MANAGING CHANGE -DETERMINING THE ADAPTABILITY OF INFORMAITON SYSTEMS

The ability to adapt to frequent changes has emerged as a new paradigm for successful business operations. Hereby common information systems are mostly not able to fulfil the requirement of adaptability for business or organisational changes. However, the ability to adapt to changes is crucial for business organisations and the support of business processes by information systems plays a crucial part. In this paper a requirement model is presented that allows the identification of building blocks and proceeding models for adaptive information system architectures. By using the example of enterprise systems it is emphasised how the pattern approach enables the assessment of the adaptability for information systems, and how adaptability of information systems can be linked with the current external environmental requirements. Initially, adaptability is a fundamental concept widely known in natural systems. The link between adaptability and information systems is outlined within this paper. Patterns about the behaviour of natural systems are taken as a model for the design and organisation of information systems.