The State of the Art on Process Virtualization: A Literature Review

The growing world-wide globalization and the possibility to use new innovations of the digital economy leads to the fact that more and more processes and services are being virtualized. The purpose of this paper is to describe, synthesize, evaluate, and integrate the results of prior research on Process Virtualization Theory by conducting a systematic literature review. We selected six academic databases and search engines as adequate with respect to the IS field, covering the period of time from 2008 to date. We created an initial catalogue of existing research and approaches that focus on process characteristics or characteristics of the IT-based virtualization mechanisms. We categorize, consolidate, and discuss the relevant papers accordingly. The results show that empirical studies of Process Virtualization Theory are lacking and the theoretical research is still the most used method.