The development of measures of process harmonization

Recent years have witnessed a marked increase in interest by researchers and practitioners in the concept of process harmonization. However, they fail to present performance measures to evaluate the extent of process harmonization achieved after implementing harmonization initiatives. At a process level, measures provide information to control and manage processes in order to improve them. Given the importance of process harmonization in process improvement as has been attributed in the literature, there is a need of measures to evaluate to what extent processes are harmonized (i.e. to what extent differences and inconsistencies are eliminated). The aim of this study is to develop and validate a set of operational measures to evaluate the level of harmonization of business processes in an organization. The research approach was composed of two phases: First, an exploratory phase to derive a measurement model composed by a set of measures of process harmonization; and second, a confirmatory phase to empirically assess the measurement model derived. As a result, a valid and reliable hierarchical measurement model was developed composed by a second order formative construct “process harmonization” and three first order reflective constructs: representing data, resources and IT-related measures.