A Survey on the Flexibility Requirements Related to Business Processes and Modeling Artifacts
Abstract:
In competitive and evolving environments only organizations which can manage complexity and can respond to rapid change in an informed manner can gain a competitive advantage.
During the early 90’s, workflow technologies offered a transversal integration capacity to the enterprise applications.
Today, to “integrate” enterprise applications -and the activities they support- into business processes is not sufficient.
The architecture of this integration should also be flexible.
Enterprise requirements highlight flexible and adaptive processes whose execution can evolve:
(i) according to situations that cannot always be prescribed, and/or
(ii) according to business changes (organizational, process improvement, strategic …).
More recent works highlight requirements in term of flexible and adaptive workflows, whose execution can evolve according to situations that cannot always be prescribed.
This paper presents the state of the art for flexible business process management systems and criteria for comparing them.
Introduction:
Over the two last decades, market changes have led to a business environment that is constantly evolving.
Companies change to better satisfy customer requirements, improve internal processes and adapt their products and services.
At the same time, they also experienced the effects of the integration and evolution of information and communication technologies.
Thus, IT and management go hand by hand in the way of reacting, adapting and implanting new ways of doing business.
Companies need:
(i) to integrate their new solutions with their legacy systems in a global IT architecture and
(ii) to orchestrate the execution of their activities and the use of the supporting technological solutions in an integrated environment.
The capacity of quick reaction of organizations is mainly due to the ability of handling the support systems in favour of the business evolution requirements.
The production of added value in business value chains is highly dependent of the quality of their supporting information systems and the effective strategic use of information technologies.
In all management challenges, information systems (IS) should be continuously adapted to changing business practices and needs.
As a consequence, information systems are becoming more and more complex and shall be conceived in the wider strategic context of organizations management.
This can be achieved by developing process-centric solutions.
The paradigm of Business Process Management stresses the importance of integrating entire processes rather than simply integrating data or applications.
The aim is to design and control the organizational structures in a very flexible way so they can rapidly adapt to changing environments.
During the early 90’s, Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) have been positioned as appropriate technological solutions for integrating process islands at a high level so that they can collaboratively provide business solutions that each individual application is unable to provide.
However, the formalisms developed for the specification of workflow definitions were –and still largely are- almost systematically activity oriented.
Consequently, process definitions have the advantage to be easily transformable in executable code but the disadvantage of being prescriptive and rigid.
Flexibility has been the focus of many researches [42], [44], [50], [52], [56].
There are many definitions of the flexibility in literature [54].
It is defined in [42] as “the ability to yield to change without disappearing”.
We consider the flexibility as the capacity of making a compromise between, first, satisfying, rapidly and easily, the business requirements in terms of adaptability when organizational, functional and/or operational changes occur; and, second, keeping effectiveness.
Processes flexibility means fast reactivity to internal and external changes.
It reflects the easiness to make evolve business process schemes (when required).
Flexibility is also reflected by the ability that the support systems have to take into account business changes.
The objective of the research in progress is to measure the capacity of the modeling solutions provided in the literature to represent the flexibility requirements of current business processes being intra or inter organizations.
This paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 presents a survey on business process modeling, regarding modeling perspectives, modeling formalisms and the commercial offer.
Section 3 proposes a state of the art for flexible process modeling and controlling.
Conclusion and Future Work:
The notion of Enterprise modeling refers to a collection of conceptual modeling techniques for describing different facets of the organizational domain including operational, organizational and teleological considerations.
Using models to represent the enterprise allows a coherent and complete description. These models are useful because they allow:
(i) to improve the knowledge about the enterprise,
(ii) to reason on alternative solutions and diverging points of view, and
(iii) to reach an agreement.
Our experience of BP Modeling, BP Reengineering and the design of the supporting ISs stands in a number of industrial projects and European research projects.
The common points we found in all these projects were:
(i) the large amount of detail to be handled in analyzing and improving BPs and the difficulties for mastering it; and
(ii) the prime importance of establishing and preserving the ‘best fit’ between organization needs (whys) and system functionalities (whats), i.e. between process models and IS specifications.
In order to keep the alignment of BPs with the organisations’ IS and strategies, BPs should embody a great amount of flexibility and variability.
So that, BPs are better supported by the IS and implement well the strategic and organisational goals of the organization.
Even if process modeling was fully helpful for managers to improve operational performance, it also demonstrated to be insufficient to help organizations to deal with the challenge of competitiveness in a constantly changing environment.
The intention driven process modeling provides basis for understanding and supporting the enterprise objectives, the alternative way-of-workings, and when required, the reasons of change.
In fact, this should be completed with the realization conditions of these objectives, i.e. taking in consideration the organizational and operational choices in order to specify the requirements on the IT systems needed by this enterprise.
Similarly, a great amount of flexibility is brought by the concepts of role and context.
Changes in pieces of works of several granularities can be done at the BP type and instance level. The subject of change can be associated with organizational, functional, behavioral and operational perspectives. Context sensitive BP models fit better the customers’ expectations which are often context-dependant.
The requirements related to the nature of the flexibility, the nature of the impact and the nature of the change capture:
(i) the ability of the business processes (and of the organization) to change and
(ii) the capacity of the modeling formalisms to incorporate this ability into process representations.
The requirements related to the evolution and migration techniques, the versioning and transition capture the ability of -and the means used bythe support systems to enact those process representations.
Our future work concerns the usage perspectives of the BP modeling and of the support systems in order to extend the taxonomy of flexibility requirements summarized on Figure 2.
We are investigating on the following issues:
Do the various kinds of business processes (operational, control, strategic, support) require the same kind of flexibility?
Should we provide the same methodological and technological means to achieve it?
Do the dimensions of change (for instance dynamism, adaptability and flexibility according to [48]) depend on this organizational categorization of the business processes?
What are the goals of the stakeholders which push them to develop business process management systems able to change?
Do they wish to innovate, to improve, to personalize, to obtain guidance…
Which perspectives of the organization require change: a domain, a process, an activity, responsibilities, an application component, etc…
How the modeling artifacts should be adapted to deal with the flexibility requirements related to those issues?