On the architecture and form of flexible process support

Abstract

The ability of businesses to develop is frequently hampered by difficulties in changing underlying software systems. An example is the need to change when business partnerships are formed, or dissolved. This article is concerned with the architecture of business process support systems in the context of change, and particularly with the need for such systems to facilitate software change. The viable system model (VSM) is a cybernetic model of organisations that change. It provides an inclusive architecture in which both operational and development components are described within an organisation. This article illustrates, through a business supply chain example, the use of the VSM as an architecture for flexible process support systems. This architecture is systemic and inclusive: it incorporates the ongoing development of both the business and its underlying software.

The impact of software process standardization on software flexibility and project management performance: Control theory perspective

“…In most environments uncertainty is present [32,53,56]. Software will be modified many times, often before the system is complete.…”

“…Three important dimensions of requirements uncertainty can be identified: requirement instability, requirement diversity, and requirement analyzability [45]. Building flexible code to allow for uncertainty is one of the tenets of good software engineering practice [53]. Adherence to such practice represents a standard control method in an organization's development techniques.…”

Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches

“…It ensures that the "fit" between actual business processes and the technologies that support them are maintained in changing environments. The notion of flexibility is often viewed in terms of the ability of an organisation's processes and supporting technologies to adapt to these changes [22,7]. An alternate view advanced by Regev and Wegmann [13] is that flexibility should be considered from the opposite perspective i.e., in terms of what stays the same not what changes.…”

“…Snowdon et al [22] identify three causal factors: type flexibility (arising from the diversity of information being handled), volume flexibility (arising from the amount of information types) and structural flexibility (arising from the need to operate in different ways). Soffer [23] differentiates between short-term flexibility, which involves a temporary deviation from the standard way of working, and long-term flexibility, which involves changes to the usual way of working.…”

Collaborative Process Flexibility Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making

“…There have been numerous studies of flexibility in business processes oriented systems, both in terms of the factors which motivate it and the ways in which it can be achieved. The following papers cover extensively the literature on both the notion of process flexibility as well as design and evaluation approaches of flexible processaware systems [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. Our approach focuses on relieving the modeler from having to a priori map situations to specific actions that should be enacted when the situations occur.…”