TIMBUS
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| TIMBUS | |
|---|---|
| Digital Preservation for Timeless Business Processes and Services | |
| Keywords | Business Continuity, Risk Management, Digital Preservation, Business Process, Service, SaaS, IoS, IoT |
| Project type | Collaborative Project (generic) |
| Funding agency | European Union |
| Reference | FP7-ICT-2009-6 |
| Objective | Digital preservation of processes and services |
| Project coordinator | SAP Research, Belfast |
| Participants | Industry partners:
Research partners:
SME partners:
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| Budget |
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| Duration | 1 April 2011 – 31 March 2014 |
| Website | http://timbusproject.org |
The EU co-funded TIMBUS project ‘’Timeless Business Processes and Services’’) addresses the challenge of digital preservation of business processes and services to ensure their long-term continued access. TIMBUS builds on feasibility and cost-benefit analysis in order to analyse and recommend which aspects of a business process should be preserved and how to preserve them. It delivers methodologies and tools to capture and formalise business processes on both technical and organisational levels. This includes their underlying software and hardware infrastructures and dependencies on third-party services and information. TIMBUS aligns digital preservation with well-established methods for enterprise risk management (ERM) and business continuity management (BCM).
Approach
TIMBUS breaks business process preservation down into three functions: 1. Planning performs risk analysis and determines the requirements for preserving the relevant business processes. 2. Preservation preserves the business processes. 3. Redeployment reactivates and reruns the business processes. TIMBUS products are validated in three scenarios: engineering services & systems, civil engineering infrastructures and eScience & mathematical simulations.
Motivation
The commercial imperative for business process preservation comes from several pressures. Heavily regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals and aircraft manufacture must fully document processes so that they can be audited, reproduced, or diagnosed. Long-lived companies must manage services across multiple changes in technical environments. Organisations that use escrow services to mitigate risk must be confident that all of the needed information is demonstrably included in the escrow agreement and services. Organisations undergoing major staff changes must ensure that they retain the knowledge needed to operate or re-instate production processes. In addition to publications and data, academics need the software and process information to assess the validity of the data and the derived scientific claims. The same provenance information that can provide a key in regulated industries can also support credit assignment in academia. All industries benefit from analysis of processes that may lead to their continuous improvement. Memory institutions need to document the provenance of their digital collections as they undergo format-shifts to prove the authenticity or quality of their process products.
Stakeholders
TIMBUS is executed by a consortium of industry, research and SME partners from across Europe. This involvement of industry in a digital preservation project is a sign that awareness of the need for preserving digital objects over the long-term is spreading from the traditional champions in memory institutions and heavily regulated private sectors to the general private sector.
References
External links
Related Projects