Towards effective business process availability management
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Towards Effective Business Process Availability Management
Rama Akkiraju, Debarun Bhattacharjya, Sammukh Gupta
Received: 16 May 2012 / Accepted: 12 December 2012 / Published: 31 December 2012 © The Society of Service Science and Springer 2012
ABSTRACT We present a decision-support framework for managing business process unavailability caused by the planned maintenance activities of the underlying infrastructure components such as software and hardware upgrades and patch application. The framework has two parts: the first part provides an approach for estimating the business impact of business process outages. Four business impact factors are defined, involving both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Total business impact involves combining the individual impacts on business for various countries affected by the outages within a company. We apply multi-attribute utility theory to combine the values of impact factors. In the second part, optimal schedules for process maintenance activities are computed to minimize the overall estimated business impact using a sliding-window based scheduling algorithm. Finally, the schedules and their business impact are presented to the decision maker in a visual environment that is conducive for effective decision making. A prototype of the system has been developed and is currently being evaluated for use in a large Dow Jones (Top 10) company. KEYWORDS Planned Business Process Outages, Business Process Maintenance, Business Process Availability Management, Business Continuit. Rama Akkiraju ( ) IBM Almaden Research Center e-mail: [email protected] Debarun Bhattacharjya IBM Watson Research Center e-mail: [email protected] Sammukh Gupta IBM Global Business Services, India e-mail: [email protected]
320 Rama Akkiraju, Debarun Bhattacharjya, Sammukh Gupta
1. INTRODUCTION Business Process Management (BPM) practice studies the lifecycle of business processes. Some aspects of the lifecycle have received more research attention than others, for example, the areas of business process design, analysis, implementation, and monitoring receive most of the attention in academic and industrial research. On the other hand, the study of business process availability management, which deals with managing planned and unplanned unavailability of business processes, is often neglected. While most critical business processes are designed to be highly available with the required redundant infrastructure, not all business processes operating in a company can be made highly available due to the associated costs of acquiring and maintaining the infrastructure. Therefore, non-critical but important business processes may become unavailable to users when the underlying hardware or software components are brought down for upgrades or patch application. Business process availa-bility management involves understanding how outages actually impact an organization’s business. Currently, most companies perform maintenance on weekends or on company holidays, assuming that such an approach minimizes the b
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