Patent Application
20090018879
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to component based business models and, more particularly, to validating business solutions that use a component business model.
2. Background Description
Business solutions need to conform to business strategy and objectives. This means that the design of business solutions must be flexible, and consequently business solution validation and optimization also needs to be flexible. Service oriented architectures (SOA) introduce the ability to create business solutions from compositions of business services. Validating that the business solutions composed of business services can meet business objectives is challenging. Business solutions need to be kept aligned with other aspects of the enterprise, such as resources, processes, people, and technology.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to determine if a business solution is meeting or can meet its business objectives.
A business solution has a Business Level Agreement (BLA) which states business objectives. A business service has a Business Service Level Agreement (BSLA) which states operational objectives. A business solution is seen as a composition of business services. Therefore, the BLA is validated by evaluating the composition of BSLAs for all business services comprising the solution. This evaluation technique is applicable: (1) during solution template composition, (2) at service binding times, and (3) during solution execution via business monitoring.
In one aspect, the invention is a method for business solution validation in a component business model. One step in the method is defining a business solution composed of a set of services exposed by components in a component business model of a business, the services being formed into a service composition structure. Another step is evaluating each of the services according to metrics that are surrogates for metrics measuring objectives of the business solution. A further step is aggregating the service evaluations in accordance with the service composition structure. A final step is comparing the aggregation against target values of the surrogate metrics measuring the business solution objectives to validate the business solution.
In another aspect of the invention, the surrogate metrics for evaluating services are defined in a Business Service Level Agreement (BSLA) for each service composing the business solution. Furthermore, the surrogate metrics may be found by statistical analysis using data in a CBM repository to compare metrics defined in a Business Level Agreement (BLA) with metrics defined in said BSLAs.
In a further aspect of the invention, the comparing step occurs during solution template composition, at a binding time for said services, and during execution of said solution. Further, the comparing step may be used during solution template composition to select among alternative service choreographies for the solution. The comparing step may also be used to bind particular service providers to a selected service choreography for the solution. Another use of the comparing step is to monitor performance of the business solution.
Another aspect of the invention is where the aggregation reflects synergistic effects and/or cannibalizing effects among solution elements, the effects being represented in one or more linear or non-linear mathematical formulae or rules. In a further aspect of the invention the service composition structure may include one or more composition relationships between and among services: probabilistic invocation relationships, parallel invocation relationships, sequential activation relationships, as well as relationships in which a service is activated based on some algorithmic combination of predecessors, such as first-to-trigger or all-must-trigger.
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 foregoing and other objects, 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:
A business solution delivers a specified set of capabilities that supports a business objective. It includes the people, technology, processes, and other resources that enable the business to achieve its purpose. A business solution can have wide ranging capabilities. The perceived complexity that enables a capability is based on point of view of the observer, thus establishing the notion of relative granularity. For example, a solution may appear from the consumer's point of view as a simple transaction, but from the provider's viewpoint may be an intricate and lengthy interaction between many business services. A business solution may in fact be a single business service or an aggregation of services. The idea of relative granularity is based on the level of decomposition of business capabilities that is suitable for management of the particular business, with the management needs of a large enterprise generally requiring a greater level of decomposition than what is required for a smaller enterprise.
A business value can be applied to every business solution. And since a business solution is a composition of one or more business services the value of the business solution can be viewed as the composition of values of the business services that support it. The present invention takes this approach, and provides a methodology for validating and optimizing business solutions composed from services defined by the component business model (CBM) as described in the above referenced foundation patent application.
The decomposition of a business into discrete business components enables a business centric view of the enterprise and facilitates its management and transformation. CBM describes a basic organizing concept, a paradigm in which the business is seen as set of independent business components that collaborate to realize business solutions. A business component is a well bounded decomposition of an enterprise and houses an entire environment that constitutes a slice or segment of the business that includes all resources, infrastructure and facilities and that enable the business component to achieve its business purpose.
One of the advantages of business decomposition is that the organizing framework provided by CBM can facilitate a more effective understanding of business problems, requirements and evaluation, and enables better solution generation than other frameworks provide. For example, rather than seeing a business as independent threads of processes that weave through the “blob” of the enterprise, in a business decomposition the focus is on business components that are endowed with specific business capabilities and resources, and how they interact with other components to enable the purposes of the business. This world view is particularly effective for business analysts and strategic business planners who need to see and evaluate the business holistically using an organizational perspective, considering many factors, including resources consumed (costs) and benefits generated (value). CBM supports a wide range of analytic techniques and methods within its framework and does not restrict the type or character of business evaluation.
In CBM, business components interact with one another to meet the business goals. To accomplish this, business components offer their capabilities through the business services they expose. The granularity of a business service in a CBM description of the components of the business is set so that it is suitable to the purposes of the business and can support collaboration with other components. A business component can thus be viewed as a service center, a perspective that supports the strategically important notion of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The decomposition model is an idealized framework that expresses business strategies through components and, through extensions of the model, can be leveraged to realize these strategies. This realization includes the creation and modification of technology and processes, and the allocation of resources such as people and finance. In the case of IT (Information Technology), coupling of business strategy to IT realization can be achieved through the application of model driven transformation frameworks in which models of business requirement are successively mapped and transforming into models of IT implementation.
However, this coupling is in practice a difficult task. The present invention provides a methodology for extending by analogy the evaluation metrics commonly used for IT so as to provide suitable metrics for evaluating business objectives more broadly, as will now be explained with reference to
A simplified metamodel of the Component Business Model is illustrated in
The Component Business Model reflects a level of granularity, as presented in Table 1, starting from the large grained level of the business element, with increasing fineness, through to business actions. This notion supports the concept of relative granularity, previously discussed, which facilitates an understanding between users with different points of view.
A business solution may be realized as a composition of business services that are choreographed to execute a sequence of finer grained business actions. In the Component Business Model business actions are encapsulated elements that support business services.
It will be observed that because each component is a substantially self-contained locus for the resources required to perform its services, the component decomposition represented by a CBM map is suited to managing each component so as to optimize performance of its services, including outsourcing. Thus, composing a business solution of business services provides a flexibility that allows both the solution provider and consumer to employ the most effective service provider to meet business goals. Such concepts are represented in service architectures, dynamic or virtual enterprises and outsource solutions.
Providers and consumers can be thought of as general contractors, assembling and managing the whole enterprise from a set of parts, where each part is a business service associated with a business component. The Component Business Model represents a logical framework for the organization of a business, independent of how that logical framework is realized. In the extreme, the entire entity can be realized as a virtual business comprised of outsourced business services that are selected, choreographed and bound to form a business solution.
A business solution is thus represented as a directed graph of business service interactions within a logical business topology. This is illustrated in
While the choreography of services shown in
These more complex solutions shown in
The invention establishes the general notation of “Business Level Agreement Composition” and extends the CBM capability, as described in the above referenced foundation patent application, to evaluate business solutions as collaborations of services provided by business components, adding BLA (Business Level Agreement) and BSLA (Business Service Level Agreement) as new elements in the CBM framework established by the above referenced foundation patent application. The invention provides a methodology for constructing a valuation of a BLA from a composition of evaluations of BSLAs of the constituent services that perform the solution to be measured by the BLA.
The metamodel extension of CBM established by the invention is shown in
Turning now to
As shown in
It will be observed that performance measures for IT operations are well understood and are often monitored automatically. These measures (e.g. percentage up-time, CPU availability) are low level measures specific to IT operations and the IT infrastructure serving the business. It is straightforward to add IT infrastructure resources in order to meet performance measures in an SLA. At the other end of the axis 510, business operations are at a higher level of abstraction and it is more difficult to know what to change in order to improve the conventional measures for achieving business objectives (e.g. revenue generation, profit margin, etc.). These conventional “bottom line” measures do not provide or suggest an analysis of how a business can make its operations more valuable to its customers or how these operations can be transformed to improve performance of the business in the marketplace. Thus it is not obvious how the well known SLA model can be applied in a practical way to performance agreements at the level of business objectives.
The approach that the present invention takes to this problem is to build upon the services (i.e. item 130 in
This approach to making BLAs feasible is shown schematically in
A simple example of how this works is shown in
In the middle of
The composite results for each of the three solution options are shown in the table 730 at the bottom of
Only the last option 739, Option 3 composed of services 1, 5, 6 and 7, meets both criteria. This option has a total transaction time of 9 (which is less than 12) and a total transaction cost of 18 (which is less than 22). Since both criteria are met the solution is valid, as indicated by a “yes” in the evaluation column 736.
The flow chart 720 can be modified to illustrate some additional effects that may complicate this simple example. For example, there may be certain synergies if two services are provided by the same vendor, enabling a discount for bundling the two services. Under this discount scenario for Option 1, the transaction cost for Service 3 is reduced from 7 to 5, reducing the total transaction cost to 22 and thereby allowing this option to meet both objectives and receive a “yes” evaluation. Another example of a complicating effect would be a configuration surcharge where the same vendor performs two services, e.g. services 5 and 6. In such an instance of cannibalization, the transaction cost of service 5 increases from 1 to 6, thereby raising the total transaction cost to 23, which removes Option 3 from validation. These complicating effects, whether synergistic or cannibalizing, may be expressed in linear or non-linear mathematical formulae or rules.
Turning now to
This stage of evaluation is based on tasks using industry benchmarks. Alternative solutions (not shown) could be explored using an industry task dictionary and corresponding benchmarks. Recall that such alternatives are shown in template 720 of
Again, as at the template building stage, a number of alternative service provider combinations may be evaluated according to the respective BSLAs of the service providers being considered. But after a business solution has been implemented by selection of a solution template 880 and selection of service providers for the tasks identified in the solution template 880, the invention provides a third stage of evaluation, as shown in
The operation of the evaluative technique of the invention during all three stages described in
When suitable service providers are found and corresponding BSLAs permit binding the providers to the solution template, a second stage evaluation 940 is performed in accordance with the techniques of the invention. As with the first stage evaluation, if the results 945 are not satisfactory, the step of finding suitable service providers and corresponding BSLAs 930 is repeated until the results 945 of the evaluation 940 are acceptable, at which point the solution can be deployed 950. Upon deployment the performance of the solution is monitored 960 and the invention then provides a run time evaluation 970. So long as the results 975 of this third stage evaluation are satisfactory, monitoring 960 and evaluation 970 continue. If the results 975 of the performance evaluation 970 at run time are not satisfactory, then the suitability of the solution template is again evaluated 920, with template rebuilding 910 and service provider binding 930 as necessary until a revised solution is ready for deployment 950, thereupon replacing the earlier solution.
The invention describes a new middleware service responsible for capturing BLA and BLSA metrics from a plurality of sources and mapping them into a CBM model. Over time, a repository of such mappings accumulates and provides a rich source of data that can be analyzed to provide improved surrogate metrics at the BSLA level for corresponding BLA metrics. This middleware service provides an interactive tool to support the evaluation and optimization of business at: (1) service composition time, (2) binding time, and (3) solution run time. And the invention uses multiple business templates, by industry, based on best practices, to suggest strategies and recommendations for BLA and BLSA.
A business solution has the following attributes. It meets strategic objectives of the business. It is a stated deliverable of the business, at an appropriate level of granularity. It is achieved by the interaction of one or more business components through a choreography of Business Services. And it is realized by a Business Process consisting of a graph of Business Actions.
The defining validation relationship is:
In other words, the “value” of the business service composition must meet or exceed the “value” of the business objectives for the solution.
A business solution is a composition of services. Each business service in the composition has a BSLA. The BLA for the business solution is evaluated against a composition of BSLAs for services. There are a variety of approaches available for evaluating the relationship between BLAs and BSLAs. Analytical techniques include queuing theory models for estimating time-based variables, and extensions to queuing theory models to estimate costs. Activity-based costing techniques can be used to estimate costs in providing business solution based on individual service-level costs. Discrete event simulation models provide models of a variety of time, cost, quantity-related metrics for each service involved and computing BLAs through simulation of business solution operation.
An example of approaches to evaluating the relationship between BLAs and BSLAs is the Composition Evaluation Technique (CET). In this technique BLA and BSLA can be expressed as a set of assertions on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or operational metrics. For example, a set of such assertions might be: i) revenue increases $300M; ii) average order processing cost is less than $6 per order; and iii) average order turn-around time is less than 3 days. Then, there are two fundamental operational metrics: a) execution time, t, per request; b) cost, c, per request. Finally, the technique examines the complete composition and the probability of possible paths through each service to determine if the composition can meet the BLA of the business solution. A probability can be input by a subject matter expert (SME) or through historical statistical data examination. Most (but not all) KPIs or operational metrics can be computed from these probabilities.
Formulating a BLA evaluation is done using the following scheme:
a) Inputs include
1) a set of available business services S;
2) a set of available business resources R;
3) a template T(V, E) which is a directed graph;
Each node v in V represents a business service with designated type, each directed link from s1 to s2 represents a potential invocation link. The actual invocation depends on the data condition at execution time.
4) a set of utility functions U, where each u in U maps a service and associated resources to a key performance indicator e.g. cost or time;
5) another set of utility functions U2, where each u2 in U2 maps key performance indicators to an overall key performance indicator at a process level;
6) an objective O as business level agreement.
b) Outputs include
1) a mapping from R to S;
2) quantified measurements manifested as key performance indicators that are associated with the realized template T;
c) Constraint: the objective O is evaluated to be true.
A Business Solution bs is composed of a set of services (s1, s2, . . . sn). For the corresponding BLA, a KPI k can be computed using:
k=F
bs(t, c)
For the set of services the BSLA s[i] (i=1,2 . . . n), KPI k[i] can be computed:
k[i]=F
s[i](t[i], c[i])
Let's seek the relationship between t and t[i] as well as c and c[i].
There are five composition relationships between services within a business solution template: 1) probabilistic invocation; 2) parallel invocation (fork); 3) sequential activation; 4) fastest-predecessor-triggered activation; and 5) synchronized activation (join).
T=t[A]+p1*t[B]+p2*(t[C]+p3*t[D]+p4*t[E])+t[F]
C=c[A]+p1*c[B]+p2*(c[C]+p3*c[D]+p4*c[E])+c[F]
T=t[A]+min{t[B],t[C]+p3*t[D]+p4*t[E]}+t[F]
C=c[A]+c[B]+c[C]+p3*c[D]+p4*c[E]+c[F]
Similarly,
T=t[A]+max{t[B],t[C]+p3*t[D]+p4*t[E]}+t[F]
C=c[A]+c[B]+c[C]+p3*c[D]+p4*c[E]+c[F]
In all these scenarios, the metric for the BLA solution is built up from service level metrics provided by the business services that compose the solution. The service level metrics are the subject of respective BSLAs.
The present invention is based on the notion that CBM can be extended to be used as a framework in which to organize a business solution composed of services, as shown in
As described in further detail in the above referenced foundation patent application, the CBM map 160 serves as a repository for business information organized by component or other structure in the CBM metamodel. This information can be reached from a display of CBM map 160 by drill-down techniques well known in the art, including use of graphic overlays and companion windows, as demonstrated below in connection with
The information 170, which has now been added to the CBM map 160, supports an evaluation of the business solution against its BLA, where the evaluation of each BLA metric is based upon an evaluation of that metric for each of the services (e.g. <A,B,C,D,E,F>) from which the business solution is composed. The evaluation is controlled by an analysis function 180 reflected in the BLA and the BSLAs of the services. The composition of services follows a structure 195 (as described earlier in connection with
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the area occupied on interface 470 by “analysis center” 490 may also be used to set up the analysis using tools that interact with CBM map 480 to display and highlight the information mapped to the CBM database and other information available in the CBM database.
While the invention has been described in terms of preferred embodiments, those skilled in the art will recognize that the invention can be practiced with modification within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
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.
