Business Process Management (BPM) is a topic of greatest relevance to government innovation. While the
concept originally stems from the private sector, public sector organizations have established BPM capabili-
Business process management does however not yet provide a comprehensive picture of BPM capabilities in governments. In this paper, we
Public sector thus examine BPM capabilities on the local government level by means of an intertwined quantitative survey
Developmental models and (representative) qualitative in-depth case study. We identify a set of BPM challenges and reflect on the
power of prevalent BPM capability assessment and development models, mostly maturity models, to provide
good guidance. We suggest taking into account organizational positions in order to overcome the significant
shortcoming of the ‘maturity’ concept, especially the focus on convergence towards an “ideal” state. Thus, we
argue for developmental models following divergence theories. Implications for practice and potentially
fruitful avenues for future research are discussed in the light of our findings.