Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Summery: Modeling Business Process Availability


 Title: Modeling Business Process Availability
Authors: Nikola Milanovic, Bratislav Milic, and Miroslaw Malek
Published: 2008

Availability is one of information security main goals, this paper looks in to presenting a framework for modeling business process availability that takes into account services, the underlying ICT- infrastructure and people.

The paper then tried to define the layer where to model the availability and define the relation between ICT layer and BPM layer. It also reached a definition of business process availability:

“Several availability definitions are provided. Interval availability is the number of correct service or business process invocations over a number of total invocations for a given time interval. Steady- state availability is the expected availability defined as ser- vice or business process uptime over its lifetime. User- perceived availability is the number of correct service or business process invocations over a total number of invocations for a given time interval (interval user-perceived avail- ability) or over lifetime (steady-state user-perceived avail- ability), given for a particular user.”

Then it went in describing the process to assessing availability. Also it provided an example of how to integrate availability in a business process model. It was a simple editor process of revising and approving a new manuscript.



The 1st pictures shows the original process, while the last 3 shows how to integrate the availability for each task that required a human interaction (editor and junior editor). The approach depended on generating tickets and granting/revoking access rights. 

Then the paper went deep in technical technology explaining such as network communication, systems integration, and permission access, to prove the importance of availability for the process.


The presented approach enables business process and service availability assessment, based on the availability properties of the underlying ICT-components. The model may be extended with additional factors, such as cost or power utilization. 
 


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