Abstract:

This research aims to investigate Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives in public organizations in order to identify Critical Success Factors (CSF) for these projects. The study context is composed by Brazilian public organizations currently conducting BPM initiatives. Our motivation to carry out this research comes from the high failure rates in industry and also the small number of empirical studies of BPM projects in public organizations. This study was performed with 31 professionals in 6 organizations and employed qualitative empirical techniques to obtain relevant information about their BPM projects. As a prominent result, the government environment provided important factors, such as Bureaucracy and culture of the public sector and Impact of Government change due to elections not yet reported in the
literature. This study aims at contributing to fill the gap in the literature concerning critical success factors for BPM initiatives in public organizations. This paper may also inspire new empirical studies in the field.