La Gestión por Procesos. Un campo por explorar

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar la evolución de los estudios publicados en español sobre gestión por procesos a lo largo del periodo 1990-2012. Los principales resultados muestran un escaso desarrollo de la gestión por procesos en los países de habla hispana y un gran interés por parte del mundo profesional. Las temáticas más trabajadas son «implantación» y «herramientas », enmarcándose las principales líneas de investigación futuras bajo los epígrafes de innovación, cultura, factores asociados y recursos humanos. En lo referente a las publicaciones, Dirección y Organización y Revista Europea de Dirección y Economía de la Empresa son los referentes en la temática.Palabras clave: Gestión por Procesos, Revisión bibliográfica, futuras líneas, temáticas, metodologíasProcess Management. A field to exploreAbstract: Process management is an interesting topic from an academic point of view. As a result there are quite a few international literature reviews about this topic. These reviews are based on international databases. Although this is obviously an interesting approach in order to have a global perspective, we consider that some studies which are not published in English, the predominant language and sometimes unique in international databases, may be excluded. Therefore international reviews should be complemented with other reviews, in this case, with an Hispanic-literature review. Overall, the aim of this study is to analyze the evolution of the studies published in Hispanic literature on process management throughout the period 1990-2012. In order to do it, a literature review on the subject was conducted. Articles were identified through Dialnet database which is the largest repository of Spanish-written studies. There were three main searching criteria: only scientific articles were identified; the period of time ranged from 1990, which is when process management literature started to be developed according to Houy et al. (2010) and Sidorova and Isik (2010), to 2012, which is the last completed year before doing this research; and finally, the topic. Articles may contain in their title, keywords or abstract the concept «process management» in order to be taken into consideration for this study. The final sample was integrated by 137 scientific articles. Following the structure of Houy et al. (2010) data was analysed from three different perspectives: meta-perspective, content-based perspective and methodological perspective. Regarding meta-perspective, the main results show little development of the process management literature in Spanish-speaking countries. However there seem to be a great interest in the topic from the professional point of view. Therefore, it may be concluded that process management could be more scientifically developed in Spanish-speaking countries. Professional interest was also identified when the most prolific journals (those that have published more articles about process management) were analysed. There was a great number of journals that were not scientific but generalistic. Nonetheless it must be highlighted that the most important scientific journals, based on their impact and the number of articles they published about process management, were Dirección y Organización and Revista Europea de Dirección y Economía de la Empresa. In addition, after establishing eight topics in which the articles analyzed were classified, it was found that the most repeated topics were implementation and tools. On the other side some future research lines related to innovation, culture, factors and human resources were detected as none articles about these topics were found. Finally, with regard to methodologies, the case study is presented as the most used methodology, which may be indicative of the incipient level of development of this field of research in Spanish-speaking countries.Keywords: Process Management, Literature review, Future lines, Topics, Methodologies