Improving the Company's IQ: How to Use Intelligence as a Paradigm for Designing Business Processes

In their struggle for operational excellence, global companies face challenges in finding a common denominator to streamline and align operations across the divisions and supply chains. They face a dilemma of allowing local flexibility to adjust to the varying market requirements versus central coordination needed to achieve business synergies. We approach this problem by suggesting a design framework based on the paradigm of intelligence. The framework outlines four interrelated perspectives: build, execute, learn and innovate. We argue that when combined, these perspectives can enable effective business processes and help establish an efficient IT engagement model. We apply the framework to a case company, which leads to a set of design principles. Methodologically the article is based on the design science research paradigm, embedded in systems thinking. It is based on a theoretical discussion across several streams of research including psychology, pedagogy, artificial intelligence, learning models and business process management.