Global Knowledge-Intensive Business Process: Extending the Boundaries of Business Process Management

This paper proposes to extend the existing boundaries of Business Process Management (BPM) to include an emerging category of processes, here termed Global Knowledge-Intensive Business Processes (GKIBP). These processes differ from other global processes, such as supply chains and collaborative cross-organizational business processes (BPs), as their main outcome is a commercial knowledge artifact, co-created trough coordinated activities of knowledge agents, that may or may not come from an organizational setting. Starting from a well-known model by Harmon (2007) used to describe the main components of BPM in an organizational setting, our research proposes a new framework more suitable for the targeted category of GKIBPs. Design of the proposed framework is founded in a case study of a real-life example of GKIBP based on crow dsourcing, also briefly described in this paper. The proposed framework is used for analysis of twenty-five papers published in the leading Information Systems journals. This resulting synthesis is then used to point to several research gaps and to propose several research opportunities.