Business Process Agility

Business processes are the central building blocks of how individuals, organizations, and industries participate with one another. In a dynamic environment, a firm’s ability to respond and adapt is dependent on the agility of its business processes. However, agility from a business process perspective has yet to be defined and measured. This paper refines the definition of operational agility from the IS literature and tests a conceptual model. A field study is used to evaluate a metric created for measuring business process agility and understanding the relationship between the firm’s system capabilities and management’s factors driving adoption of agile business processes

An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Influence of Enterprise Systems on Business Process Agility

Business process agility (a combination of speed and flexibility) is increasingly becoming an important weapon for achieving a competitive advantage in today’s growing competition and dynamic business environment. Based on literature review and past research by the author, this paper will present the development of a research framework to investigate the influence of enterprise systems on business process agility. Using exploratory qualitative case studies, this study will identify the major drivers and inhibitors for enhancing the process agility in business organizations that have implemented enterprise systems and investigate the possibility of attaining both process efficiency and agility simultaneously while automating and/or integrating business processes

The increased international propensity of serial entrepreneurs demonstrating ambidextrous strategic agility: a precursor to international marketing agility

This paper analyzes whether business owners that simultaneously demonstrate past entrepreneurial experience and process agility have greater export propensity levels. The proposed hypotheses are tested using binary choice models relating past entrepreneurial experience and reported process agility on a unique sample of 246 Catalan business owners for the year 2010. Consistent with our theoretical arguments on the relevance of generative-based cognitive agility, results reveal that serial entrepreneurs demonstrate a greater export propensity. Additionally, we found that serial entrepreneurs who also demonstrate process agility show superior export propensity levels, compared to the group of business owners outside this ambidextrous group (first-time business owners without process agility). The findings of this study indicate that traits characterizing international marketing agility, decisional speed and accuracy, are also linked with greater export propensity levels. The added export market expansion resulting from the opportunity responsiveness of serial entrepreneurs is found to be amplified by the accuracy of internal adaptation capabilities of process agility. Therefore, the promotion of ambidextrous strategic agility coming from the complementarities between the benefits of entrepreneurial experience and adaptive process abilities is essential for increasing businesses’ internationalizationPostprint (author's final draft

IT CAPABILITY�S IMPACT TOWARDS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THROUGH BUSINESS PROCESS AGILITY ON INDONESIA�S ACCOUNTING FIRMS DURING PANDEMIC

The existence of work from home policy due to the Covid-19 pandemic had caused several service industry sectors, such as accounting firms, to be hardly affected. However, to survive in the business competition, these accounting firms have to adapt by increasing their IT capability and business process agility to create a competitive advantage over their competitors. This research aims to observe the IT capability and the agility of Indonesia�s accounting firms and examine the mediation effect of business process agility. The samples are public accounting firms registered in Indonesia�s Audit Board and a service accounting firm with more than one licensed accountant. The analysis technique used in this research is Structural Equation Modelling with three variables: IT Capability, Business Process Agility, and Competitive Advantage. The results show that IT Capability directly impacts the Competitive Advantage of the firms, and the mediation of Business Process Agility increases the total effect of IT Capability towards competitive advantage. Therefore, this study could acknowledge Indonesia�s accounting firms about how to survive in this pandemic by creating a Competitive Advantage by increasing their IT Capabilities and Business Process Agility

Interaction-driven definition of e-business processes

Business-to-business interaction (B2Bi) is the next step for corporate IT [1]. Business relationships become increasingly dynamic, and new requirements emerge for data and process management. Standardisation initiatives are successfully targeting business ontology [4]. Still, business agility mainly depends on the flexibility of the business processes of a company. In the B2B space, traditional approaches to process modelling and management are inadequate. Today more than ever, traditional workflow management is crucial for the internal effectiveness of a company. Internal efficiency is a prerequisite for external agility. From both a technical and a business perspective, internal workflow management relies on specific assumptions in terms of resources involved in the process, as well as the process itself [2]. Level of control, availability, reliability, and cost stability are parameters that traditional process models and technology can almost take for granted. A single authority ruling on the process definition and the total control over process execution are also basic concepts for internal workflows. From a business perspective, a big upfront investment is put in the complete definition of process specifications. A different conceptual framework is required for the definition and management of e-business processes [3, 5]. The intrinsic capability to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements becomes crucial. The line of research explored in this paper derives from an approach to process modelling and management that explicitly targets the peculiarities and dynamics of B2Bi. In the model we propose, the upfront specification of the interaction logic of a company can be limited to partially specified processes and basic interaction rules. Specific information is then gathered from the observation of actual instances of business interaction, and used to refine and extend the initial model. In addition to the enforcement of explicit business requirement, the goal is to capture and leverage implicit operational knowledge. In the following sections, we present an overview of the methodology we are currently experimenting with for the inference of complex processes from business interaction flows. For our initial experiments, we focus on business messages compliant with the RosettaNet standard [4]