Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1.0, University Karlsruhe (TH) (AIFB & Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI)), language: English, abstract: Business Process Management (BPM) is a topic that is generating a level of interest in both academic and business circles. The issues and problems that are associated with implementing and gaining support for BPM within organisations are well known. BPM maturity, however, is something that organisations aspire to ¿ but know little about. Research to date indicates that many organisations do not progress past very rudimentary levels of BPM maturity. This is likely due to BPM being seen as a complex and complicated issue. This research looks at what successful organisations see as being key to BPM and what organisations that are unsuccessful in BPM implementation consider being the issues that contributed to their failure. BPM is defined as a holistic management practice that includes the alignment of processes with the corporate strategy and especially with strategic and operational goals. Whilst the use of both methodologies and information technology, as supporting and enabling functions, is important for BPM, organisational and cultural change is identified as one of the critical success factors for BPM implementations. This research focuses on defining BPM maturity in a meaningful and measurable way. It addresses the complexity of BPM maturity be firstly defining what BPM maturity means and then developing a model that can be used to measure current levels of maturity. In addition, BPM-related benefits are identified, such as increased effectiveness, efficiency, or quality. Increased BPM maturity is characterised as being correlated with an increased probability of achieving these benefits. An increased maturity can lead to a decreased gap between objectives and a current situation. Objectives are also more likely to be met due to less varying results and, therefore, greater ability to predict results. The organisation-wide deeper understanding of how the business is conducted results in work being more consistent and repeatable and as a result more effectively and efficiently. Other benefits of the model are the ability of the organisation to determine strengths and weaknesses in current applications. In doing this, the organisations see benefits in being able to expand knowledge sharing within the organisation by learning from the successes within its own self.