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Agile business process development: why, how and when—applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

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Abstract

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.

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Notes

  1. This case comes from the experience of the first author.

  2. The data above were derived from ProBis system logs on 31 of May 2012.

  3. This case comes from the experience of the second author.

  4. This case comes from the experience of the first author.

  5. In this section we do not provide the description of iPB which is done in Sect. 6. The main focus in this section is on how iPB is being used in the process and system development.

  6. Here, we follow the idea of (Box and Draper 1987), p. 424: “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” considering that that showing the usefulness for practical purposes as the best way to validate a model.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to all members of our team without whose efforts this paper would have never been written. Special thanks to Tomas Andersson, Paul Johannesson, Erik Perjons, Rogier Svensson and Alexey Striy. The authors are also much in debt to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped us to improve the structure and readability of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DSV - Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ilia Bider & Amin Jalali

  2. IbisSoft AB, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ilia Bider

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  1. Ilia Bider
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  2. Amin Jalali
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Correspondence to Ilia Bider.

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Bider, I., Jalali, A. Agile business process development: why, how and when—applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 14, 693–731 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-014-0256-1

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