Toward the Agile Enterprise: Coevolution of Business Processes and IT Infrastructure

New technologies, notably service oriented architectures and Web services, have enabled a third wave of business process management (BPM). Supporters have claimed that BPM is informed by complexity theory with the outcomes that business processes can evolve and adapt to changing business circumstances as well as coevolve with the IT infrastructure. As a consequence it has been suggested by BPM adherents that the businesslIT divide will be obliterated through a process-centric approach to systems development. In this paper we trace the evolution of BPM and its associated technologies and argue that a complex adaptive systems view of business processes and IT infrastructure in general and a coevolutionary view based on Kauffman 's NK[C] model in particular, may provide a more sound basis for BPM and IT infrastructure management. The paper concludes by considering the limitations of coevoJutionary theory in the BPM context and proposes areas for future work, including an injection of social theory to address issues such as human agency and the role of social structures.