Supporting strategic process

Strategic business processes are typically one-off processes of strategic organisational significance that involve senior members of the organisation. Strategic business processes, and sub-processes, are classified as either goal-directed or emergent. A goal-directed process is completed successfully when its goal is achieved. An emergent process is completed when the resources allocated to it are expended. In general a business process will involve both goal-directed and emergent sub-processes. The management of emergent sub-processes is more complex than the management of goal-directed sub-processes. A multi-agent system supports strategic business processes. The system manages goal-directed sub-processes and manages the commitments that players make to each other during emergent sub-processes. The conceptual agent architecture is a three-layer BDI, hybrid architecture. The system can generate a substantial amount of inter-agent communication that can lead to non-trivial belief revision. Individual agents adapt their behaviour on the basis of estimates of performance which are defined in terms of four particular parameters. These estimates are made on the basis of historic information, and are accepted as long as they are statistically stable. If variations in these estimates lie outside specified limits then the system attempts to identify a reason why this is so. If such a reason is quantifiable and may be represented as some function then that function is used to revise subsequent measurements while that reason remains significant. The system has been trialed on business process management in a university administrative context. 1