There is something about process standards: An empirical analysis

Insights from qualitative information systems research reveal a strong impact of process standardization on the overall process performance like reduced process time or process costs in staff recruitment. Surprisingly, the process owners indicated that an increased use of information systems (IS) in different sub processes such as candidate attraction or applicant tracking triggered overall process standardization. Based on these qualitative research approaches and the additional literature about the antecedents of process standardization and its impact we conducted an empirical survey with 156 process owners in large scale companies to revise these findings. The evaluation of our structural equation model using partial least squares shows that process standardization is a full mediator for the relationship between system usage and process performance measured in process time, cost, and quality and that information systems usage directly and significantly influences process standardization.