficiency and performance of process-oriented organizations [6], [7] and [8]. Later and equally important [9] defines the concept of BPM as a management discipline that integrates the strategy and goals of an organization with customer expectations and requirements by focusing on comprehensive horizontal processes. The BPM definition itself indicates that it is a complex 51088 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ VOLUME 9, 2021 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis discipline that covers strategies, objectives, culture, roles, policies, methodologies and tools for comprehensive analysis, planning, implementation, control, constant improvement and process management [9]. Research into BPM has been extensive in recent times and, also, poorly organized as will be demonstrated below. Thus, there was a significant increase in scientific production on BPM in 2000, which became known as the third wave of BPM. This sufficiently justifies that the beginning of the chosen research period is precisely that year. On the other hand, the last major review of the literature in the field of BPM was conducted in 2013 by [7]. Since that study and until 2020, there has been no specifically bibliometric study of BPM. Furthermore, no quantitative work has been identified to support the relevance of pure research in BPM, along with the establishment and structuring of data as important as determining what the main authors and topics that have contributed to the knowledge in this scientific field are. All this justifies the research explained in this document. The main aim of this paper is to identify the presence and evolution of the term BPM in the period 2000-2020 using a literature review with bibliometric analysis. In order to do that, some questions have been defined: Is there a real interest in researching this scientific domain? If so, what are the major areas of future development in BPM? And, finally, is there a consistent body of researchers which collaborate effectively? An in-depth bibliometric study answers these questions and this will be the main contribution of this study. The scientific methodology used in this research was a type of bibliometric analysis known as Scientific Mapping Workflow, which attempts to show the structural and dynamic aspects of scientific research. This methodology requires a statistical tool to help with the analysis of the data. This study used the Bibliometrix package to implement the scientometric methodology. The details of this methodology will be described in more detail in the corresponding section. The following sections of this article are organized as follows: first, articles are filtered along the lines of the research by [10] using the bibliometric methodology known as Scientific Mapping Workflow [11]. The analysis is done using R statistical software and Bond’s Bibliometrix package [12]. The research is augmented with studies carried out by [13], which used a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for the term BPM. An extensive literature review was carried out on articles published before 2020, with the articles identified in a bibliometric study of the collection of bibliographic metadata in the Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Google Scholar, AMC, IEEE Xplorer, and EBSCO databases. The author, origin and document type were the search terms used for the analysis, which was then complemented with conceptual, intellectual and social structure analyses using factorial analysis of the k-structures or structures of knowledge as proposed by [11], and used in other studies, such as [14]. The first part of this document is the Literature Review, which presents the most relevant features of BPM. The second section is the Methodology, which explains the methods and procedures which were used to carry out this investigation. After this, the results are presented which identify the relevant authors, documentary analysis and the structure of knowledge for BPM. Finally, there is a discussion of the results and a conclusions section. As this research used a bibliometric study, the main contributions of this paper are that it shows the size, growth and distribution of scientific documents and also the structure and dynamics of the groups that produce and use these documents and the information they contain. In addition, another fundamental contribution of the research is that it creates a reference framework that will help future researchers of BPM with an easy and organized way of finding the history and authors that have contributed scientific knowledge about BPM. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Business Process Management is considered a management discipline that combines knowledge about information technology and management sciences and applies it to operational organizational processes [15]. Therefore, it has received considerable attention from academics and professionals in recent years, due to its ability to significantly increase productivity and cost savings. In addition, there are numerous BPM systems available today, which are generic software that rely on explicit process designs to carry out and manage operational business processes [16]. The origins of BPM are not easy to identify and have been written about differently many times. However, it is agreed that the theory behind BPM can be seen in Smith’s Division of Labor [17] and the profits that this brings. Later, the principles of Taylor’s Scientific Management [3], which remained in vogue until the 1980s, gave considerable attention to Total Quality Management (TQM). Since the 1970s, however, data rather than processes were the important focus of attention because of the complexity of process management. [16]. On the other hand, the ideology of business processes is a wide-ranging, customer-oriented management culture. This idea can be expanded, and using the definition of [18] process orientation consists of elements of structure, focus, measurement, ownership and customers. [4] also emphasizes the commitment to improving customer-directed processes and information-oriented systems of business processes as an important component of this culture. Later, interest in processes continued to increase in the 1990s, with the introduction of business process reengineering (BPR), promoted by authors such as [4], [19]. Evidence since then suggests that it has not generated the expected positive effect on the performance of organizations [20]. Then, from the mid-1990s until the end of that decade, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was the focus for organizations, thus becoming the next step in this area of knowledge [21]. In principle, ERPs should have offered better ways for organizations to operate. In addition, they were presented as the solution to the problems identified with the implementation of BPs. However, ERP systems did not solve process VOLUME 9, 2021 51089 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis problems in organizations, nor did they manage to increase efficiency and effectiveness on their own [22]. Towards the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or Customer Relationship Management Systems were introduced and had a broad customer-based approach, but while CRM focused on the front-office, or rather customers, they did not improve backoffice processes, understand horizontal processes or noncustomer-visible activities. For this reason, organizations also used the Six Sigma process improvement methodology proposed by Smith [23] to reduce process time, eliminate production defects and increase customer satisfaction [24]. In this sense, CRM helps to take decisions made by the managers and CEOs of companies when proposing strategic agreements at the organizational and human resources levels [25]. Three fundamental elements therefore converge in BPM, namely the scientific analysis of processes, information technology and people. However, [23] has since demonstrated the dissociation between processes, people and technology and the correct management of them. Thus, this was the trigger for [2] to propose the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) to integrate the best practices of the technology industry with the best managerial practices. Therefore, the progress of BPM is due to the successes and failures of other proposals for process-based organizational management. BPM, on the other hand, can be seen as an extension of Workflow Management (WFM), since it primarily focuses on process automation, while BPM has a broader scope, which ranges from optimization, automation and process analysis to operations management and the organization of tasks. In addition, as with WFM, BPM combines with software to manage, control and support operational processes. Therefore, the main difference with traditional WFM technology is that it automates organizational processes operationally, while BPM includes human factors, administrative support and optimization [26]. Hence, [27] coined the term ‘‘reengineering’’ to describe the development of a customer-centric, process-oriented, organization based on strategic business practices and using information technology as a tool to help overcome problems in company-wide activities. As a result, [28] stated that the success of BPM is due to the business architecture of an organization, company-wide communication, innovation, people, continuous improvement, project management, but above all the strategic management of the organization. While it is true that BPM focuses on processes, data and systems, the trend for data has had more impact, due to the complexity of understanding processes [15]. This period, better known as the third industrial revolution (1969 – 2015) was marked by the availability of computers, communications networks, databases and other emerging technologies, which contributed to the importance given to data because it was immediately available [29]. Therefore, one of the objectives of BPM is to improve operational processes with the use of new technologies. For example, by modeling a process and analyzing it using simulation, management can gain insights on how to reduce costs and improve service levels [30]. Currently, the world is talking about Industry 4.0 [31] better known as the fourth industrial revolution since the German Federal Government coined the term in 2011 [32]. Systems are being combined to make embedded systems or the Internet of Things, better known as IoT, which uses sensors, networks, service orientation, big data and business intelligence [33]. Finally, Fig. 1 shows a chronological summary of the literature review and also identifies important milestones and relevant authors. FIGURE 1. Chronological literature review. III. METHODOLOGY Developments in information and documentation science have led to the emergence of many easily accessible databases. However, the amount of information contained in these has been seen to be unmanageable [34] and additional tools must be used to manage all the data. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis was carried out [10] using the methodology proposed by [35] known as The Scientific Mapping Workflow, hereinafter SMW, which is described in detail in Fig. 2 and the objective of which is to show the structural and dynamic aspects of scientific research. This analysis uses R as statistical software [36] in the Bibliometrix package developed by [11] that implements this scientometric methodology. First, bibliographic data was collected from various databases. This was done by searching metadata for author, source and document. Once the metrics were defined, analyses of the k-structures or structures of knowledge at the conceptual, intellectual and partner level were done. The bibliometric analysis was then performed using the Scientific Workflow procedure, shown in Fig. 2. Initially, in the data collection stage, filters were applied to the Web of Science, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, EBSCO, AMC and Google Scholar databases for the 19-year period between 2000 and 2020 in order to complement the 51090 VOLUME 9, 2021 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis FIGURE 2. Science mapping workflow. systematic literature review proposed by [37] in which a search strategy filters relevant criteria using the PRISMA methodology proposed by [38] and implemented by [11]. This methodology details the phases of database identification, selection of records and item filters with eligibility criteria. The databases and search criteria applied, as indicated in Table 1 below, identified a total of 1706 BPM-related articles, of which, after applying Prisma methodology [38], the relevant documents for this research were found. 671 duplicate items were deleted from the database results, with a resulting total of 1035 items. Likewise, the search protocol for all databases were the same keywords, ‘‘Business Process Management’’ and ‘‘BPM’’ for the period between 2000 and 2020 (March) inclusive, in which the keywords must appear in the title of the article, abstract or in its meta data. In addition, other filtering parameters were included, namely English-only and published articles. As can be seen in Table 1, four limitation rules were applied to the content of the papers and related documents: 1. Manuscripts that were not research or scientific review articles were excluded, 2. Articles that were not in the English language were excluded, 3. Selected articles should have a clear relationship with or contribution to the field of BMP study and 4. The main objectives and research questions in the selected articles should be clearly described and explained. The methodology should also propose appropriate ways to address the research problem and answer the research questions. TABLE 1. Database search text. VOLUME 9, 2021 51091 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis TABLE 1. (Continued.) Database search text. Once the results of the different databases were obtained, the records were exported into plain text files in BibTeX format in order to maintain the consistency of the different data sources. These files were then combined into a single file [39]. The resulting data file was then processed using the R statistical software following the suggestions of [36], using the specialized package for bibliometric analysis called Bibliometrix developed by [11], supplemented by the Biblioshiny function developed by the same authors and available on the Wide Network of R Files, or Comprehensive R Archive Network, hereinafter CRAN. Bibliometrix initially requires that the CRAN bibliometrix packages are installed and the R package must be subsequently loaded with the command library (‘‘bibliometrix’’) and finally the Biblioshiny plug-in must be run. This allows the filtering, normalization and final analysis of the results. The WoS and Scopus databases allow data to be directly exported in the BibTeX standard bibliographic format, but each database includes different fields in a different order. For example, EscoHost and other databases use generic Bib- Tex, thus the standardization proposed by [40] is performed with the BibTool standardization algorithm, in which bibliographic fields are consistently standardized, which is an indispensable requirement for treatment with Bibliometrix. IV. RESULTS After analyzing the consolidated and consistent databases, the scientific workflow mapping procedure was continued with TABLE 2. Summary of processed bibliographic information. the analysis and standardization phase. Table 2 shows the general descriptive data of the research. It is important to note that, in the 20-year period which was analyzed, it was found that the 1035 articles remaining after excluding duplicates came from 377 different sources, with an average annual publication of 6.7 articles per year and an average number of 27.6 citations. More than 44,500 articles, 2,500 keywords and 118 different authors have been referenced. This shows how strong the BPM field of study is and how it interacts with other topics. As shown in Fig. 3, the number of scientific publications about BPM increased after 2000 and again markedly in 2003, as identified by [2]. This is known as the Third Wave of BPM, in which the authors of the documents were the triggers of the developments in BPM, according to [5]. Then, in the following years, BPM research had an average annual growth 51092 VOLUME 9, 2021 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis FIGURE 3. Annual scientific production of the subject under study. rate of 16.53%, in addition to growth peaks in 2009 and 2012, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020, which coincide with the emergence of new technologies such as Cloud Computing, the Internet of Things or IoT, Industry 4.0 and Artificial Intelligence. Likewise, Fig. 3 shows the lineal regression of the variance with an explanatory effect coefficient of 91%, which is quite reliable as it is a value very close to 1, in line with the suggestion by [41], and checks the validity and correctness of the subject under investigation. A. IDENTIFYING SOURCES OF BPM RESEARCH The most relevant databases were identified in the bibliometric analysis. As can be seen in Table 1, the results were headed by Scopus (735), WoS (616) and Google Scholar (133). Other recognized databases, such as IEEE Xplore (33), ScienceDirect (68), EscoHost (50), ACM (70) or SpringerLink (1), only have a few papers. Relevant scientific journals on the subject of BPM were also presented, with an average number of 32 published articles in the period being analyzed. The Business Process Management Journal was the journal that published the most articles with a total of 146. Table 3 shows the most relevant scientific journals for publications about BPM. TABLE 3. Most relevant sources. Therefore, the in-depth description of the dataset in Fig. 4 shows the thematic development of keywords related to processes and business, and also the most relevant authors of BPM topics. FIGURE 4. Thematic development. TABLE 4. Most cited sources. FIGURE 5. Bradford’s Law. Moreover, Table 4 identifies the 10 most cited journals for BPM, which is topped by the journal Lecture Notes in Computer Science with a total of 737 citations. Fig. 5 shows how, by applying Bradford’s Law [42] the most important journals on the subject of BPM can be identified, or as Bradford called them ‘‘core sources’’. These sources are where most of the relevant information about BPM is concentrated and according to [43], should be given special importance when preparing publications on VOLUME 9, 2021 51093 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis TABLE 5. Source impact. FIGURE 6. Journal publication growth. the subject. This core is identified in zone 1, the shaded area, and includes the Business Process Management Journal and Expert Systems with Applications. These are the core of BPM, and therefore, these journals concentrate the most relevant research on the subject. The calculation of the impact of the journal is consistent with Bradford’s law and shows that the Business Process Management Journal has the highest impact factor, as shown in Table 5, with an h-index of 31, with more than 3100 citations. It is also the oldest journal and began publishing in 2001. In second place Expert Systems with Applications began publishing in 2007. Fig. 6 also shows the consistent growth of the Business Process Management Journal. This growth has continued and has become exponential since 2003, being constant until 2020, with a slight drop of just half a point since 2018. At the same time, several journals which have also published articles on BPM show only a discrete growth in published research compared to the aforementioned journal. Journals such as Information Systems or Expert Systems and Applications have had an increase in BPM publications in recent years. Other journals such as Business & Information Systems Engineering have maintained the number of publications and Decision Support Systems shows an obvious drop in interest in publishing research on BPM or in receiving proposals on the same subject. The g-index [44] is calculated based on the distribution of citations of a given researcher’s publications, giving a set of articles ranked in decreasing order for the number of citations they have. The h-index [45] uses the set of the author’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. Table 5 shows both indices for authors and their publications in the main journals. TABLE 6. Relevant authors of BPM. B. IDENTIFYING RELEVANT AUTHORS The most relevant authors of BPM articles were identified in the bibliometric analysis. As shown in Table 6, Dr. Wil Van Der Aalst, Professor of Data Sciences at the University of Aachen, Germany, is the author with publications on BPM which have had the greatest impact. In the analysis of published articles on BPM and PetriNets topics, Dr. Aalst can be seen to have published 22 articles related, the most noteworthy being the article entitled Case Handling: A New Paradigm for Business Process Support, with 509 citations and an average of 31 citations per year. Second is Dr. Hajo A Reijers, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, with 15 publications. The article with the largest number of citations is entitled Business Process Mining: An Industrial Application, published in 2007 which has had 494 citations. Third, is Dr. Jan Mendling, Professor of Economics and Business at the University of Vienna, Austria, whose most cited article is Similarity of Business Process Models: Metrics and Evaluation, published in 2011 with more than 419 citations. 51094 VOLUME 9, 2021 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis FIGURE 7. Scientific production of authors over time. The two most popular areas of research by authors of BPM were Computer Science followed by Management and Economics. Analyzing production over time in Fig. 7 confirms that Dr. Wil Van Der Aalst has consistently researched BPM in the period of time analyzed, with 2005, 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2019 being the most scientifically productive. Meanwhile, other authors, such as Halo Reijers, PhD. published in 2007, 2011 and 2015, and has drastically increased publishing since 2018. Third, Jan Mendling, PhD. began research in 2008, and published the greatest number of articles in 2011, followed by 2018 and then declined markedly in 2019. It should be noted that J. Mendling, PhD. together with Van Der Aalst, Wang, Becker, Grefen, Recker and Lee are the most active authors with publications about BPM. Lotka’s law describes the frequency of publications per author in any field of research [46].This law is expressed by Equation 1, in which the number of authors is inversely proportional to the square of the total number of publications n and directly proportional to A1the number of works published by a single author. An= A1 n2(1) This study identified 2289 authors, as indicated in Table 2, of which 1822 authors, or 80% have contributed only one publication on the subject of BPM. In line with Pareto’s theory 13% wrote two articles and only 3% contributed three articles. By contrast, only 63 authors of the total number have surpassed five publications and only 12 have exceeded 10 publications, as shown in Table 7 below. Following the work by [47], Fig. 8 shows that 80% of authors wrote only one article about BPM and only 0.1% wrote more than 10 articles, so it appears that most authors only publish occasionally. The impact rates of the authors in Table 8, affirm the predominance of the author Van Der Aaslt, who has an h-index of 15, which is higher than the average. The average is 9 and so Van de Aaslt has an outstanding overall impact in this TABLE 7. Distribution of scientific production according to Lotka law. FIGURE 8. Scientific production of publications about BPM. field [48] taking into account that he is one of the authors who has worked in this field the longest, with his first publication in 2005. He is followed by Reijers and Mendling, who have h-indexes of 11 and 10 respectively, which is closer to the average number of publications for this group. These three authors have more than 4220 citations, which gives a clear idea of the impact of their publications. Table 9 shows the University to which the authors are affiliated. The Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands has 79 publications, followed by the Queensland University of Technology, Australia and thirdly the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Finally, it is important to highlight the German VOLUME 9, 2021 51095 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis TABLE 8. Impact factor of authors. TABLE 9. Affiliations of Authors. TABLE 10. Scientific production by country. Universities of Augsburg, and University of Liechtenstein, University of Seville (Spain) and University of Zagreb (Croatia) with 14 articles each. Table 10 uses the simple production indicator by country or SCP, and shows that Germany, with 107 articles, is the TABLE 11. Average number of article citations by country. country that leads production of articles about BPM, followed by the United States with 71 articles and Korea with 54 articles. However, the Netherlands is the country with the highest collaboration rate with a MCP of 10, which is outstanding for its 46 contributions. Nevertheless, the country with the highest number of citations of its publications is the Netherlands, with 3183 i.e., an average of 69% of citations, as seen in Table 11, followed by the USA with 2771, the United Kingdom with 2570 and Germany with 2263. Slovenia also stands out with 1040 citations, being the sixth country with the largest number of citations despite its small size and it surpasses other, bigger countries, such as South Korea, Italy, Australia or Spain. TABLE 12. Most cited BPM articles. C. DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS The documentary analysis included the identification of the most relevant articles and the citations of these. Table 12 shows that the article by [49] has been cited 1271 times, which is more than any other article, with an average annual citation rate of 60.5 times. The cited article explains the method of analysis and agent-oriented design, which are mainly associated with the concepts of roles, 51096 VOLUME 9, 2021 H. Lizano-Mora et al.: Evolution of BPM: A Bibliometric Analysis In the same way, as mentioned above, BPM is a current research domain that was can be described with the analyses presented. There are changes in the trend of the citation curve, where deviations, recessions and different historical factors can be seen to be the cause, which suggests that BPM research is highly susceptible to global economic conditions. Nonetheless, with the previous premise, a number of accessory topics were identified that appear to be extremely relevant for BPM research. This are how technological issues, methodological frameworks and data mining are recurrent and have virtually the same relevance after 2012. This suggests the importance of the fourth industrial revolution in online management disciplines, as explained by [31], which means that BPM may have influenced Industry 4.0, or vice versa. VI. CONCLUSION This bibliometric analysis has shown that there a significant amount of research work has been carried out in the field of BPM. As can be seen in the section identifying the main publications, there has been exponential growth of interest in researching this scientific domain. The high number of publications found attests to this and suggests that in the coming years it will continue to grow. The areas of BPM for future research should be about management, framework and performance. From a conceptual point of view, performance is the most valued area. This means that research will be in these areas and application and use of BPM will grow. Performance can be measured with respect to helping achieve greater decision-making capacity, improving planning, and creating a single operational framework for measuring results. A conclusion of the current research is that these will be the keys to growth in the future. Many organizations that have implemented BPM report great benefits, with large cost savings and significant reductions in service time. It has been shown that BPM together with technology are essential to turn challenges into reality. In this respect, the emergence of technology such as cloud computing highlights aspects such as complexity that BPM can help [87]. Among the practical implications of this research are some factors to improve performance. To be successful when implementing BPM, organizations should not make the mistake of only focusing on technologies, but also on the knowledge, mastery and continuous improvement of their business processes, data, and resources. Many authors suggest detecting a need for improvement in organizations as the first step to introducing BPM. This means that an analysis of the current process is made, the process is optimized, and key indicators are set to show the milestones achieved. Incorrect implementation of BPM will mean that is a need for more research and publications about BPM. Although BPM is research domain that has been well researched in the period of time analyzed and has had an excellent citation rate, researchers do not maintain their interest in this line of research. This means that it is not a field where there is a body of consistent researchers and that lines of collaboration, especially international ones, do not prosper. However, despite this, growth is exponential and will likely continue to be exponential as the application and use of BPM extends further to medium- and small-sized enterprises. In the future, more research on BPM will be demanded and will be in the areas of growth, especially the influence of BPM on performance. Academics and editors should investigate different applications of BPM in areas of research with the highest growth forecast. The limitations of this bibliometric study are the collection of bibliographic metadata in Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Google Scholar, AMC, IEEE Xplorer and EBSCO databases. This study is limited to these databases. Finally, this work is of great interest to academics and professionals interested in deepening knowledge about the BPM concept. This article gives a historical review and identifies the main authors who contribute knowledge to this scientific area. REFERENCES [1] P. 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Van Raan, ‘‘Structuring scientific activities by co-author analysis: An expercise on a university faculty level,’’ Scientometrics, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 235–255, Jan. 1991, doi: 10.1007/ BF02018157. [85] J. Recker and J. Mendling, ‘‘The state-of-the-art of business process management research as published in the bpm conference: Recommendations for progressing the field,’’ in Proc. BPM Conf. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng., vol. 58, 2016, pp. 55–72, doi: 10.1007/s12599-015-0411-3. [86] K. B. Danilova, ‘‘Process owners in business process management: A systematic literature review,’’ Bus. Process Manage. J., vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 1377–1412, Sep. 2019, doi: 10.1108/BPMJ-05-2017-0123. [87] P. R. Palos and M. B. Correia, ‘‘La actitud de los recursos humanos de las organizaciones ante la complejidad de las aplicaciones SaaS,’’ Dos Algarves, Multidisciplinary E-J., no. 28, pp. 87–103, Nov. 2016. HENRY LIZANO-MORA was born in Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica, in 1977. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica, and the master’s degree in information systems from the Technological Institute of Costa Rica, Costa Rica, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in business administration. Since 2006, he has been working as a Professor with the University of Costa Rica. He is also the Chief Information Officer of the University of Costa Rica. His experience includes direction of numerous postgraduate courses and collaborations with private and public organizations. He has participated in research projects in business process management, digital transformation, robotic process automation, business intelligence and innovation. He has participated with courses and in various conferences and programs on business process management both nationally and internationally. PEDRO R. PALOS-SÁNCHEZ was born in Badajoz, Extremadura, Spain, in 1968. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Extremadura University, Spain, the master’s degree in marketing from UOC, Spain, the M.B.A. degree from Camilo Jose Cela University, Spain, and the Ph.D. degree in business administration from the University of Seville, Spain. He worked as a Professor with the University of Extremadura, Pablo de Olavide University, and the International University of La Rioja, Spain. He is currently an Associate Professor with the University of Seville. His experience includes direction of numerous postgraduate courses and collaborations with private and public organizations. He has participated in research projects. He has participated with different papers, courses and articles in various conferences and programs on digital economy, entrepreneurship and management both nationally and internationally, being his lines of research digital marketing, business organization and information systems. Dr. Palos-Sánchez is a member of the Andalusian College of Computer Professionals and the Economy College of Sevilla. He has been guest editor of several international scientific publications. MARIANO AGUAYO-CAMACHO was born in Seville, Andalusia, Spain, in 1965. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in business administration science and the Ph.D. degree in business administration from the University of Seville, Spain. He was a Lecturer with Texas Tech University (EEUU), teaching classes on IT accounting and the effects of Euro entry in Marketing and Finance and Universidad de Huelva, Spain. He has been the Director of the LifeLong Learning Center, Universidad de Sevilla. He is currently an Associate Professor with the University of Seville. His experience includes direction of numerous postgraduate courses and collaborations with private and public organizations. He has also participated in several research projects related to IoT and IT for business, lifelong learning. He has participated with different papers, courses and articles in various conferences and programs on accounting information systems, ERP, ecommerce and management information systems both nationally and internationally, being his lines of research information systems and accounting information systems. VOLUME 9, 2021 51105