Knowledge-intensive business process: deriving a sustainable competitive advantage through business process management and knowledge management integration

This paper adopts a holistic approach to Business Process Management (BPM) and Knowledge Management (KM) integration to describe an interesting case of a customer-facing business process and illustrate its evolving nature, from a highly structured to knowledge-intensive. More precisely, the paper proposes an integrated multidisciplinary framework and then uses it as a theoretical lens to analyze an organization's journey towards BPM/KM integration in the context of their knowledge-intensive business processes.

Our research findings clearly demonstrate the importance of process-related knowledge in this company. They also illustrate how different KM aspects of the same BP were used by the organization at different points in time to determine the most appropriate strategies for value-creation and BPM-related competitive differentiation. They also confirm previous findings by other researchers that knowledge-intensive processes do require a different approach to their ongoing improvement. Most importantly for the future BPM/KM research, our case demonstrates that an organization's perception of a BP could change over time (from procedural to knowledge-intensive), as a result of an increased recognition of process-related knowledge. This in turn creates new, yet-to-be explored challenges for BPM.