Lean and BPM - growing attention. But where are the Academics?

I just saw two articles on the use of Lean in the context of Business Process Management (published through BPM institute, ah, at least one BPM group that is surviving ;-)).
See:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c070618a.asp
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c070625a.asp

And I am glad that we see this trend developing. In my opinion, Lean is a great process improvement framework, that we can apply in the area of BPM.
The big change from the BPR times is this: When BPR was big, basically the only process improvement groundrules we had, were, well, take a blank paper, and start all over.
But... where we used to have the "magical" step, going from current state process to future state, we now have a growing set of best practices and frameworks that make the process improvement step more based on sound research and practical experiences at other companies (such as Toyota).
Type BPM and Lean in Google and there are more and more hits.
The same on BPM and Six Sigma.
Great!

The only thing I am waiting for/hoping for is more activity in the field of academics - research on process concepts in the services industry... We need sound research and a better conceptual framework for service processes. While great work has been done on operations research and management, in the area of logistics and manufacturing, the "logistics" in services are not well understood. We know there is things as "cycletime" "Work in progress inventory" "flow"
"resource scheduling". But we need a better framework of theorie and optimization methods.

Anyone that has a perspective on this - reactions welcome!