Improving Software Flexibility for Business Process Changes

In times of continuous change, companies need to adjust their business processes to gain sustainable competitive advantage. Resulting changes in the company’s IT currently require the involvement of developers from departments that are mostly not aligned with the business. These changes often result in high transaction and labor costs. The article presents a platform-based method to adjust business processes with the aim of increasing both efficiency and flexibility compared to current approaches. The core of our work is an evaluation against traditional component-based software development using a sound simulation model. Three real-world scenarios of business process change show that – despite a slight increase in transaction costs – our suggested method decreases labor costs while increasing operational flexibility. Copyright Gabler Verlag 2010