Enterprise Availability Broker for Policy Compliance
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Solution Overview
Problem
In enterprise environments, user-controlled availability settings often conflict with resource needs and policies, leading to inefficiencies and potential unavailability of critical personnel during peak times or policy violations.
Innovation Solution
An enterprise availability broker system that negotiates user-controlled availability status changes based on predefined enterprise criteria, using a rules-based engine to evaluate requests against resource needs and policies, and queues denied requests for potential reevaluation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If users are allowed to manually control their availability status on various media, then user autonomy and flexibility are improved, but enterprise resource needs and policies may be violated
Solution Approach 1:
An enterprise availability broker is introduced as an intermediary system between users and communication media. The broker negotiates availability requests against enterprise policies and resource needs, automatically approving or denying requests without requiring users to directly manage their availability status. This resolves the contradiction by maintaining user autonomy in requesting availability changes while ensuring enterprise compliance through automated policy enforcement.
2Productivity
If automated systems initiate communication interactions based on enterprise processes, then communication efficiency and productivity are improved, but the complexity of managing user availability across multiple criteria increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges multiple availability criteria (user preferences, enterprise policies, resource needs, calendar availability) into a single integrated broker that evaluates all factors simultaneously. This consolidation reduces the apparent complexity by providing a unified interface and automated decision-making process, allowing automated systems to initiate communications efficiently without requiring separate management of each availability criterion.
Solution Approach 2:
The enterprise availability broker operates autonomously to evaluate and decide on availability requests without requiring manual intervention from users or administrators. The system self-manages the complexity of multiple availability criteria by automatically negotiating requests against enterprise policies and resource needs, thereby improving communication efficiency while keeping the system manageable through automated rule-based decisioning.
3Reliability
If user availability requests are automatically evaluated against enterprise criteria, then policy compliance is improved, but the time required to process availability changes increases
Solution Approach 1:
Enterprise policies, resource needs, and evaluation criteria are pre-configured and stored in the availability broker before runtime. When availability requests are made, the system performs rapid automated evaluation against these pre-established criteria rather than requiring real-time policy interpretation or manual review. This preliminary setup enables fast automated decision-making that maintains policy compliance while minimizing processing time for availability changes.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods and apparatus are provided for controlling an availability of a user in an enterprise environment. If an enterprise user requests to change an availability status on one or more media, a determination is made as to whether to grant the request based on one or more predefined criteria associated with the enterprise. For example, the predefined criteria may comprise resource needs or one or more policies of the enterprise. The predefined criteria may be expressed as one or more rules in a rule base.