Achieving Adaptability at the Edge of Chaos: Adaptive Business Network Models, Processes, Framework and Architecture

Abstract

The business environment has become increasingly complex and unpredictable. Business is facing turbulence in an environment that includes social, political, technical and economic challenges. IT is developing faster than can be predicted, along with customers’ constant changes in demands and living patterns, and businesses must respond to this complex and dynamic environment in order to survive and be competitive. The traditional business network lacks the adaptability to rapidly reconfigure its strategy, structure, business process, and systems to respond to environmental and customer change. To meet these challenges, organisations need to form adaptive networks that provide businesses the capability to collaborate across organisational boundaries and change their business strategies and processes to the needs of the environment. The Adaptive Business Network (ABN) business model has been adopted by many organisations to allow heterogeneous organisations to gain adaptability and agility. The ABN model achieves this through specifically selecting business partners who have a common interest in producing a product or service, and can collaborate extensively to meet their customers’ changing requirements. Organisations need to maintain their internal operation efficiencies (order) while tackling the uncertainties and changes with their business partners and the business environment (chaos). Identifying the position where both efficiency and flexibility are maximised is therefore important to allow organisations to achieve performance and agility in today’s ever-changing environment. In the past, operations and supply chain researchers have investigated agile and adaptive supply chains, and management of adaptive business networks. The information system and computer science field has contributed studies on building flexible systems and service-oriented architecture (SOA), while the management discipline focused on strategy, leadership, organisation structure and learning. The business process area has contributed on enterprise systems, business process management (BPM) and governance. Over the years, researchers have proposed numerous adaptive and agile frameworks and systems to support ABNs, but have not comprehensively integrated these diverse aspects in a holistic fashion to deliver a fully functional ABN system (ABNS). In order to address the problems, this research blended together several relevant disciplines in a unique way and attempted to overcome the problems identified in the ABN field. The research synthesised ideas of competitive forces in business networks; process managements in business networks; the theories of edge of chaos in business networks; and other relevant literature. As part of the research, ABNS models, processes, framework and architectures were proposed, along with an implementation of a prototype for an ABNS that acted as a proof-of-concept for ABNS models, processes, framework and architectures. The implementation of an ABNS was its use in business scenarios to prove some of the concepts behind these proposals. Lastly, the implementation was evaluated. The results indicated that the proposed models, processes, framework, and architectures are valid and valuable for the design of an ABNS.