Organizational agility key factors for dynamic business process management

International audienceFor several years, Business Process Management (BPM) is recognized as a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency. Increasingly, corporates find themselves, operating in business environments filled with unpredictable, complex and continuous change. Driven by these dynamic competitive conditions, they look for a dynamic management of their business processes to maintain their processes performance. To be competitive, companies have to respond quickly and nimbly to changing environment. One domain that has dominated the thinking of most managers from few years is organizational agility. It is considered as inescapable feature of today's forward-looking corporates. About 90% of executives surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit believe that organizational agility is critical for business success. Many researchers tried to define and characterize organizational agility according to their context and domain application. The first aim of this paper is to tighten and explicate a conceptualization of organizational agility that clarifies what it is and how it can be reached by proposing a framework that leads to improve organizational agility. The second aim of the current research is to suggest ideas on how to make business processes agile and what are the practices of organizational agility that can be transferred to BPM

An Architecture-Centric Approach for Information System Architecture Modeling, Enactement and Evolution

International audienc

Conception et construction de fédérations de progiciels

Organizations aim at combining a lot of software applications together in wide and consistent systems. Such systems have to exhibit properties such as openness, interoperability, maintainability, autonomy, evolution, etc. Our approach, as in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) domain, is aiming to interoperate (instead of integrate) autonomous, distributed, software applications and services that have to respond together at users needs.We define a federation as a heterogeneous software tools set, most of these tools being commercial ones; such software tools are geographically distributed and autonomous.Our approach deals with several facets that are mainly: conceptual facet, i.e. how one can build an information system composed of heterogeneous software tools; operational facet, i.e. how can one define the behaviour – control – of such system (the federation system); technological facet, i.e. how can one plug several software tools in a federation. We will show how the framework architecture we propose allows on the one hand to build software tools federations, and on the other hand to control their execution.Les systèmes d'information des entreprises, soumis à la fois à l'environnement économique et à l'avènement d'Internet, sont le cœur d'investigations multiples : on parle de refonte, fusion, architectures, etc. Il y a, d'un côté, la demande croissante en fonctionnalités de toute sorte, couvrant les diverses fonctions des entreprises comme les services commerciaux, les services responsables de la production, les services de direction et de management. De l'autre côté, les directions informatiques ont du mal à se situer, coincées entre l'attrait d'un éditeur de logiciel unique et la disponibilité d'applications concurrentes, parfois complémentaires sur le marché. Disposer d'outils de gestion de la chaîne logistique, de gestion de la relation client ou d'achat en ligne, avoir la capacité de s'interfacer avec d'autres systèmes d'information sont devenus des impératifs. Les PGI (Progiciels de Gestion Intégrée), d'un outil interne, évoluent vers un outil de gestion interentreprises (appelé ECM, pour Enterprise Commerce Management). Les architectures de ces outils devront être adaptées, répondant aux soucis d'ouverture, d'interopérabilité, du respect de normes, de maintenance, d'autonomie et d'exigences fonctionnelles. Aussi, la tendance que l'on trouve avec les approches de l'EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) est à l'intégration d'applications indépendantes, de services, distribués à travers le réseau et permettant, ensemble, de satisfaire les besoins des utilisateurs.C'est dans ce contexte que se situe notre problématique et en particulier ce que nous appelons des fédérations d'outils. Ces dernières sont un assemblage d'outils hétérogènes, géographiquement répartis, autonomes et dont l'intégration doit couvrir les attentes des utilisateurs.L'approche que nous proposons aborde plusieurs axes : conceptuel, ou comment construire un système d'information composé d'outils hétérogènes ; opérationnel, définissant le mode de fonctionnement et de contrôle de la fédération ; et technologique, permettant aux différentes applications de participer à une fédération. Aussi, nous verrons en quoi l'architecture que nous proposons permet la construction de fédérations d'outils, leurs mises en oeuvre et leur contrôle à l'exécution

Diapason, une approche à base de services support aux entreprises étendues

La notion d'entreprise étendue véhicule aujourd'hui des caractéristiques de flexibilité, de changements, de capacité à se reconfigurer, de s'adapter pour atteindre de nouveaux marchés. L'approche Diapason présentée dans cet article offre un support à l'agilité des systèmes d'information des entreprises étendues en abordant différents niveaux d'abstraction pour la composition dynamiquement évolutive de services

Une Architecture pour l'Ingénierie des Systèmes d'Information à base de Services

National audienceInformation systems aim to be decentralized and to make use of different resources or business knowledge more and more externalized and used on demand. Today SOAs are presented as a possible answer to the implementation of these decentralized information systems, but require enterprises to major challenges : the exposure of their business functionality in the form of services, the use of these services, but also the use of services provided by third parties. The approach we propose under this article disclaims SOA vision in the context of a conceptual architecture for the information systems engineering, encompassing the definition of a business services repository and the composition of these services in the form of agile services orchestrations

Business Process Flexibility in Service Composition: Experiment Using a PLM-Based Scenario

In recent years, service oriented systems that compose services in a loosely coupled manner, have emerged as a new paradigm to provide automated support for business processes. These process based composition and their support need to survive in a highly volatile environments under which the business operations are subject to continuous changes. Consequently, many approaches have been proposed to address the issue of flexibility support in business process enactment in order to facilitate the coupling with the business reality. However, it remains a challenge for researchers. In this paper we provide some requirements for process flexibility in the context of service composition and analyses existing approaches in workflow domain and in AI planification domain against these requirements. Some perspectives are addressed based on a practical experiment conducted with these approaches