In today's dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agilit17 y as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time-to-market, and to ensure business-IT-alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged-so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems or service orchestration engines.
This talk addresses these flexibility needs and provides an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle. This includes flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the BPM field as well as for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time.