Chapter 1 Making the Business Process Execution Language ( BPEL ) Flexible

Today’s enterprises need to be responsive to competitors, the market, organizational changes and changing customer requirements and need to response immediately. Agile enterprises are able to scope with increasing changes, uncertainty and unpredictability in the business environment. Although, the original concept of an agile manufacturing was popularized 1991 by the Iacocca Institute (Iacocca 1991), there is still a lack in supporting agility by information systems (Mutschler, Reichert et.al. 2006; Rymer and Moore 2006). Several workflow management systems exists, which mostly provide process definition tools that presents the knowledge about the process using standard modeling elements like activities, roles or control flows elements (Mendling and Neumann 2005). This is suitable for production oriented processes, but it is ill-suited to deal with changes (van der Aalst and Jablonski 2000). Because, change is difficult, complex and risky according ABSTRACT