Aligning Customer Needs: Business Process Management (BPM) and Successful Change Management in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections

Abstract

In 2004 the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University began investigating the feasibility of automating many of the workflows used to manage the manuscript and archival collections in its holdings. This article examines the role that business process management (BPM) played in that effort. BPM is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the needs and wants of their customer bases. The department identified its customer bases as its curatorial staff and its patrons. It was recognized that enabling our curatorial staff to more efficiently prepare manuscript collections for research use would also enable better customer service. We used several different BPM techniques to gain an understanding of the needs of our curatorial as the department automated its workflows. This enabled the department to successfully simplify and streamline its workflows during the course of automating them. The end result has been more efficient processing of archival collections and better service for our patrons.