Thomas G. Koslowski

ERP On Demand Platform

Platforms for SaaS-based enterprise applications are prospering and the number of on-demand ERP vendors is increasing. We combine both phenomena for the first time and illustrate how the integration of a sustainability benchmarking service into an on-demand ERP platform provides added value beyond pure cost savings. By applying a qualitative system dynamics approach we identify self-reinforcing mechanisms which allow a faster and more comprehensive market penetration compared to providing these services separately.

Resilience - A New Research Field in Business Information Systems?

Being responsive in cases of unplanned disruptions has been difficult for management in the past, but for IT it is even more challenging: IT Systems are developed to fulfill predefined properties, and offer a hard-wired set of exception handling functionalities. Resilience encompasses reaction on disturbances beyond the scope of known properties. An organization is resilient if its capabilities can be adapted to new requirements which have not been explictly incorporated into the existing IT design. This paper introduces the concept of resilience and its implications in the fields of business information systems.

Towards a Process-Centered Resilience Framework

The turbulent organizational environment and the intensive use of interconnected, complex IT-systems incur operational risks with increasingly severe and uncertain disruptive effects. The increasing reliance on Information Systems (IS)such as Business Process Management (BPM) systems brought up an urgent need to ensure continuous business operations despite unexpected challenging conditions. In contrast to well-established risk-aware BPM which mainly addresses risk mitigation at design-time and only for known risks, we propose resilient BPM as a complementary approach focusing either at run-time or off-time. Such approaches seek the adjustment and maintenance of operations under disruption. We report on our ongoing work towards the development of a decision support framework to realize resilience in the BPM context. For this approach, measuring resilience on a process level is crucial, since it provides information that allow for better decision-making, learning, and improvement. Nevertheless, there are no suitable holistic measurement systems for resilient BPM available by now. Specifically, this paper motivates the need for operational resilience measurement at the level of processes. It presents the components and operation of our measurement framework, which helps to detect resilience properties of processes based on measures by analyzing process-logs. This information is then exploited to drive a resilience-oriented decision support to increase process resilience.

Toward Resilience Assessment in Business Process Architectures

This paper investigates options to access the resilience of business process architectures, thereby connecting the two hitherto unconnected areas of Business Process Management and Information System Resilience. The overarching goal is to provide for robust and reliable business process execution even under adverse and unexpected situations. Specifically, this paper focuses on one particular resilience indicator as a basis for assessment, namely time. This is because timeliness and time behavior of activities in business processes directly mirror effects and impacts of a changing environment on the business process. We develop an approach based on process mining to analyze the event logs generated during the execution of processes which extract probability distributions of a process’s time behavior to model the effects of occured events. A case study substantiates the applicability of the approach.

Towards a Detective Approach to Process-Centered Resilience

Protection of today’s interconnected and complex information infrastructures is of high priority. Traditionally, protection means robustness: preventively identify the threats to business processes and propose countermeasures within the context of a risk analysis. This, however, only covers known risks having punctual effects upon the IT infrastructure. In contrast, the notion of resilience, as a refinement of trustworthiness, is getting attention both in academia and within organizations as a denominator to move beyond survival and even prosper in the face of adverse conditions. This paper reports on ongoing work towards the development of PREDEC, a detective framework to realize resilience in the context of business processes. Specifically, it firstly motivates the need for operational resilience and corresponding tool support at the level of processes. Secondly, it sketches the operation and building blocks of PREDEC, which currently employs process mining techniques to analyze process event logs to assess systems’ resilience. Finally, it describes the intended evaluation steps to be undertaken once PREDEC is completely implemented.

ERP-On-Demand-Plattform

ZusammenfassungPlattformen für SaaS-basierte Unternehmensanwendungen beginnen sich im Markt zu etablieren und das Angebot an ERP-On-Demand-Anbietern nimmt zu. Der vorliegende Beitrag führt beide Phänomene erstmals zusammen und zeigt, welche Vorteile die Integration eines Softwaredienstes für Nachhaltigkeits-Benchmarking (NBM) in eine ERP-On-Demand-Plattform jenseits von Kosteneinsparungen bietet. Mittels eines qualitativen System-Dynamics-Ansatzes werden selbstverstärkende Effekte identifiziert, die im Vergleich zu einem getrennten Anbieten der Dienste eine schnellere und umfassendere Marktdurchdringung versprechen.AbstractPlatforms for SaaS-based enterprise applications are prospering and the number of on-demand ERP vendors is increasing. We combine both phenomena for the first time and illustrate how the integration of a sustainability benchmarking service into an on-demand ERP platform provides added value beyond pure cost savings. By applying a qualitative system dynamics approach we identify self-reinforcing mechanisms which allow a faster and more comprehensive market penetration compared to providing these services separately.

Resilience Undefined: A Framework for Interdisciplinary Communication and Application to Real-World Problems

Resilience scholars from multiple fields continue to look for a universally accepted definition of resilience. But is a universal definition across disciplines possible or even desirable in the near future? The proposed framework enables a more holistic understanding of the various fields of resilience research and makes communication across several domains more productive by placing the discussions into four types of resilience that are broad enough to facilitate discussion, but specific enough to allow for the translation of resilience into specific policies, practices and outcomes.