Contextually Aware Adaptive Systems for Enterprise Transformation

More than ever before, enterprises nowadays are faced with an environment characterised by asynchronicity, complexity, and uncertainty. We see three major shortcomings of many current approaches of enabling enterprises to adapt under these conditions: the proposed processes and systems often do not deal with the whole context surrounding the enterprise; enterprises still follow rather deliberate approaches when dealing with strategy and its execution; and decisions are limited in terms of their reach and range. Complex adaptive systems, and in particular autonomic systems, provide concepts and principles that could be leveraged to address these challenges. Furthermore, agent oriented implementation approaches could be harnessed to realise contextually aware and adaptive enterprise systems. In this paper we propose an adaptation lifecycle model, an agent oriented framework and architecture that enable enterprises to learn, adapt and be transformed.