Workshop on Change, Drift, and Dynamics of Business Processes (ProDy) at the 24th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2026) in Toronto, Canada

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IMPORTANT DATES

• Workshop papers submission deadline: June 3, 2026 (AoE)
• Workshop papers notification deadline: July 15, 2026
• Workshop camera-ready papers deadline: July 29, 2026
• Workshop: Monday, September 28, 2026

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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Unique contributions of this workshop:

• This workshop brings together different perspectives and research streams on change, drift, and dynamics of organizational processes
• This workshop reaches out to researchers from organization sciences and information systems research to stronger engage with the BPM Conference. At the same time, we welcome submissions relating to classic BPM research on process drift and process change
• There is a vibrant discourse on dynamics of routines in information systems research, as exemplified by seminal works such as Leonardi (MISQ 2011) being cited more than 1,000 times
• This workshop plays a key role in building a bridge between these research communities and bring new groups of researchers to the BPM Conference

Business processes are everything but stable, but they change over time. This change is connected with various factors inside and outside the organization. Different descriptions of change phenomena have been discussed in the literature such as incremental or seasonal drift, endogenous and exogenous change, along with roadblocks and enablers for process change. Recent research investigates, among others, how we can detect drifts in organizational processes, how we can use process mining to make change visible, how we can theorize change of processes, and which methods can support the design of new versions of processes.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together different perspectives and research fields on change, drift, and dynamics of organizational processes and provide them a stage for mutual exchange. To facilitate this, we invite conceptual, technical, and empirical papers addressing various aspects that relate to changes, drifts, and dynamics of organizational processes. Related terms covered by recent BPM research and neighboring disciplines that we specifically welcome are process evolution, routine dynamics, exogenous and endogenous change, process drift detection, etc. We encourage submissions from different epistemologies and applying different research methods. We invite submissions from

Business Process Management, but also from other connected research areas, such as Routine Dynamics, Information Systems, and Computer Science.

The workshop is planned as a half-day event. First, we will have presentations of regular papers that will be published in the post-proceeding volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series. Second, we will invite submitted papers that cannot be published as research-in-progress presentations with the aim to foster discussions among the workshop participants and provide feedback to the authors. Moreover, we plan a discussion session for outlining future research directions and for motivating joint research efforts of participants.

Submissions can address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• What are novel techniques to detect and visualize drift in organizational processes?
• How do (business) processes or process-related aspects change over time?
• What method can we apply to study change in business processes?
• How can change in processes be conceptually described and theorized?
• How do process change initiatives unfold and what are their effects?
• How can organizations manage intended and unintended process change?
• Which kind of unintended change in processes exists, and how do they unfold?
• Which positive and negative consequences emerge from process change?
• How can techniques like process mining help to investigate process dynamics?
• How do specific technologies (e.g., robotic process automation, gen AI) trigger change in organizational processes?

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the workshop topics. Accepted papers will be published. Length of full papers must not exceed 12 pages and comply with the LNBIP format and research-in-progress papers 6 pages (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-791344-0). Papers must present original research contributions and must not be concurrently submitted elsewhere.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2026) hosted in Toronto, Canada, from September 27th to October 2nd, 2026.

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WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Christian Bartelheimer (University of Goettingen)

Inge van de Weerd (Utrecht University)

Brian Pentland (Michigan State University)

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If you have any questions, please contact Inge van de Weerd

(g.c.vandeweerd@uu.nl)