A review of the literature on cross-functional integration (2010-2020):Trends and recommendations

Purpose: Structural and technological changes are driving functional reorganization in many organizations. To date, there are very few articles that explicitly, consistently and cumulatively focus on cross-functional integration. This paper aims to review and explore the literature that does directly address cross-functional integration. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted a literature review within the general management domain for the time frame 2010 to 2020 and identified 71 relevant articles that provide an overview of current practices and trends. Findings: This conceptual paper reviews this identified literature and outlines key trends, noteworthy articles and a summary of relevant theories, and provides an overview of outcomes linked to cross-functional integration in the literature. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for practitioners and an outline of potential research areas for academic researchers, including a call for more theory integration, building and testing in the area of cross-functionality. Originality/value: This paper is the first of its kind to attempt to summarize the literature on cross-functionality (published between 2010 and 2020), a currently very fragmented field of study spread out across different management disciplines

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

The Effect of Cross-functional Integration on Organizational Performance: A Look at Collaboration, Coordination, and Communication

Cross-functional integration (CFI) in organizations involves a sequence of integrated tasks and activities across multiple departments and units. Modern organizations are hierarchical and have separated functional departments. This may lead to limited reciprocal communication and poor coordination. Work is often divided, categorized, and poses a challenge for CFI personnel to be practical. This challenge continues as technology and organizational structures change. This study is to investigate the effect of CFI on organization performance. The study also looked at CFI from a triadic level of analysis, a broader perspective involving several functional units and processes within the organization. Specifically, this study examines how collaboration, coordination, and communication as the three core processes of CFI impact organization performance and develops a research model based on Tushman & Nadler’s (1978) information processing framework. The study also incorporates the organizational structure (OS) by testing the moderated effect between CFI and performance. We tested the model via a survey that included 325 completed survey responses from online participants. The results showed a strong positive impact of collaboration, coordination, and communication on performance. Also, the study revealed that organizational structure partially moderates the relationships between CFI and performance. There was a strong interaction effect on the relationship between coordination and performance, and communication and performance. No relationship was found between collaboration and performance when the organizational structure is included. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with suggestions for future research

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Business process modelling in ERP implementation literature review

Business processes are the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Business process modelling (BPM) has become essential for modern, process driven enterprises due to the vibrant business environments. As a consequence enterprises are dealing with a substantial rate of organizational and business processes change. Business process modelling enables a common understanding and analysis of the business processes, which is the first step in every ERP implementation methodology (blueprint phase). In order to represent enterprise processes models in an accurate manner, it is paramount to choose a right business process modeling technique and tool. The problem of many ERP projects rated as unsuccessful is directly connected to a lack of use of business process models and notations during the blueprint phase. Also, blueprint implementation phase is crucial in order to fit planned processes in an organization with processes implemented in the solution. However, business analysts and ERP implementation professionals have substantial difficulties to navigate through a large number of theoretical models and representational notations that have been proposed for business process modeling (BPM). As the availability of different business process modeling references is huge, it is time consuming to make review and classification of all modeling techniques. Therefor, in reality majority of ERP implementations blueprint documents have no business process modeling included in generating blueprint documents. Choosing the right model comprise the purpose of the analysis and acquaintance of the available process modelling techniques and tools. The number of references on business modelling is quit large, so it is very hard to make a decision which modeling notation or technique to use. The main purpose of this paper is to make a review of business process modelling literature and describe the key process modelling techniques. The focus will be on all business process modeling that could be used in ERP implementations, specifically during the blueprint phase of the implementation process. Detailed review of BPM (Business process modeling) theoretical models and representational notations, should assist decision makers and ERP integrators in comparatively evaluating and selecting suitable modeling approaches

A conceptual framework for capability sourcing modeling

Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm's value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Capability sourcing modeling is a technique that helps investigating sourcing alternative solutions to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making. Our position is applying conceptual models as intermediate artifacts which are schematic descriptions of sourcing alternatives based on organization's capabilities. The contribution of this paper is introducing a conceptual framework in the form of five views (to organize all perspectives) and a conceptualisation (to formulate a language) for capability sourcing modelling

The creation of business architecture heat maps to support strategy-aligned organizational decisions

The realization of strategic alignment within the business architecture has become increasingly important for companies. Indeed, it facilitates business-IT alignment as a well-designed business architecture helps both to identify the appropriate requirements for IT systems and to discover new business opportunities that can be realized by IT. However, there is a lack of alignment techniques that support organizational (re) design decisions during the operation phase as the actual performance of business architecture elements is neglected. Capability heat maps provide a useful starting point in this respect as they focus on the creation of a hierarchy of prioritized capabilities, which are characterized by a performance measure. In this paper, these techniques will be extended to support strategy-aligned decisions within the business architecture. The identification of the relevant business architecture elements is based on state-of-the-art enterprise modelling languages, which enable the development of enterprise models on distinct layers of the business architecture. Strategic alignment between these elements will be realized by using prioritization according to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while performance measurement will enable the creation of a proper decision support system. Afterwards, the proposed heat map will be applied on a case example to illustrate its potential use. This results in the completion of a first build-and-evaluate loop within the Design Science methodology