Fulfilling Functional Demands of BPM in Long-tailed Change Environments

Abstract

Enterprises rely on their process-aware information system (PAIS) to conduct business. With the increasingly fierce competition, the operation environment of enterprises is constantly changing due to uncertain factors or emerging opportunities. How to react to the changes in time and make a positive response is fundamental for enterprises to maintain their core competitiveness in the new economic era. Among these changes, a kind of long-tailed change has been omitted by traditional business process management (BPM) because of its wide variety and low frequency. Just as the long-tailed effect reveals, the impact of long-tailed change on PAIS change management will be no less than the impact of high-frequency changes. On the move to digital economy, enterprises can hardly win if they cannot catch the first opportunity and deal the long-tailed changes properly. On the other hand, business process models in PAIS are core assets of an enterprise. The requirement of keeping routine processes running smoothly and reusing these assets smartly in unexpected situations runs through the whole business. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel maintenance approach for business process models to cope with long-tailed changes. By decorating existing process models with business-oriented annotations, the PAIS can equip with the mechanism to support original processes while react to long-tailed situations agilely with a reinforced process engine. Several experiments revels the effectiveness and generality of proposed approach for BPM in the digital economy ear.