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To survive in a competitive business world, a company needs as much help as it can get. Collaboration is nothing new. Cloud Computing transforms the way many organizations work and offers benefit for operation management and service computing (Chang, V. 2013). The encouragement of process improvement and the assurance that processes do meet all compliance and risk regulations is of core business interest. In addition, customers increasingly want to get their products and services sooner, better, cheaper and in a more innovative and up-to-date way. The demands and expectations continually change so that the need to be dynamic in provisioning their products and services in the most efficient and effective manner through continuously improving processes rises. Process improvement is one of the ways addressing the challenges of increasing in regards to effectiveness, efficiency, capacity, flexibility and responsiveness (Chang, V., Walters, R. Wills, G, 2014).
More recently, a new generation of collaborative tools has evolved which support coordination of activities via a web based service. What is relatively new is the use of software systems to support the collaboration of business processes to facilitate new forms of collaboration. One major product emergence is the entire cloud service model as innovation and collaboration will frame the future of the cloud agenda. (Forrester, 2012) Due to this technological evolution, it becomes increasingly easier for companies to cultivate and orchestrate collaborative ecosystems around the cloud services. Whereas previously the data in IT systems largely stayed locked up behind corporate firewalls, more and more of that data is now flying in and out of a cloud. This digitization is transformative, driving business processes to ever-greater power and efficiency. Standardization is still and even more a key success factors that allows the digitization of business networks to expand and flourish. The business processes and related business parties, such as suppliers, distributors, customers, partners, and employees becomes increasingly complex and dynamic and stays as the most important factor of any competitive advantage.
Business processes are paramount for the success of a company towards its competitors in the market. Companies have always been working on improving processes for millennia. One can say that the systematic efforts at business process improvement started with Michael Hammer and James Champy in 1993 where they argued, among other things, that IT had often been used to automate bad processes and proposed that the proper combination of process redesign and IT could revolutionize the way companies worked.
Companies in almost every industry and of any size face similar questions how to handle their processes – no matter from which business area they are, no matter how standardized they are, no matter how important they are for the company. The need to improve their business processes continuously with an increasing level of creativity in regards to the design of the process itself and the collaboration of various processes with different partners is a mantra in today’s business. In parallel the idea of supporting business processes by IT systems flies around since ages – even before we have thought about cloud and BPaaS. Mostly this has been done by standardization, documentation and with the help of ERP systems. Successful companies need to face this challenge with implementing a continuous and substantial change of the entire business processes. (Zahn & Schmidt, 1997) Companies all over the world have invest time and effort to standardized their processes, increase quality and support these processes as much as possible by IT systems. However, in by far too many cases, these systems have been installed in ways that are difficult to maintain or even to support the business process adequately. The current business environment is characterized by an ever-changing market environment with an aggressive. (Knyphausen, 1993) Consequently, the new design of a complex and flexible business process landscape need to cover this complexity together with another degree of interoperability to even further increase efficiency and flexibility. In this context the concept of agile business processes and cloud services gets more and more important since both concepts addresses the same process targets as they offer an interoperability to enable business partners distributed across an on-demand business process landscape to coordinate their functioning based on a shared understanding of the meaning of the data that flows among them.