Patent Application
20080189644
This invention is related to commonly owned patent application Ser. No. 11/176,371 for “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ALIGNMENT OF AN ENTERPRISE TO A COMPONENT BUSINESS MODEL” which is incorporated by reference herein.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to component based business models and, more particularly, to techniques for monitoring the enterprise based on a component business model framework.
2. Background Description
Managers of very small businesses may be able to grasp their entire business situation from their own knowledge and operating experience. They are rather like bush pilots, able to fly by the seat of their pants. Larger enterprises do not have that luxury, and must develop alternative mechanisms for getting a clear picture of the condition of the business. The business itself is like a commercial airliner flying at night or in bad weather, requiring instruments to navigate. The monitoring systems of the business have been developed in response to this need, but there are a variety of such systems and they may be neither comprehensive nor coordinated. Individual managers within the business may be more or less successful at developing suitable monitoring mechanisms within their own areas of responsibility. Within the enterprise there is a wide and disparate range of managers that need to monitor the business, including those involved in the management of: business strategy, business operations, IT operations, computer center management, facility management and management of individual units of enterprise. The challenge, however, is to provide suitable monitoring for the enterprise as a whole.
In order to provide the managers of the enterprise better ways of identifying and analyzing problems or “conditions of interest” (not necessarily errors but reflect situations and states that the business is interested in), exception and condition of interest events and alerts of all types (including business operations, IT infrastructure application facilities, etc.) need to be monitored and the results of this monitoring must be presented within a business organization context. Otherwise there is no way for the business operation team to fully understand the nature of issues that may arise. For example, key performance indicators (KPI's) do not in themselves provide sufficient information to understand the business problem. Strategic objectives need to be validated on an ongoing basis using active operational information. In another example, an exception reported by a business application may be caused by the catastrophic shutdown of a system due to an electrical failure.
To achieve these objectives it is not sufficient for the individual managers of the enterprise to see monitoring results within a business organization context. The business organization context must be the same common context for all the various role players within the enterprise. Otherwise the enterprise as a whole cannot have a clear vision, which is the purpose of enterprise monitoring. Without this common business organization context the business operation team as a whole will not be able to fully understand the nature of business issues, and the members of the team will not be able to communicate effectively on how best to resolve these issues.
Single pieces of data, such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI's), exceptions, failure reports or other reported conditions of interest, do not in themselves provide sufficient information to understand the business problems that arise. Enterprise monitoring information needs to be aggregated and correlated within a common organizing framework to make sense of the many diverse conditions that occur within an enterprise. Furthermore, strategic objectives, business operations and information technology (IT) realization and performance need to be validated on an ongoing basis using active enterprise monitoring information.
One aspect of the invention is a method for monitoring an enterprise, comprising mapping at least one message from a monitor source to at least one element of a component business model and presenting monitoring information from the mapping to a user of the enterprise. In another aspect of the invention the mapping further comprises listening to a message from a monitor source, capturing an event from the message, using an event rule to determine if said event is a monitor event, and, if the event is a monitor event, annotating the monitor event with component business model data. In yet another aspect of the invention, the presenting further comprises displaying the monitoring information on a component business map of the enterprise. In another variation, the presenting further comprises generating a report of the monitoring information, the report being sorted by elements of a component business model.
In a further aspect of the invention, the annotating is based on an enterprise monitor metamodel connecting the message from a monitor source to one or more elements of a component business model. It is also an aspect of the invention for the metamodel to include a monitor artifact element, the monitor artifact element being further comprised of a status level element, a monitor data element, and a monitor correlator element. In another aspect of the invention the mapping is provided by a middleware service.
The foregoing and other features, aspects and advantages will be better understood from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention with reference to the drawings, in which:
It is therefore a feature of the present invention to provide enterprise monitoring systems with a common business organization context.
Another feature of the invention is to provide various role players within the enterprise (including executive management, business operation teams, business analysts, IT architects, and program/project managers) better ways of viewing, identifying and analyzing problems that affect the achievement of business goals and performance of the enterprise.
It is also a feature of the invention to provide an enterprise operation monitoring founded on the CBM organizing framework.
A further feature of the invention is to present enterprise operation monitoring within a CBM interface based on the component map tailored for the enterprise.
It is also a feature of the invention to provide for reports and monitoring displays that present information in context for each of the user roles that comprise the business operation team.
Another feature of the invention is to aggregate and correlate enterprise management conditions to facilitate problem determination, analysis and correction.
A feature of the invention is to cover within the enterprise monitoring umbrella all operational activities including but not limited to business activity monitoring (BAM), key performance indicator (KPI) monitoring, IT system monitoring, IT application monitoring, and other software monitoring.
A related feature of the invention is to extend the enterprise monitoring umbrella to support the monitoring of the physical plant, resource consumption and other examples of utility monitoring not ordinarily connected to the direction of the enterprise as a whole.
It is a feature of the invention to use enterprise operation monitoring to provide reports and information displays usable for validating business strategy, business operational and IT realization aspects of the enterprise.
Another feature of the invention is to ensure that enterprise monitoring also supports the identification, determination and correction of business problems.
The invention uses the Component Business Model (CBM) described in related patent application Ser. No. 11/176,371 for “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ALIGNMENT OF AN ENTERPRISE TO A COMPONENT BUSINESS MODEL” (hereafter termed “the above referenced foundation patent application”). CBM provides a logical and comprehensive view of the enterprise, in terms that cut across commercial enterprises in general and industries in particular. The component business model as described in the above referenced foundation patent application is based upon a logical partitioning of business activities into non-overlapping managing concepts, each managing concept being active at the three levels of management accountability: providing direction to the business, controlling how the business operates, and executing the operations of the business. The term “managing concept” is specially defined as described in the above referenced foundation patent application, and is not literally a “managing concept” as that phrase would be understood in the art. For the purpose of the present invention, as for the related invention, “managing concept” is the term associated with the following aspects of the partitioning methodology. First, the methodology is a partitioning methodology. The idea is to begin with a whole and partition the whole into necessarily non-overlapping parts. Second, experience has shown that the partitioning process works best when addressed to an asset of the business. The asset can be further described by attributes. Third, the managing concept must include mechanisms for doing something commercially useful with the asset. For a sensibly defined managing concept these mechanisms must cover the full range of management accountability levels (i.e. direct, control and execute). Managing concepts are further partitioned into components, which are cohesive groups of activities. The boundaries of a component usually fall within a single management accountability level. It is important to emphasize that the boundaries between managing concepts (and between components within managing concepts) are logical rather than physical.
The invention establishes a metamodel extension that annotates enterprise operation messages, data and events originating from a wide range of existing (or future) monitoring sources, with condition prioritization and explanation that maps this information to CBM components and elements. The invention enables a monitoring display based on the CBM map of the Enterprise, indicating condition prioritization and providing information reports in context for user roles. A new middleware service is implemented, responsible for capturing monitoring conditions from a plurality of sources and mapping them into CBM components and elements. This middleware service obviates the need for existing monitoring sources to change their procedures or data to recognize the CBM model. A new user interface is implemented that provides graphic views or reports of monitoring conditions based on the CBM map of the enterprise.
One aspect of the invention is a method for monitoring an enterprise by mapping at least one message from a monitor source to at least one element of a component business model and presenting monitoring information from the mapping to a user of the enterprise. The details of the mapping involve listening to a message from a monitor source, capturing an event from the message, using an event rule to determine if the event is a monitor event, and if the event is a monitor event, annotating the monitor event with component business model data. The presenting step can display the monitoring information on a component business map of the enterprise, or generate a report of the monitoring information, the report being sorted by elements of a component business model, among other options.
This invention is based on the notion that CBM can be extended to be used as a monitoring framework in which to organize and present information on enterprise conditions. The overall concept is presented in
Using the partitioning scheme provided by CBM, the enterprise's variety of business monitoring sources 150 may be parsed into an array of understandable and well organized components. This enables the typical user (e.g. operator 125) to select 127 a narrower set of business activities (represented by a component 130 or even a competency 111) aligned with the user's focus. By mapping the monitoring activities of the enterprise 150 onto the CBM map 110, as explained below, a user 120 is able to limit his examination to those sources 150 of monitoring information mapped to a set of business activities selected by the user.
A unique Operational Monitoring Service 140 (OMS) listens 143 for monitoring messages and reports generated by the various monitoring sources 150. It then annotates these messages and reports using a CBM metamodel extension as described below in connection with
The OMS 140 creates unique messages, annotated with CBM data, which enables the CBM Enterprise Monitor (EM) 110 to display this information. The EM interface is a representation of the CBM map of the enterprise upon which monitoring information status is visually encoded by color or pattern. Monitoring information is captured in the messages generated by the OMS. By selecting visual elements of the CBM map, the user can “drill-down” to obtain detailed information about the monitored condition, as may be seen in connection with the description of
The user 120 may be a member of a wide range of roles from executive to operations manager. The EM presents monitoring information on context to the user role.
As illustrated in
Thus, by observing these interacting aspects of the enterprise in their totality, holistically embracing business intent 225, realization 240 and monitoring 250 are seen as being related to, and interdependent with, strategy 220 and operations 230. As a consequence of this perspective on the enterprise, the so-called business-to-IT gap can be seen to be illusory. Shaping the monitoring function to this holistic view of an enterprise significantly improves how the enterprise is organized and managed. This shaping also improves how the enterprise shares data, and also improves how business components react to the information that is provided.
The starting place for setting enterprise objectives and defining the activities of the enterprise lies within the business strategy and executive roles, which articulate the goals and conditions that the operational enterprise must meet. Capturing this business context is critical to the identification and specification of business operations, realization and monitoring. This can include business related information that influences the specification of governance, service agreements and key performance indicators used for monitoring. The key is to capture business specification, operation, realization and monitoring in a formal way, and retain these specifications throughout the continuum shown in
The Component Business Model (CBM) 210 provides a common, consistent and uniform model in which to support all four aspects of the business continuum. CBM provides a wide range of techniques that enable an effective means of identifying and capturing business intent. CBM embodies a model and method that facilitates the analysis of a business enterprise, decomposing it into discrete semi-autonomous and collaborating business components. Contained within these components are sets of requirements that provide specification for the people, processes, technology and other resources that realize the purposes of the component. Further, as the CBM map is rooted in business strategy operations and business service realization, it is a natural step to extend the technique, model and methods to embrace enterprise operational monitoring. This provides critical information about the active operations of the enterprise required for detection, analysis, control and feedback.
Turning now to
This model is referenced by the OMS 140 to construct messages that are passed to the enterprise monitor (EM as described below in connection with
The right side of
Business component 310 is a well-bounded piece of the enterprise that can be a business in its own right. It includes the resources, people, technology and know-how necessary to deliver the value the business strives to provide. A business service 330 is some well-defined value that a business component offers to other business components and/or to external parties. A business operation 335 describes what the business actually does. It consists of business artifacts 325, business activities 340 (nodes) that work on artifacts 325, and a topology of connections between the business activities, and resources, people and technology that support the activities. A business activity 340 is something the business does at a level of granularity that is chosen by the business. Business activities are related to one another through a link 345 which establishes their relationship. Directed graphs of activities and links form a business operation 335, which can be viewed as the business process that enables a business service 330. A business artifact 325 is a concrete identifiable chunk of business information such as forms, documents and messages. A service invocation activity 350 is a business activity that requires a business service be invoked.
The method of the invention is shown in
In a definitional task, business and IT architects construct rule sets 430 and other programmatic instructions (for example, such as those represented by Event-Action-Condition rules (ECA rules) or other declarative rule forms) that direct the identification and mapping of monitor events 435. These are submitted to the Operational Monitoring Service 420 which uses them to direct message processing as shown in
Using its rule sets and programmatic instructions, the Operational Monitoring Service 420 maps detected conditions to CBM elements and constructs a message (based on the EM Metamodel described above in connection with
Note that the various monitors (531, 532, 533, and 534) are defined in terms of the EM metamodel (shown in
Now turning to
While the invention has been described in terms of a single preferred embodiment, those skilled in the art will recognize that the invention can be practiced with modification within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 11212105 | Aug 2005 | US |
| Child | 12054645 | US |
