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Business models are increasingly recognized as a concept to support innovation in organizations. The implementation and operation of a new or altered business model involves the (re-)design of an organization's business processes and their successful execution. This study reviews and synthesizes the existing body of literature to guide organizations in systematically moving from a business model design to the implementation and operation of the business model through their underlying business processes.

A systematic literature review of the methods that bridge business models and business processes is performed. The selected 34 studies are classified according to the method's characteristics and the support in the design, implementation and operation of business models.

The results of the systematic review provide an overview of existing methods that organizations can adopt when moving from business model design into the implementation and operation of their business model using processes.

This work provides a comprehensive overview and detailed insight into the existing methods that align business models and business processes. It increases the understanding on how these two concepts can be synthesized to support more effective digital innovation in organizations. Based on the review results, knowledge gaps are identified and an agenda for future research bridging the fields of business models and business processes is proposed.

Organizations rely on their business processes to achieve their business objectives and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Hence, conformance to process specifications is essential to remain compliant. Various factors influence an organization’s ability to operate in conformance to its process specifications. This study investigates the influence of business process management (BPM)-supportive culture and individual process orientation on process conformance.

A construct was created for perceived process conformance and two constructs were selected from literature to represent BPM-supportive culture and individual process orientation. A survey was conducted with 178 employees of a global enterprise, hypotheses were formulated, and a statistical model was constructed and validated.

Results pinpoint the key role of the BPM-supportive culture in influencing both individual process orientation and conformance. Individual process orientation is also found to have a significant influence on process conformance. The findings provide additional evidence for the significance of human-related aspects of BPM in achieving BPM success.

The contributions of this paper help better understand how soft factors of BPM contribute to employees’ process conformance drawing on and relating concepts of BPM and organizational routines.

Business process models describe the way of working in an organization. Typically, business process models distinguish between the normal flow of work and exceptions to that normal flow. However, they often present an idealized view. This means that unexpected exceptions – exceptions that are not modeled in the business process model – can also occur in practice. This has an effect on the efficiency of the organization, because information systems are not developed to handle unexpected exceptions. The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between the occurrence of exceptions and operational performance.

The paper does this by analyzing the execution logs of business processes from five organizations, classifying execution paths as normal or exceptional. Subsequently, it analyzes the differences between normal and exceptional paths.

The results show that exceptions are related to worse operational performance in terms of a longer throughput time and that unexpected exceptions relate to a stronger increase in throughput time than expected exceptions.

These findings lead to practical implications on policies that can be followed with respect to exceptions. Most importantly, unexpected exceptions should be avoided by incorporating them into the process – and thus transforming them into expected exceptions – as much as possible. Also, as not all exceptions lead to longer throughput times, continuous improvement should be employed to continuously monitor the occurrence of exceptions and make decisions on their desirability in the process.

While work exists on analyzing the occurrence of exceptions in business processes, especially in the context of process conformance analysis, to the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first work that analyzes the possible consequences of such exceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework that presents how internal audit effectiveness can be operationalized and what factors are available to influence the effectiveness. Internal audits have become one of the key practices for organizations to control the adherence of their processes to standard procedures and regulations. The benefits of conducting internal audits are well acknowledged in the literature. However, it is difficult for organizations to assess the effectiveness of internal audits and to understand the factors that influence audit effectiveness.

A systematic literature review was conducted to identify relevant publications and collect and synthesize evidence on the operationalization of internal audit effectiveness and the factors that potentially influence the effectiveness of internal audits.

A thorough analysis of the relevant studies resulted in a comprehensive list of indicators used for the operationalization of audit effectiveness and a list of potentially influencing factors. The results of the systematic review are synthesized into a framework.

The researchers should consider this study as a comprehensive source that offers pointers on the factors investigated in the literature and a basis for future research in this field to address the gaps that are identified.

Awareness about how the effectiveness of internal audits can be measured, and the factors that can potentially influence this effectiveness can help organizations to understand their current performance and ultimately improve it in the future.

The contributions of this study will help in better understanding the state of the research on internal audit effectiveness, including the influential factors, and gaps and opportunities for future research.