"Virtual or material, What do You Prefer?" a Study of Process Virtualization Theory

Process virtualization is receiving increasing attention as an emerging phenomenon in information systems. Process Virtualization Theory (PVT) has been suggested as one way for understanding factors that affect the behavior of process participants when they face a virtual process. In this paper, we empirically analyze and test the propositions of PVT. We investigate the “airport check-in” process as our process of interest and conduct in-depth interviews with 18 informants who use different types of check-in processes, ranging from completely virtual to completely manual and material options. We examine why different process participants use or do not use this process in a virtual environment, and why different types of people perceive a virtualized process as useful or usable. The findings from most participants corroborate PVT and show that perceived process characteristics indeed play a very important role for process virtualizability. However, we also found a very interesting counter-example in the data, which indicates that factors such as prior experience and participant characteristics may be equally or even more important.