Method and apparatus of on demand business activity management using business performance management loops

Abstract

An architecture, system, and method are provided for a commitment loop solution for on demand business activity management. A Business Performance Management (BPM) loop is defined as a set of nodes each relating to different tasks for processing performance management trigger data generated by a business entity in real time, where the beginning or sensing element of the loop is triggered by a token (representing a business event from a business process) and the ending or executing element provides a business action to be implemented by the business entity. The token is passed from node to node sequentially in a particular order around the loop. Processing of the data represented by the token is governed by policies, which can be changed dynamically and follow a life cycle. On demand business activity management of larger aggregates of business entities (i.e. enterprises and value chains) is achieved by extending this architecture by building upon the BPM loops of the component entities to form a BPM net, adding nodes as necessary. This architecture, system and method can be implemented at multiple levels of granularity from operational or tactical business activities to enterprise wide strategic activities.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] The present invention generally relates to business process management and, more particularly, to frameworks for business process management that facilitate adaptive monitoring and control. [0003] 2. Background Description [0004] To succeed in today's business environment, an enterprise needs agility. Businesses must respond to changing customer needs with flexible systems and processes. Unfortunately, most enterprises are slow to respond to both the problems occurring in its organizations and the changes of requirements from customers. Static processes that cannot adapt to changing needs are a liability. Enterprises are scrutinizing the effectiveness of their business and information technology (IT) operations to identify opportunities for greater efficiencies. [0005] Business performance management (BPM) has emerged as a critical discipline to enable enterprises to manage their business solutions in an “on-demand”...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011] It is also an object of the invention to provide an architectural framework for building business performance management (BPM) systems that overcomes the constraints of a currently available linear based design.

[0012] The present invention provides a policy based BPM framework to address the above issues. In general, a BPM system is a system for sensing stimuli in the business environment, interpreting perceived data to detect exceptions, determining alternatives for overcoming the exceptions, and deciding how to respond to the situation presented. A policy based BPM system using BPM loops establishes an on-demand platform for business performance monitoring and control. The central notion of this kind of BPM system is the BPM service. A BPM system having BPM loops manages multiple instances of a BPM service within a shared IT infrastructure. Each service is developed as either a Web service or a service on grid of servers. We define the BPM loop framework as delivering BPM services to multiple service customers over the Internet to form a shared service-oriented architecture. Each instance of a BPM service in this BPM loop architecture can be viewed as a utility computing service environment. A defining feature of a BPM loop framework in accordance with the invention is the sharing and management of highly heterogeneous resources with the constraint that user expectations will be satisfied from both functional and non-functional perspectives. Similarly, a policy based BPM loop system is able to integrate, monitor and control functions so that these functions are available to managers on a continuous basis.

[0013] The core of this modular and scalable invention is a system for business performance management of a business unit. The business unit is defined by business processes. The business processes generate events, which are detected by the BPM system (e.g. via probes) and represented by tokens. The central component of the system is a BPM loop comprising a plurality of nodes, including at least a sensing node for receipt via the tokens of event data corresponding to a business event,

Problems solved by technology

Unfortunately, most enterprises are slow to respond to both the problems occurring in its organizations and the changes of requirements from customers.

Static processes that cannot adapt to changing needs are a liability.

However, in practice most BPM processes and architectures are linear and rigid and are very hard to change once they have been developed and implemented.

To change the requirements of these BPM systems is sometimes like building a completely new application, which costs time and money.

However, this kind of approach is hard to model, deploy and maintain.

Nevertheless, most functions provided by business analytics are performed in batch mode, which compromises the ability of the management system to determine business situations and resolve exceptions in a timely fashion.

It is challenging to run business analytics in a continuous manner.

In general, it is extremely difficult to model, integrate and deploy monitoring and control capabilities into larger scale business solutions (e.g. supply chain management) so that the business process can be managed dynamically.

Current technologies for dynamically adapting IT systems to changes in the business environment, where the IT systems are serving an interrelated structure of business units, are inadequate in a number of particulars.

There is no agreement on how monitoring and management capabilities should be defined and deployed to the customer's environment.

Also, two-party service management based on service-level agreements (SLAs) cannot handle commitments crossing lines between business units in a complex organization.

Finally, existing rule-based expert systems for decision support do not provide end-to-end reasoning for business commitments and capabilities.

There are several existing efforts directed toward the general problem area of adaptation to changing business conditions, but each of these efforts is deficient.

An approach using the name “Ponder” provides a policy language for a distributed management system, but fails to consider modularized policies for different granularities and levels of abstraction in business process management.

The Holosofx Monitor is based on time and cost only, and fails to provide a generic concept for business process management.

There is no quality of service management of the wider value net within which a particular business process operates.

A framework for specifying and monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services (WSLA) provides a web service based language to specify IT level service agreements, but there is no supporting and scalable infrastructure for handling monitoring and management capabilities.

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