Toward a Formal Approach to Process Bundling in Public Administrations

Excessive information and data exchanges between companies and public administrations create a need for the bundling of processes. Process bundles are created whenever cross-organizational processes are combined or interlinked. While a considerable amount of literature addressing the process of reorganizing, optimizing, or reengineering processes exists, much less is known about concrete approaches which facilitate the identification of suitable process bundles. This paper presents a review of identification criteria relevant for process bundling. Our literature review is deliberately broad, encompassing work in the fields of process management, reengineering, and E-Government. The analysis discloses that the plain focus on secondary process identification criteria (e.g., inefficiencies and redundancies) neglects to assess if the processes actually fit together. Premised on these results, we synthesize the insights from the cited literature into a methodological intermediary step to support the purposeful elicitation of bundling candidates.