Business Agility and Process Agility: How Do They Relate to Each Other?

Agility is an essential feature for SMEs and this chapter intends to examine if and how business processes, as currently understood, are able to promote it. Over the last years a number of viewpoints have emerged which exerted great influence on the design of notations and languages for business processes: the majority of them can be referred to as the centralized viewpoint, the role viewpoint, the conversational viewpoint, the case viewpoint and the cooperative one. These viewpoints provide different levels of agility and then beneficial results can be expected from their integration, which is the purpose of the proof-of-concept notation, AgileBPN, presented in this chapter. In AgileBPN, business processes are organized around conversations and role processes (encompassing the tasks pertaining to a given role); shared artifacts are represented as cooperative objects. The notation is illustrated with the help of an example referring to a business process meant to handle applications in a certain organization.