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 and service agility as competitive advantages to address business trends like increasing product/service variability or faster time-to-market, and to enable a close alignment of business with information technology. Along this trend, process awareness and service orientation have become prevalent paradigms in enterprise computing, and a new generation of process- and service-oriented information systems has emerged.
Using real-world cases from various application domains, this tutorial will present a review of fundamental flexibility challenges that exist for process- and service-oriented information systems. In particular, it will give insights into concepts, methods and technologies that foster flexibility for all phases of the process and service lifecycle. Amongst others, this includes flexibility support for pre-specified composite services as well as for loosely specified ones whose schema is only partially specified at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain schema parts are deferred to the run-time.