The recent work on business process flexibility focuses primarily on defining and classifying business process flexibility and developing strategies, architectures, and tactics for achieving it. However, to specify the required type and level of business process flexibility it is essential to understand how the need for flexibility arises in the first place, and how this need affects the requirements for flexibility. The objective of this position paper is to examine the characteristics of the environmental variations that provide the stimulus for designing business process flexibility and its implications for the design and management of business processes.
Strategies and Tactics for Achieving BPF
Ideally all three perspectives of flexibility should work in consonance. Business Process Flexibility should be designed in such a way so as to meet the demands of variations, whereas the strategies and tactics for achieving business process flexibility would be appropriate to meeting the BPF design requirements. Practically, sometimes the link between these three perspectives of flexibility is sometimes not explicit. The recent work on flexibility in general and business process flexibility in particular focuses primarily on defining and classifying business process flexibility and developing strategies, architectures, and tactics for achieving the requisite levels of flexibility. There is only minimal work that examines the antecedents of business process flexibility, that is, the characteristics of the variations that give rise to the need for flexibility. However, to specify the required type and level of business process flexibility it is essential to understand how the need for flexibility arises in the first place, and how this need affects the requirements for flexibility.
The objective of this position paper is to examine the characteristics of the
environmental variations that provide the stimulus for designing business process flexibility
and its implications for the design and management of business processes.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the theoretical
underpinnings of the need for flexibility derived from Herbert Simon’s conceptualization of
the design of an artifact (Simon 1996) and Ashby’s law of requisite variety
“Only variety can destroy variety”
The Law of Requisite Variety, often called Ashby’s Law
We differentiate between two types of business process flexibility – Pre-Designed Flexibility: the need for process flexibility is anticipated and by the process designer and therefore process flexibility is pre-designed; and Just-in-Time Responsive Flexibility – flexibility that is created on the fly by the process manager1 at the time of occurrence of the unanticipated or ambiguous variation. Pre-designed flexibility is built into the design of the process; just-in-time responsive flexibility requires an intelligent process manager who can interpret the unanticipated variation and design the flexible response to it at the time the variation occurs. The differences between the two types of flexibilities depend upon the nature of the variability of the environment, the underlying reason or stimulus for flexibility. 3.0 Need or Stimulus for Business Process Flexibility Design of requisite business process flexibility thus requires an understanding of the variations and perturbations that is the stimuli that require a flexible response from the business process. In this section we explore the characteristics of the stimuli and 1 Process manager is a role that is responsible for the management of the overall business process. The incumbent in this role could be an individual or a team of people. their general relationship to business process flexibility. We provide a taxonomy of stimuli to Business Process Flexibility in Table 1. The BPF stimuli are explained in terms of their description, the number of paths for process fulfillment, the response responsibility and the level of flexibility resolution. Then, we illustrate this taxonomy by using two examples, one from disaster response processes, and the other from the example of an order fulfillment process for computers.
A Business Process is a collection of interrelated work-tasks, initiated in response to an event that intends to achieve a specific result for the customer of a process. Worktasks are performed by Process actors. Actors may manage other actors, tasks may consist of other tasks, actors manage or control resources, and actors deploy the resources in performing tasks to meet the customer’s requirements. Process management is a higher level process that monitors, adapts and controls the overall process. The intended specific result for the customer is expected to be achieved despite the variety and variations in the stimulus to the process. The process identity arises through the identification with the process customer-type and their required process deliverables. Thus, as long as the customer-types and the required deliverable-types are constant, the process maintains its identity even though the tasks within the process and their interrelationships, or process actors and resources may change. Ilia Bider (2005) in his keynote talk last year in BPMDS 2005 observes: “When you ask people how they do things, they, most probably, will know how things are done in “normal” circumstances, forgetting many of not so normal cases. ….No wonder the end users then start complaining about “lack of flexibility” as soon as the system is in place.” (Bider 2005, p.7) Thus, often systems are designed only for the normal case, and therefore have a monotonic response behavior. However, as Bider points out, monotonic systems are rare, and systems that are designed to be monotonic are often the result of inadequate requirements analysis.
Next, following the discussion in Section 2.0 we recognize that the requirements for flexibility may arise due to variety in stimuli that can either be pre-identified and predefined, or can be the result of ambiguous or unanticipated variations in stimuli. We further differentiate between ambiguous variations in stimuli, i.e. variations that can not easily be understand and classified, but are still within the range of existing experience, and variations that come as complete and total surprise.
In the case of variations in stimuli that can be anticipated and pre-defined the designer of the process can build-in the flexible response at the level of the process itself. This requires that all variations are identified crisply as mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Thus pre-defined selection/decision points in the process can be used to steer the process in line with the contingency. Flexibility is thus resolved within the process. However, in the case where variation in the stimuli is either ambiguous, or is totally unexpected, the requisite flexibility cannot be built into the process. In these cases, process flexibility can be achieved by passing the responsibility for interpreting the variation and designing the response to an intelligent and innovative decisionmaker above the process, the process manager. To illustrate the variations in characteristics of the stimuli for business process flexibility we next examine two examples: (i) processes for responding to a hurricane, and (ii) an order fulfillment process for an order for a computer. We will describe the BPF stimulus, typical response and the response responsibility for two examples above in Tables 2 & 3 respectively. 4.0 Relationship between the Stimulus for Flexibility and Business Process Flexibility Regev et al (2006) have classified business process flexibility with respect to the types of changes it enables. Their classification includes three orthogonal dimensions: the abstraction level of the change (type and instance), the subject of change (functional perspective, operational perspective, behavioral perspective, informational perspective, and organizational perspective) and the properties of the change (extent, duration, swiftness, and anticipation). We suggest that the characteristics of the stimulus defined above can be used to identify the requirements for business process flexibility identified by Regev et al.
However, before we do so, we need to re-clarify the understanding of the concept of flexibility and change. Above we had defined flexibility as the capacity of adapting to variations. We also demonstrated that this capacity, to some extent, can be built into the design of the process itself (Type B stimulus). Thus in case of stimuli Type B we do not need to change the design of the process. We have a self-adaptive process. The process flexibility is inherent in the process design and manifests itself through the choice of alternate paths for different process cases.
However, in cases C and D the flexibility is not completely built into the process design. It requires an intelligent process manager to interpret variations, select or change the design of the process in response to the variation, and execute it. Thus qualitatively, this change is different than the type B change and includes changes in process design as well as process enactment.
Tables 4, 5 & 6 show how the BPF taxonomy proposed in this paper explains the three orthogonal dimensions described above. It is possible that in some cases, we may not directly relate the level of stimulus to the type of business process change. Perhaps this could be part of the discussion in the workshop. It is our conjecture that this problem could be due to two types of ambiguity. First, there is considerable ambiguity in the commonly used terms “flexibility” and “change.” For example, it is not clear if the change is with respect to the “normal” case or is it with respect to the designed process. It can be argued that all changes are only with respect to the “normal” case. In that case, any variations from the norm, whether anticipated and designed for as a contingency, or unanticipated, will be considered a flexibility requirement and hence a change. On the other hand, if the change is with respect to the designed process, the need for flexibility and therefore change arises only in the case of anticipated change. Second, the difference between ‘Process Type’ and ‘Process instance’ needs clarification. For example, in the case of anticipated and designed variations, each unique path may be considered a process instance. In this situation, the anticipated variation would lead to a designed change as a new process instance. On the other hand, an unanticipated and therefore, not designed for variation may result in changes to the process design (type) itself. Therefore, it is important that such ambiguities in definitions of change be clarified before the levels of stimulus can be substantively related to business process flexibility changes. Perhaps, this could be a matter for discussion and clarification during the Workshop. 5.0 Learning in Business Processes The taxonomy of BPF stimulus described above also suggests that learning occurs in organizations in the way they progressively deal with the different types of BPF stimulus. From the simplistic view of BPF stimulus as Type A (constant), organizations may learn the different exceptions to be handled and mature the stimulus model into Type B. Organizations learn from their ambiguous situations how to model and manage the ambiguities, thus bring down Type C to Type B. Similarly, organizations may learn to move Type D to Type C once the ‘surprise’ has occurred at least in ambiguous terms, and then to Type B by defining a predefined crisp set of stimuli. For example, in the aftermath of 2004 Tsunami, governments and disaster relief organizations are installing early warning systems and revising their standard operating procedures to include processes for assessing and managing future Tsunamis. The target of business process flexibility designers is to design processes with response sets for the utopian Type A BPF stimuli and at least, the more pragmatic Type B stimuli. In addition, the designers should build in continuous learning mechanisms in the processes to move the Type C & D stimuli into Type B.
As the above discussion shows, before we can specify and design flexible processes we need to understand the requirements that lead to the need for flexibility. According to both Simon and Ashby, systems, to survive, need to continuously be responsive to and adapt to variations in their inner and outer environments. Thus, an understanding and assessment of the variations that drive the need for flexibility are prerequisites to designing flexibility. Moreover, we need to establish clear connections between these stimuli for flexibility and the design of business process flexibility. This, in turn, requires a crisper definition and classification of both the stimuli as well as the flexibility options.
Bider, I. ‘Masking flexibility behind rigidity: Note on how much flexibility people are willing to cope with”, Proceedings of CAiSE05 Workshops – J Castro and E. Teniente (Eds.).
Simon, Herbert A. ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’, 3e, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1996. Volberda, H. W. Building the flexible firm: how to remain competitive. Oxford University
Press. 1998
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