Business Process Agility
Business process agility (or flexibility) has been a matter of interest for numerous researchers (Milanovic et al., 2011; Van der Aalst et al., 2009; Snowdon et al., 2007; Pesic et al., 2007; Daoudi & Nurcan, 2007; Reijers, 2006; ShuiGuang et al., 2004; Rinderle et al. 2004; Mangan & Sadiq, 2002; Millie & Balasubramanian, 1997). Agility in the context of business processes can be defined as the ability of an organization to effect changes in the process components (activities, roles, resources, information etc.) in a timely manner, usually in response to changes in business environment and stakeholders’ needs (Alexopoulou et al., 2008). The intense interest on business process agility stems from the fact that business process automation supported by the utilization of process-aware information systems (Dumas et al., 2005) has increased accuracy and efficiency in process execution on one hand, but it has also rendered business process modification a complex and time-consuming task. This is because well-structured business process models executed by Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) (Dumas et al., 2005) proved to be inflexible to change. Since modern enterprises operate in highly turbulent environments having to cope with a frenetic pace of change (Oosterhout et al., 2006) and continuously sense opportunities for competitive action in their product-market spaces, it is business process agility, which underlies enterprises’ success in constantly enhancing and redefining their value creation in highly dynamic environments (Sambamurthy et al., 2003).
In an effort to make business process agility true, researchers propose various methods, techniques or approaches in general, focusing on business process automation. Therefore, although business process design is an equally important phase of the business process lifecycle (Weske, 2007), the exploration of agility in the design phase, associated with the ability of the process designer to easily and effectively describe business process modifications, has not been given adequate attention.