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Confirming Design Guidelines for Evolvable Business Processes Based on the Concept of Entropy

Authors:
Peter De Bruyn
Dieter Van Nuffel
Philip Huysmans
Herwig Mannaert

Keywords: Business Processes, Complexity, Entropy, Normalized Systems

Abstract:
Contemporary organizations need to be agile at both their IT systems and organizational structures (such as business processes). Normalized Systems theory has recently proposed an approach to build evolvable IT systems, based on the systems theoretic concept of stability. However, its applicability to the organizational level, including business processes, has proven to be relevant in the past and resulted a.o. in a set of 25 guidelines for designing business processes. In subsequent work, the Normalized Systems theory was confirmed and extended based on the concept of entropy from thermodynamics. Therefore, this paper explores whether the guidelines which have been proposed for business processes from an evolvability point of view can be confirmed or extended from the entropy reasoning as well. More specifically, the validity of 9 business process design guidelines is investigated for this purpose. Our results indicate that the investigated guidelines are rather consistent among both approaches: guidelines required to attain evolvability seem to enable low entropy (i.e., complexity) and vice versa.

Pages: 420 to 425

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: October 27, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-304-9

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from October 27, 2013 to October 31, 2013