Testing the Concept of the RUN-Time Adaptive Enterprise

Abstract

Our research program aims at finding and testing methods that allow organizations to become more RUN-time adaptive enterprises, with a near-zero time-to-market for new or changed products and services. Indeed, to thrive in increasingly more disruptive environments, an enterprise’s IT time-to-market should sustainably no longer be on the critical path of business time-to-market. Earlier research suggests that key elements for such a method are (a) an organization and IT agnostic way of modeling products and services and its collaboration network, using DEMO, (b) a universal transaction pattern of coordination and production acts as atoms for building business processes, and (c) designing the aspects in which organizational adaptivity is desired, in terms of Organization Implementation Variables (OIVs). To test the combined application of these elements in practice, ICTU and Capgemini conducted a Proof of Concept on Social Housing during 5 weeks. The resulting application, built with the Mendix low code platform, showed the ability to reorganize – in this case: reconfiguring accountabilities inside and across organizations – at run-time, without the need to change software. Future research should clarify to what extent such intrinsic application adaptivity can be increased, e.g., by (a) embedding the use of APIs, (b) automated support of all coordination acts in the universal transaction pattern, and (c) parametrizing more OIVs.