The Role of Information Technology in Business Process Management

In BPM, discussions of Information Technologies are traditionally limited to specialized BPM tools and workflow management solutions. In this chapter, we develop an expanded view of IT support for business processes that allows considering the process-enabling role of a variety of ITs from telecommunication infrastructure to business intelligence solutions. We propose that the information that is used by a business process can be classified based on two dimensions, information domain and information level, into instance level business information, instance level process information, reference level business information, and reference level process information. We further propose that IT enables business processes by providing information management, information processing and communication support for the aforementioned information types. In this chapter we discuss examples of how different classes of IT provide different types of business process support. The expanded view of IT support for business processes allows for a closer integration of various IT-related initiatives with BPM efforts. It also offers a framework for measuring the level of IT support for business processes.

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