Towards a Process-Centered Resilience Framework

Abstract

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.