The Nature of Data, Information and Knowledge Exchanges in Business Processes: Implications for Process Improvement and Organisational Learning

A number of assumptions in the past have been made about how business process improvement and re-engineering, and organisational learning should take place in organisations. Although a number of these assumptions have been framed on theoretical models, few have been based on the empirical analysis of the nature of actual business processes. This paper tries to fill this gap with an analysis of data, information and knowledge exchanges in 22 business processes from three organisations. This analysis points to a number of characteristics that appear to be contradictory with some current organisational practices, and that can be helpful to inform future developments in the fields of business process improvement, re-engineering and organisational learning. Two relevant characteristics are a much higher proportion of data over material exchanges in business processes, and a higher proportion of knowledge exchanges in improvement over core and support processes.