MAMBA: Automatic customization of computerized business processes

Abstract

Due to recent market challenges organizational researchers have developed a variety of strategies how organizations can continuously survive in highly dynamic, sometimes even hostile environments. One of the most important strategies aims to enhance the flexibility of enterprises through widespread decentralization, while another well-known approach advocates customer orientation through systematic business process (re-) engineering. This paper addresses organizational flexibility and business process orientation from the perspective of information systems. It starts from a requirements analysis which investigates the challenges of contemporary organizational strategies and then proceeds towards an approach that supports the flexible modeling of business processes by linking decentralized organizational procedures. For this purpose a set of process modeling and process interaction operators is defined. These operators also allow to automatically create and customize configurations of computerized business processes. This progress in cooperative information processing technology contributes significantly to the recently emerged concept of the computerized enterprise. The concepts are presented in the context of a banking application, namely the Credit Advisory Subsystem of our banking application MAMBA.