xoEPC - Jan Mendling

Chapter 1
Introduction
This chapter provides an introduction to this doctoral thesis. After a discussion of the
general motivation in Section 1.1, we present the research contribution of this thesis in
Section 1.2. In Section 1.3, we discuss the findings from an epistemological point of
view and relate them to design science and behavioral science approaches to information
systems research. Finally, Section 1.4 closes this chapter with an outlook on the structure
of this thesis.
1.1 Motivation
The importance of Business Process Management (BPM) is reflected by the figures of
the related industry. For example, Wintergreen Research estimates that the interna-
tional market for BPM-related software and services accounted for more than 1,000 mil-
lion US dollars in 2005 with a tendency of rapid growth in the next couple of years
[Win06]. Furthermore, the plethora of popular and academic textbooks (e.g. [HC93,