Information flows and business process integration

Purpose – Many business process improvement efforts emphasize better integration, yet process integration can mean many things. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of information flows to modern business processes, and draw upon recent organizational and information systems literature to characterize process integration and to derive four principles of process integration: accessibility, timeliness, transparency, and granularity of information flows. Design/methodology/approach – Using a field study, the four principles of process integration are applied to analyze ten different business processes across five organizations. Findings – In total, 18 generalized activities are identified that describe non‐integrated behavior, and “keying in known data” was found to be the most common. Among other findings, analysis highlights the importance of documentation to modern business processes, especially for coordination roles, and the paper describes three different purposes for documentation found in the data: content, process validation, and posterity. Research limitations/implications – The articulation of “business process integration” offers a foundation for future research in this area. Findings are limited in generalizability to various levels of processes, as well as possible instrument‐related biases. Practical implications – The principles of process integration provide a lens through which practitioners can analyze processes. Empirical findings stress the role of documentation, forms of documentation, and types of non‐integrated work. Originality/value – The paper characterizes process integration in relation to other commonly‐used constructs such as organizational integration, data integration, and application integration. Principles are derived from the literature that can guide future inquiry and practice associated with business process improvement.