On the architecture and form of flexible process support

Businesses may be described as holistic systems of interacting processes. Beer’s Viable System Model is a complete formulation of such a set of processes necessary for a business to be sustainable in a volatile, changing environment. The Viable System Model can be used to describe a process architecture for the IT capabilities required to support a sustainable business. This paper explores this idea by applying it to a supply chain scenario using a reflective process enactment environment.