What drives business process standardization? A case study approach

Business process standardization is of growing importance for both researchers and practitioners alike. Corporate experts and process owners meanwhile consider business process standards to be a prime action item and major instrument in a firm's BPM toolkit. An increasing number of scientific publications also show a growing interest of the scientific community. But to date IS research on business process standardization most notably is focused on the impact of business process standardization on business process performance abstracting away from a concise analysis of their antecedents. Therefore in this paper – based on an exploratory case study from healthcare industry – we provide a research model presenting three major antecedents of business process standardization: Top management support, involvement of the HR-, businessand IT departments and organizational governance/topology. As this approach is conceptual in nature future research should empirically evaluate our framework.