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.
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Rama Akkiraju is a Distinguished Engineer at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Since joining IBM Research in 1995, she has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, business transformation analytics, business process integration technologies including semantic Web services. She is one of the drivers of W3C standard on SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for Web Services Description Language) and is the editor of the SAWSDL User guide. Rama is currently working on researching, developing and delivering innovative solutions that transform the services engagement (sales) process for IBM’s services businesses-with an aim to improve the service solution quality and service engagement process effectiveness. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 35 technical journal, conference and workshop papers. Rama is the recipient of multiple best paper awards including INFORMs, and Decision Sciences Journal awards. Rama holds a MS degree in computer science and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business. Rama graduated at the top of the MBA class in 2004 and received a gold medal of honor from the university.
Debarun Bhattacharjya is a Research Staff Member in the Decision and Risk Analytics team within the broader Business Analytics and Math Sciences division at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Debarun’s primary research interests lie in decision and risk analysis, and probabilistic models and decision theory in artificial intelligence. Specifically, he has pursued research on topics such as probabilistic graphical models (influence diagrams and Bayesian networks), value of information, sensitivity analysis and utility theory. His applied work has been in domains such as energy, business services, sales and demography, and he has coauthored more than ten publications in highly refereed journals and conference proceedings. Debarun holds M.S and Ph.D degrees in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and a B. Tech degree in Industrial and Production Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.
Sammukh Gupta has 6 years of experience in the IT industry. He has been working with IBM since 2009 in various assignments ranging from SAP security to Java development. As part of his responsibilities, he currently leads a team working on security & compliance. Sammukh holds a Masters degree in computer application from Andhra University, India. He currently resides in Kolkata, India.
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Akkiraju, R., Bhattacharjya, D. & Gupta, S. Towards effective business process availability management. J Serv Sci Res 4, 319–351 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-012-0013-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12927-012-0013-2