How Process Models Change Business Processes in Organizations: From Planned to Emergent Change

This paper examines how the use of process mining in organizations can promote change in real-world business processes via data-based process models. Drawing on routine dynamics research, we conceptualize process models as artifacts that organizational members can use to change the business processes (i.e., routines) which they perform, and we theorize how such change is possible. Our arguments (a) suggest an emergent change approach to process mining, (b) advance social business process management by unpacking the social influence of process models, and (c) suggest guidelines for practitioners that apply process mining in organizations

Generic Process Transformation Model: Transition to Process-based Organization

The competitive global market climate of the new millennium has raised awareness of business processes as the most important management paradigm (Levi, 2002). Consequently, process elements, as well as process-based organizational solutions, have become an emergent need. However, the question is how companies should transform themselves to become more process-oriented? Many attempts under the helm of Business Process Reengineering movement were not successful in reaching benefits of lateral orientation, what additionally emphasizes the delicacy of business process transformation. Concerning the literature, there is a lack of clarity and presence of organizational change models which could provide managers with guidance for process transformation. The models are mostly focused on the transformation generally, and they do not address the specificity of a change from traditional to process paradigm. Furthermore, they are mostly single-oriented, either on the organizational elements or steps which should be taken during the change, thus only partially answering the dilemma. The purpose of the paper is to present an overview of existing transformation models which could be relevant for taking a process journey, as well as propose a Generic Process Transformation Model which should be able to ensure smooth transition, with emphasis on specific problems related to process transformation. Although the proposed model is theoretically and logically based, without empirical evidence, it represents a first step in convergence of process transformation concepts to business world. Ultimately, only its usage in a real world would or would not prove its severity.process transformation, process-based organization, organizational change, transformation models

Keeping the Cost of Process Change Low through Refactoring

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS) large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Although refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address related problems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Consequently, process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or can not apply respective techniques at all. In this paper we propose a set of techniques for refactoring large process repositories, which are behaviour-preserving. The proposed refactorings enable process designers to effectively deal with model complexity by making process models easier to change, less error-prone and better understandable

Towards Consistency Management for a Business-Driven Development of SOA

The usage of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) along with the Business Process Management has emerged as a valuable solution for the complex (business process driven) system engineering. With a Model Driven Engineering where the business process models drive the supporting service component architectures, less effort is gone into the Business/IT alignment during the initial development activities, and the IT developers can rapidly proceed with the SOA implementation. However, the difference between the design principles of the emerging domainspecific languages imposes serious challenges in the following re-design phases. Moreover, enabling evolutions on the business process models while keeping them synchronized with the underlying software architecture models is of high relevance to the key elements of any Business Driven Development (BDD). Given a business process update, this paper introduces an incremental model transformation approach that propagates this update to the related service component configurations. It, therefore, supports the change propagation among heterogenous domainspecific languages, e.g., the BPMN and the SCA. As a major contribution, our approach makes model transformation more tractable to reconfigure system architecture without disrupting its structural consistency. We propose a synchronizer that provides the BPMN-to-SCA model synchronization with the help of the conditional graph rewriting

The Link between BPR, Evolutionary Delivery and Evolutionary Development

In this paper we intend to show how the challenges of managing a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) project are consistent with the ones of a Systems Development project. As traditional management techniques were no longer appropriate in the changing business environment, companies employed BPR to achieve elevated business performance. Similarly, as traditional systems development approaches delivered disappointing results, system developers experimented with other models, including Evolutionary Delivery and Evolutionary Development, in order to enable successful technology exploitation by businesses. Both these business and systems initiatives embrace elements of cultural change, management flexibility, empowerment, organisational readiness, and technology introduction in a changing environment. We will present the similarities of the two initiatives and show how progress in one initiative could contribute in the progress of the other

Business process modelling: potential benefits and obstacles for wider use

As Organisations need to adapt to new business conditions and respond to competitive pressures, various change management approaches have been developed. Many studies suggest that the success of business change projects could be increased by developing dynamic models of business processes prior to their radical change. This paper investigates a potential of simulation modelling to be used for modelling business processes and argues the case for a wider use of simulation techniques by business community. It is postulated that discrete-event simulation can be considered as a missing link between change management approaches such as Just in Time [JIT], Total Quality Management [TQM] or business process re-engineering [BPR]. The usability of simulation modelling for evaluating alternative business process strategies is investigated, and the guidelines for achieving more widespread use of business process simulation are proposed

The Wheel of Business Model Reinvention: How to Reshape Your Business Model and Organizational Fitness to Leapfrog Competitors

In today's rapidly changing business landscapes, new sources of sustainable competitive advantage can often only be attained from business model reinvention, based on disruptive innovation and not incremental change or continuous improvement. Extant literature indicates that business models and their reinvention have recently been the focus of scholarly investigations in the field of strategic management, especially focusing on the search for new bases of building strategic competitive advantage, not only to outperform competitors but to especially leapfrog them into new areas of competitive advantage. While the available results indicate that progress is being made on clarifying the nature and key dimensions of business models, relatively little guidance of how to reshape business models and its organizational fitness dimensions have emerged. This article presents a systemic framework for business model reinvention, illustrates its key dimensions, and proposes a systemic operationalization process. Moreover, it provides a tool that helps organizations to evaluate both existing and proposed new business models.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENT AGENTS FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATION

Fierce competition in a market increasingly crowded and frequent changes in consumer requirements are the main forces that will cause companies to change their current organization and management. One solution is to move to open architectures and virtual type, which requires addressing business methods and technologies using distributed multi-agent systems. Intelligent agents are one of the most important areas of artificial intelligence that deals with the development of hardware and software systems able to reason, learn to recognize natural language, speak, make decisions, to recognize objects in the working environment etc. Thus in this paper, we presented some aspects of smart business, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, intelligent systems models, and I especially emphasized their role in managing business processes, which have become highly complex systems that are in a permanent change to meet the requirements of timely decision making. The purpose of this paper is to prove that there is no business without using the integration Business Process Management, Web Services and intelligent agents.business intelligence, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, management, enterprise, web services

Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats’, paper presented at the 15th Annual Edineb Conference, Malaga, Spain, 15-18 June, 2008.Enterprises are presented with ever increasing challenges regarding marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity. They face competitive pressures from local and international sources, their competitors are constantly tweaking products and services to jostle ahead of them, and their customers expect responsiveness and innovativeness to their expressed and latent needs. The enterprises’ very success, and survival, depends on their ability to change their business, market and product strategies to fit these challenges. Underlying these business, market and product strategies is the enterprises’ business model. Simply, business models are an organisation’s understanding and interpretation of how they currently, and in the future, achieve their revenue and profit streams. These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders. In SMEs the creation, development and creative deconstruction of business models is most often driven by the founding entrepreneur, or subsequent corporate entrepreneurs brought in to provide professional management of these rapidly growing businesses. Interestingly, more recent research has strongly linked entrepreneurs’ mindset, or mental models (Zahra, Korri et al. 2005), associated with the challenges to the enterprise, with their drivers for innovation and changes in their enterprises’ business models. Certainly research has identified the potential value changes, business and customer, that can often facilitate the construction and deconstruction of business value-based innovations (Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst et al. 2004), and then reflecting these in their overall business processes. This paper discusses the research study, undertaken by the authors, to explore the link between entrepreneurs’ understanding and interpretation of business opportunities and threats, and the potential influence in challenging their mindset business model. The paper begins by discussing the two broad approaches to modelling enterprise strategies and the resulting integrated business models: innovation and process orientations.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Approaches and models for change management

Change management is currently one of the most sought-after business management technologies. Often, change management is called the most difficult part of a managerial work, which requires great skill. This is particularly relevant in the context of modern business, when deep, almost constant changes are in principle considered a factor that is very important for a company to adapt to the changing demands of the market and the global economic situation. The purpose of the article is an analysis of approaches and models of change management. To achieve it a literature review was carried out. Article describes main differences between ADKAR, EASIER, Lewin's model of change and Nadkar twelve steps approach to name a few. Analysis led to the conclusion, that it is impossible to pick the best approach to change management. Each approach to change management draws attention to different aspects of this issue but at the same time they do not exclude but complement each other. Change management models focus, to a large extent, on the practical process of this management area