Designing Complex Organizations Computationally

Business process management is recognized increasingly as a critical factor in organizational success, leaders and managers seek to cope with increasingly complex and dynamic environments, and traditional approaches to process management become increasingly inadequate due to their lack of flexibility and adaptability. Alternatively, an organizational form receiving considerable current focus is the Edge, which distributes knowledge and power to the “edges” of organizations, and which enables organizational members and units to self-organize and self-synchronize their activities. The dynamics of such self-organization and self-synchronization, however, are extremely complex, and balancing the flexibility and adaptability inherent in the Edge with sufficient control to avoid chaos is very challenging. We employ the state-of-the-art POWer environment for dynamic organizational representation and emulation to develop and experiment with models of competing organizational forms, and to inform our understanding of complex organizational design and management—thereby making an important contribution to theory, research methodology, and practice.

Engineering of Experience Based Trust for E-Commerce

Trust is significant for sustainable development of e-commerce and has received increasing attention in e-commerce, multiagent systems (MAS), and artificial intelligence (AI). However, little attention has been given to the theoretical foundation and intelligent techniques for trust in e-commerce from a viewpoint of intelligent systems and engineering. This chapter will fill this gap by examining engineering of experience-based trust in e-commerce from the viewpoint of intelligent systems. It looks at knowledgebased trust, inference-based trust and their interrelationships with experience-based trust. It also examines scalable trust in e-commerce. It proposes a knowledge based model of trust in e-commerce and a system architecture for METSE: a multiagent system for experience-based trust in e-commerce. The proposed approach in this chapter will facilitate research and development of trust, multiagent systems, e-commerce and e-services.

Towards Dynamic Collaborations in Virtual Organization Alliances

This chapter introduces a service oriented relative workflow model as a means of helping organisations promptly create flexible and privacy-safe virtual organisation alliances. It argues that virtual organisation alliances are highly advocated to adapt to dynamic B2B collaborations, driven by the fast changing service demand-and-supply requirements. However, the temporary partnership and low trustiness between collaborating organisations put challenges to effectively manage collaborative business processes, and correspondingly an organisation centred design method and a visibility mechanism are discussed in this chapter to provide a finer granularity of authority control at contacting and collaboration design phases. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the establishment of a virtual organisation alliance through the use of relative workflows will not only inform researchers a better business process design methodology, but also assist in the understanding of the dynamic behaviours inside a virtual organisation alliance and the supporting approaches.

Flexibility for Distributed Workflows

This chapter shows how flexibility can be realized for distributed workflows. The capability to dynamically adapt workflow instances during runtime (e.g., to add, delete or move activities) constitutes a fundamental challenge for any workflow management system (WfMS). While there has been significant research on ad-hoc workflow changes and on related correctness issues, there exists only little work on how to provide respective runtime flexibility in an enterprise-wide context as well. Here, scalability at the presence of high loads constitutes an essential requirement, often necessitating distributed (i.e., piecewise) control of a workflow instance by different workflow servers, which should be as independent from each other as possible. This chapter presents advanced concepts and techniques for enabling adhoc workflow changes in a distributed WfMS as well. Our focus is on minimizing the communication costs among workflow servers, while ensuring a correct execution behavior as well as correctness of ad-hoc workflow changes at any time.

Operational Process Management in the Financial Services Industry

The financial services industry faces significant competitive pressures. Economic and political influences, incessant regulation, and fast changing markets make for a highly complex and dynamic environment. Thus, banks and insurance companies are forced to permanently improve their performance – raising process performance represents one of the biggest levers for success. This chapter analyses the challenges of operational process management for banks and insurance companies. The involvement of customers in service processes of financial institutions make these not as easy to manage as production processes. In response to these challenges, cornerstones for a general framework for operational management of service processes will be developed. The aim of this chapter is to present a framework for structuring service processes which allows combining influences by customers and an operational process management. The concept is based on the modularisation approach and will be demonstrated using a loan process as an example.

Tending and Trekking towards Composite Oriented Architecture (COA)

With the noteworthy spurt of service orientation (SO) principles, the spur and surge for composition paradigm have taken a fabulous and fruitful dimension and perspective. Composites are emerging and establishing as the promising, proven and potential building-blocks in the pulsating ICT space. Enterprises are very optimistic and sensitive about the shining days of composites in their day-to-day dealings and obligations to their restive partners, government agencies, venerable customers, demanding end-users, and loyal employees. In short, composites are bound to increasingly and illuminatingly participate and contribute towards fulfilling the goals of realizing integrated, optimized, smart and lean business processes that in turn can lead to extended, connected, adaptive, and on-demand businesses. As next-generation ICT is presumed to thrive on spontaneous and seamless collaboration among systems, services, servers, sensors, etc. by sending messages as well as smartly sharing a wider variety of connected and empowered resources, there arises a distinct identity and value for progressive, penetrative and pervasive composites. Already we started to read, hear and experience composite applications, services, and views. As composition is to flower and flourish in a positive fashion, the future IT is definitely on right track. In this chapter, you can find discussions about how rapidly and smoothly services enable business-aligned composites realization. There are sections dealing with prominent composition paradigms, patterns, platforms, processes, practices, products, perspectives, problems and potentials.

Multiple-Step Backtracking of Exception Handling in Autonomous Business Process Management

This chapter proposes a multiple-step backtracking mechanism to maintain a tradeoff between replanning and rigid backtracking for exception handling and recovery, thus enabling business process management (BPM) systems to operate robustly even in complex and dynamic environments. The concept of BDI (belief, desire and intention) agent is applied to model and construct the BPM system to inherit its advantages of adaptability and flexibility. Then, the flexible backtracking approach is introduced by utilizing the beneficial features of event-driven and means-end reasoning of BDI agents. Finally, we incorporate open nested transaction model to encapsulate plan execution and backtracking to gain the system level support of concurrency control and automatic recovery. With the ability of reasoning about task characteristics, our approach enables the system to find and commence a suitable plan prior to or in parallel with a compensation process when a failure occurs. This kind of computing allows us to achieve business goals efficiently in the presence of exceptions and failures.

Addressing the Complexities of Global Process Harmonization

Process harmonization is a complex initiative carried out by large companies seeking to standardize the process variants being executed by different business units across several countries or regions. Motivations for this exercise include cost pressures, mergers and acquisitions, customer satisfaction, need for agile and flexible processes, risk reduction in outsourcing processes etc. The complexity of this exercise is inherent as it involves multiple regions with special needs and characteristics, existing process and IT systems evolved over time, organizational dynamics around different business groups, etc. While a literature survey reveals quite a few cases of process harmonization, there are not many descriptions or research on the best approaches or methodologies to be used. In this chapter, we first define and examine the drivers of process harmonization. Subsequently, the challenges and constraints associated with such initiatives are identified, followed by some example cases. Further, we analyze a case study in detail to understand the practices followed. Based on these analyses, we propose a methodology to execute process harmonization initiatives.

Challenges and Solutions for Complex Business Process Management

A business process displays complexity as a result of multiple interactions of its internal components and interaction between the process and its environment. To manage complexity and foster flexibility of business process management (BPM), we present the DCAR architecture for developing complex BPM systems, which includes decomposition of complex processes (D); coordination of interactive activities (C); awareness of dynamic environments (A); and resource selection and coordination (R). On the other hand, computing technologies, such as object-oriented programming, component-based development, agent-oriented computing, and service-oriented architecture have been applied in modeling and developing complex systems. However, there is considerable ambiguity involved in differentiating between these overlapping technologies and their use in developing BPM systems. No explicit linkage has been established between the requirement of complex BPM and the supporting technologies. In this study, we use the DCAR architecture as the foundation to identify the BPM requirements for employing technologies in developing BPM systems. Based on an examination of the both sides (BPM requirements and supporting technologies), we present a clear picture of business process complexity with a systemic approach for developing complex BPM systems by using appropriate computing technologies.

Knowledge Flow Networks and Communities of Practice in Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) is a common approach used in dynamic and complicated environment throughout the organizations’ operation. Knowledge Flow Networks (KFN) and Communities of Practice (CoPs), especially that resulting from innovation needs, is regarded as a BPM issue. It involves both personal and organizational aspects, and is an iteration of the transmission between explicit and tacit knowledge. We discuss business process management in the context of Knowledge Management (KM) and knowledge flow networks. KFN, unlike workflow, can often transcend organizational boundaries and are distinct and different than workflow models. In this chapter, we develop, implement, and analyze a CoPs Centered KFN model in a multinational organization. The CoPs Centered KFN model is underpinned in a CoPs model built around four organization performance evaluation dimensions and sixteen criteria. Many criteria and clusters need to be taken into consideration while establishing a CoPs model. For this purpose, fuzzy multi-criteria decision making and cluster analysis techniques for evaluation of the CoPs Centered KFN model are employed in this chapter. A Dynamic Knowledge Flow Activity Analysis Model is also defined as part of our ongoing and future work.