Business process reliability is a topic that, in general, has been addressed in research, however, there are not many methods proposed for calculating the reliability or for looking at it as an engineering problem in the context of business processes. In this position paper we address the business process reliability from different perspectives and argue that it is necessary to consider these perspectives in systemic manner throughout the lifecycle of a business process. We address, specifically, IT based business processes, as these processes bring in additional factors affecting reliability of business process, i.e., the business process reliability depends on the reliability of IT solutions.
Reliability engineering is a well-known topic in mechanical engineering and even in software engineering. It is less addressed in the domain of business process management. However, in the era of digital transformation, the reliability of business processes becomes an essential issue because business processes may easily suffer from disruption at strategic, business or infrastructure levels.
In general, reliability is defined as ability of a system or component to perform its
required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time [
Respecting the number or possible failure points, emergent nature of global economy, and continuous changes in business processes and IT systems that support them, we take a different perspective in addressing business process reliability. We look at the business processes from systems-theoretical perspective and, based on already accumulated scientific knowledge in business process reliability (and software reliability), propose to establish guidelines that would support establishing and maintaining reliable business processes. We do not see these guidelines as substitutes of already existing qualitative and quantitative approaches in reliability engineering; rather we claim that they could be established with the purpose to provide relatively easy applicable suggestions in IT based business process management that would help to prevent at least part of errors that could lead to non-reliable IT based business processes. In this position paper we ponder about the basis on which the guidelines could be established.
The factors influencing IT based business process reliability are discussed in Section 2. The method for establishing the guidelines for complexity handling in IT based business process reliability engineering are proposed in Section 3. Section 4 presents brief conclusions and directions for future work. 2
Reliability Related Factors in IT Based Business Processes In this section we will review different issues that concern IT business process reliability.
We start with software reliability, as this area of research is more mature than
business process reliability research. Here we can see that software reliability is a
product of software reliability engineering. Software reliability engineering includes
[
There are several metrics established that are used in estimating software reliability
[
While the concept “software reliability engineering” is well known, we cannot say
the same about the concept “business process reliability engineering”. Rather it is
common to speak about business process quality engineering and criteria of business
process quality estimation. For instance, in [
Regarding reliability of a construction of activities of a business process, the author of [10] offers several metrics for different activity combinations. Authors of [11], in turn, suggest estimating business process reliability by active monitoring which addresses not only the activities per se but also their inputs, such as knowledge, information, equipment, etc.
In summary, we can say that reliability of a business process depends on the reliability of its elements. In IT based business processes, the IT systems that serve this business process also must be considered as business process constituents. This adds to the complexity of reliability analysis as software systems themselves can go through their development cycles in running business processes. One business process can be supported with several IT systems, each of which has its own development and maintenance schedule. The simplest case is when business process development and software development are synchronized. This is illustrated in Table 1, which shows interplay between software reliability engineering and business process reliability engineering. For the sake of simplicity, in the table business process reliability cycle is constructed analogically to software reliability engineering.
Reliability engineering phase for business process
reliability and software reliability engineering
Planning for business process reliability
engineering and software reliability engineering
Analyzing business process failure modes and
software failure modes
Predicting business process reliability and
software reliability during development
Estimating business process and software
reliability during business process model testing
and software testing
Making business process implementation decision
and making software release decision
Monitoring business process reliability and
monitoring software reliability
Literature coverage (black color
is for business process reliability
engineering, blue – for software
reliability engineering)
[
The purpose of our research is to create guidelines so that it would be possible to address any combinations in lifecycle phases. In the next section we will briefly describe what method are we intending to apply for creating the guidelines. Literature sources depicted in Table 1 show some related works which were found useful for reliability analysis in a particular cell. Black color is used for business process literature and blue color is used for software engineering literature sources. Currently we have made search with limited number of keywords (“software reliability” and “business process reliability”). Broader search could give more results for cell population. Also, with respect to software reliability engineering, only some of available references are reflected as the emphasis here is on business process reliability not just software reliability. 3
A Method for Developing the Guidelines for Complexity
Handling
The development of the guidelines is based on the Table 1 and concept model reflected
in Fig. 1. The model in Fig. 1 reflects basic business process concepts to be addressed
in reliability engineering as can be derived from related work discussed in Section 2.
The model presented in Fig.1 can be extended by more concepts, e.g., the business
processes context or specific performer types as in [
For each combination of business process reliability engineering and software reliability engineering phases shown in Table 1, the appropriate elements from Fig. 1 should be chosen and corresponding reliability analysis, planning or estimation methods and evaluation metrics suggested. For instance, the combination “monitor business process reliability” and “monitor software process reliability” could be handled with the following: • • • • •
Business process life cycle phase: execution, Business process activities to be monitored and metrics of monitoring parameters, Business process active resources to be monitored and monitoring metrics (information regarding all types of resources including software must be represented), Business process passive resources to be monitored and monitoring metrics, Software reliability engineering phase: monitor software process reliability. Reliability analysis and engineering for IT based business processes has high level of complexity. Therefore, we intend to establish structured guidelines for reliability engineering that utilize existing and possible upcoming knowledge in business process reliability engineering and software reliability engineering with respect to all phases of business process life cycles and with respect to all basic constituents of the business process including used software. The software is regarded as an active resource of a business process; and software reliability engineering can be applied separately to different IT solutions as business processes can have different supporting software components at different their reliability engineering stages.
The development of guidelines should be structured and exposed knowledge extendable. Development of the guidelines and tool support for their convenient usage are the objectives of further research. One more direction of further research would be industry specific guidelines, for instance, the set of guidelines for supply chain IT based business process reliability engineering, educational IT based business reliability engineering, etc. Providing industry specifics would help even more to reduce complexity of reliability handling by providing structured renewable knowledge and tool support. 3-662-56509-4. 10.Sunyaev, A.: Internet Computing. Springer International Publishing (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34957-8. 11.Mendibil, K., Turner, T.J., Bititci, U.S.: Measuring and improving business process reliability. Int. J. Bus. Perform. Manag. 4, 76–94 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1504/IJBPM.2002.000109. 12.Holt, J.: A pragmatic guide to business process modelling. British Informatics Society (2009). 13.Respício, A., Domingos, D.: Reliability of BPMN Business Processes. Procedia Comput.
Sci. 64, 643–650 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PROCS.2015.08.578. 14.ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-2:2013(en), Software and systems engineering — Software testing — Part 2: Test processes, https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec-ieee:29119:-2:ed1:v1:en, last accessed 2021/08/04. 15.O’Regan, G.: Concise Guide to Software Testing. Springer International Publishing, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28494-7. 16.Turner, T.J., Bititci, U.S.: Maintaining reliability of business processes using active monitoring techniques. 169–176 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35321-0_19. 17.ISO - ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015 - Systems and software engineering — System life cycle processes, https://www.iso.org/standard/63711.html, last accessed 2021/08/04.