An interoperable architecture and principles for implementing strategy and policy in operational processes

In today’s economy managers expect new strategies and policies to be implemented quickly. Yet practice shows that current systems are not able to implement changes within a short time frame. Nowadays a variety of technologies including semantic web services, business rules and software agents are available as building blocks for interoperable systems. Yet these technologies are rarely used in combination and are not adapting operational processes to changing business strategies and other requirements. A generic architecture is presented in this paper which is able to adapt processes to changing requirements based on three types of knowledge repositories (domain ontology, service description and business rule) which, when combined, allows for direct employment of strategy in business processes. The architecture is tested using scenarios. The testing shows that the architecture improves the interoperability between policy/strategic and operational level and results in a higher agility and better compliance. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.