Towards effective business process availability management

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.