The Functional Integration of Operations Management in Banks : A Framework for Research

This paper responds to emerging concerns from banking practitioners and media about service operations mismanagement in banking industry. It presents a general review, discussion and empirical analysis of relevant academic literature on cross-functional integration from the Service Operations Management (SOM) and Service Management (SM) domains, together with a proposed SOM functional integration framework for use in future research into the enterprise-wide cross functional integration of operations management in banking. Empirical analysis of literature themes by industry, content analysis of key papers exploring their usage of the term ‘function', and critical analysis of the literature from a new ‘functionalist' perspective are conducted. The focus on strategic intentions in SOM and SM academic literature fails to address the emerging concerns in the banking industry regarding problems arising at functional execution levels of management. Research into this gap in knowledge may help to explain the factors contributing to banking performance shocks and their relationship to operational inadequacies exposed during economic turbulence. A functional integration framework provides banking operations managers with an improved ability to locate operational inadequacies, and thereby identify opportunities to increase operational resilience. Although the implications of this conceptual paper can be translated to the financial services industry in general, the examples presented here are from banking