From business process management to business process ecosystem

New technologies, notably service oriented architectures and web services, are enabling a third wave of business process management (BPM). Supporters claim that BPM is informed by complexity theory and that business processes can evolve and adapt to changing business circumstances. It is suggested by BPM adherents that the business/IT divide will be obliterated through a process-centric approach to systems development. The evolution of BPM and its associated technologies are explored and then coevolutionary theory is used to understand the business/IT relationship. Specifically, Kauffman’s NKC model is applied to a business process ecosystem to bring out the implications of coevolution for the theory and practice of BPM and for the relationship between business and IT. The paper argues that a wider view of the business process ecosystem is needed to take account of the social perspective as well as the human/non-human dimensio

A coevolving systems approach to the organization of agile software

Despite the popularity of agile methods in software development and increasing adoption by organizations there is debate about what agility is and how it is achieved. The debate suffers from a lack of understanding of agile concepts and how agile software development is practised. This paper develops a framework for the organization of agile software development that identifies enablers and inhibitors of agility and the emergent capabilities of agile teams. The work is grounded in complex adaptive systems (CAS) and draws on three principles of coevolving systems: match coevolutionary change rate, maximise self-organizing, and synchronize exploitation and exploration. These principles are used to study the processes of two software development teams, one a team using eXtreme Programming (XP) and the other a team using a more traditional, waterfall-based development cycle. From the cases a framework for the organisation of agile software development is developed. Time pacing, self-management with discipline and routinisation of exploration are among the agile enablers found in the cases studies while event pacing, centralised management and lack of resources allocated to exploration are found to be inhibitors to agility. Emergent capabilities of agile teams that are identified from the research include coevolution of business value, sustainable working with rhythm, sharing and team learning, and collective mindfulness

Adaptive information system development

Information system development (ISD) is being conducted in an increasingly turbulent and complex environment. New forms of ISD are emerging, such as open source software and agile methods but theory is needed to explain and help improve the organization of ISD. Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) provides a novel perspective to understand and describe new forms of ISD and provide a theoretical foundation for researchers. This paper provides an overview of CAS and a review of its application to the study of organizations and to ISD. A directive approach to ISD is compared with a CAS informed approach, adaptive ISD. The CAS concept of coevolution is then used to throw light on the relationship between ISD and the enterprise in which the ISD activity takes place. The paper concludes with a research agenda for the application of CAS to ISD

Organizing for agility: a complex adaptive systems perspective on agile software development process

Agile software development has caught the attention of both practitioners and academics in recent years. In spite of many anecdotes and papers describing lessons learnt the theoretical foundation of agile software development has not been systematically articulated. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to study agile software development based on the theory of complex adaptive systems. The framework is illustrated by a case study of an agile software development team. Several agile practices are identified and reflected on from the perspective of complex adaptive systems

Toward the agile enterprise: coevolution of business processes and IT infrastructure

New technologies, notably service oriented architectures and Web services, have enabled a third wave of business process management (BPM). Supporters have claimed that BPM is informed by complexity theory with the outcomes that business processes can evolve and adapt to changing business circumstances as well as coevolve with the IT infrastructure. As a consequence it has been suggested by BPM adherents that the businesslIT divide will be obliterated through a process-centric approach to systems development. In this paper we trace the evolution of BPM and its associated technologies and argue that a complex adaptive systems view of business processes and IT infrastructure in general and a coevolutionary view based on Kauffman 's NK[C] model in particular, may provide a more sound basis for BPM and IT infrastructure management. The paper concludes by considering the limitations of coevoutionary theory in the BPM context and proposes areas for future work, including an injection of social theory to address issues such as human agency and the role of social structures

Order and chaos in agile software development: a comparison of two software development teams in a major IT company

Agile methods have emerged and become popular over last few years as a response to shortcomings of the waterfall process model. However, agile processes are stamped by some as chaotic processes and are placed in opposition to waterfall approaches. This paper uses the edge of chaos concept from complex adaptive systems theory as a theoretical lens to analyse the roles of structure and planning in the software development process. The software development processes of two teams in a major IT company, on of whom uses agile methods and the other a waterfall approach, are presented and the project structure and planning process of each is highlighted then compared. Our research finds that structure and planning are essential to agile processes and take different forms from the waterfall model. Contrary to the belief that agile software development may be chaotic we conclude that it is possible that the waterfall method may be chaotic due to prescribed rather than effective structures

A paradoxical perspective on contradictions in agile software development

An ongoing debate on agile methods focuses on the contradictions in software development, especially responding to change vs. following a plan, and people vs. processes. Unlike the ‘either-or’ perspective adopted in the existing agile literature, this paper introduces a paradoxical view on the contradictions in agile software development and uses two agile processes to illustrate it, arguing that a paradoxical perspective can help to gain a better understanding of the nature of and ways of dealing with the contradictions in agile software development. Taking a paradoxical perspective on responding to change vs. following a plan, and people vs. processes, this paper reveals that an agile process is a planning-driven process geared to responding to change, and it is a process that provides a supporting structure for people to learn and to improve their competences

A computational literature review of the field of System Dynamics from 1974 to 2017

<p>System Dynamics celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2017. While there have been numerous special issues in diverse journals that bring together work by System Dynamics scholars who share similar research interests, there have been no systematic reviews of scholarly activity across the broad field. This paper presents a computational literature review of the field from 1974 to 2017. A CLR automates the analysis of research articles with analysis of content (topic modelling of abstracts) to identify emergent themes in the literature. We performed a broad review of the field by initially searching using the term “System Dynamics” with more than 8000 articles. However, the results obtained were not satisfactory so we decided to restrict our sample to less than 800 articles from recognised journals and proceedings. After evaluation of the results obtained from topic modelling, we decided to use 51 topics covering most of the articles in our sample. A list of 51 topics provides enough granularity to identify relevant patterns of activity within the community of System Dynamics scholars. For each of these 51 topics, we present a commentary on the key insights obtained.</p