Analysing Business Losses Caused by Information Systems Risk: A Business Process Analysis Approach

Author(s):  
Hannu Salmela
2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Salmela

Increased reliance on computers by many companies and public organisations has generated a business risk for them. For example, problems in systems availability can lead to additional cost in operations, lost revenues and competitive losses. Systematic analyses are needed to avoid such losses. Prior research provides rigorous methods for identifying information systems risks and reducing the likelihood of these risks. The analysis of potential business losses in the user organisations has, however, received only limited attention. The objective in this paper is to investigate methods that can be used in the systematic identification of potential losses in the user organisation. The paper provides a review of prior literature on methods that can be used to analyse and report such losses. One understudied method is business process analysis that entails a systematic analysis of potential losses in different phases of the organisation's core business processes. Action research was used to examine the use of business process analysis as a method to associate information systems availability risk with potential business losses. The analysis was carried out in two different companies, one operating in the paper industry and the other one in the finance sector. The study contributes to research by summarising prior research on the analysis of business losses and by illustrating how the use of one method, business process analysis, assisted the client organisations. Perhaps most importantly, it identifies a new topic that has received very little attention in information systems research, despite its obvious managerial and practical significance.


Author(s):  
Milan Mišovič ◽  
Jan Turčínek

It is generally accepted that the process control of a small and medium-sized manufacturing business enterprise is the foundation of high quality care of firm’s business processes. Any business process is seen as an indivisible sequence of activity steps designed to perform complex business activities. In its statutory documents the company should have concise descriptions of at least the main processes, along with their contexts in a given department of the company and the employee position.The main business processes, of course many others, are not immutable, on the contrary, they are very often changing. Many processes occur, others are modified others disappear as antiquated and useless to support strategic business objectives. All this is a consequence of the firms’ effort needed to maintain competitiveness in the harsh and dynamic consumer market.Business processes are not isolated, many of them are part of a relatively large process chains, so-called enterprise services, see (Erl, 2005). The discipline of Software Engineering responded to the possibility of consolidating enterprise functionality with enterprise services with the method SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) leading to new applications for enterprise information systems.In contrast to business processes, business services are still not sufficiently recognized in the statutory documents of enterprises. Informaticians, producing software applications for enterprise information systems, must draw on company management knowledge relating to the general context and processes together with management to prepare business services. There are therefore more relevant questions based on the emergence of corporate services and information modeling in the discipline of Information Engineering. Acceptable responses are not included in a lot of publications or in publications of the doyen of SOA Thomas Erl, see (Erl, 2006) and thus the proposed SOA paradigm suffers from the same problem.The present article tries to give an answer to those questions and show the relevant theoretical basis for finding service solutions of business process logic. Furthermore, this article wants to show possible conversions of known methods of process analysis of Information Engineering disciplines, such as the method Eriksson – Penker Business Extensions, or the method ARIS by prof. Scheer, into the platform of enterprise services.


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