A sense-and-respond approach to business transformation

Business process technology has been one of the drivers and enablers of business transformation in the last decade. In essence, a business process represents a specific way of executing and coordinating business activities. Middleware that can help model and execute business processes along with integrating those processes with multiple vendor applications has been used widely in many large enterprises, and is fast gaining momentum in the small and medium business sector. As automated business processes become prevalent, we have seen a new wave of business transformation emerging: enterprises start looking for capabilities to intelligently monitor and control their business operations, and to link the operational performance with their business strategy. This new wave of business transformation is aimed to achieve a higher level of governance, i.e., to support "smart" decision-making and control of business processes. In this paper, we propose a sense-and-respond approach to intelligent business process control. A sense-and-respond loop typically consists of three steps: sensing, analyzing and decision-making, and execution. In this paper we focus on the design of a decision-making framework