From business process management to business process ecosystem
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Research article
From business process management to business process ecosystem Richard Vidgen, Xiaofeng Wang School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, UK Correspondence: Professor R Vidgen, School of Management, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. Tel: þ 44 1225 383821; Fax: þ 44 1225 386473; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract 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 dimension. Journal of Information Technology (2006) 21, 262–271. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000076 Keywords: business process management; service-oriented architecture; coevolution; complex systems; ecosystem
Introduction mith and Fingar (2003) claim that organizations that hard-code processes or continue with manual process steps will lose out to competitors that adopt business process management (BPM) techniques, a view supported by the major IT market intelligence companies – Gartner, Forrester, Ovum and Delphi Group. Organizations carry out BPM to execute, manage, improve and adapt their business operations across the extended enterprise. The implementation of BPM relies in great part on IT (in particular, a service-oriented IT architecture built on Web service technologies) to model business processes and to execute them directly via a business management server. The ability to change a process design and to make it operational quickly makes BPM a key enabler for creating and responding to change, that is, for achieving organizational agility. Smith and Fingar (2003) call the resurgence of interest in BPM the ‘third wave’. They argue that BPM is both/and (Pettigrew et al., 2003) rather than either/or. For example, BPM is not just about the past and present (process improvement), it is also about the future (process innovation). Smith and Fingar (2003) say that third-wave BPM
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disrupts the business–IT divide and moves toward a world in which ‘process owners design and deploy their own processes, obliterating, not bridging, the business–IT divide’ (p. 127). But, how is this to be achieved? Smith and Fingar (2003) point explicitly to complex systems theory as
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