Agents of change in business process management

Abstract

Successful enterprises are built on change. Increasingly, businesses operate in a rapidly evolving environment where the response to changing markets may of necessity be measured in hours and days instead of months and years. Responsiveness and adaptability will be the hallmarks of business success. BT is strategically placed as both a major potential facilitator of this change, as well as benefiting from its technology. This paper describes how agent-based process management systems can provide powerful tools for managing the enterprise of the future. It explores recent work combining distributed computing technology with autonomous software agent techniques for business process management, and argues that these represent a viable supplement and even an alternative to existing workflow management systems. This is supported by the results of a number of projects, including ADEPT, BeaT and a number of other related schemes, which are exploring how leading edge technology can improve the way business processes are managed. This paper provides a vision of how agent-based process management systems can support the needs of the ‘virtual’ enterprise of the future and the integration of the information systems of small to medium-sized enterprises (SME).