Long term Digital Preservation of Business Processes [TIMBUS FP7 project]

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Mike Nolan

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Nov 25, 2011, 3:05:13 PM11/25/11

to UseCase Group, Nolan, Michael, finian....@intel.com

To Cloud Use Case members,

I would like to forward this mail from the TIMBUS FP7 project which is carrying out a survey (https://intel.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1LWzcs15h0TIiAk) to aid research into the digital preservation of business processes so that they can be exhumed and re-ran in the future. Virtualisation and cloud are key enablers for this. The output of TIMBUS will be architectures, models and prototype tools which will be open source (ie: this is not a commerical research gathering exercise, and i apologise in advance to anyone who is not interested in the subject). My intent in circulating this is merely to:

1. introduce the issue of digital preservation to a larger audience. So much of our data today is "born digital" (if i can be forgiven for borrowing that phrase). How do we identify the data we need to keep long term and how can we store it in a way to ensure it is not only accessible, but is also intelligible in the future.

2. for those with a deeper interest in this topic, i would welcome you to PM me or indeed to fill out the survey and we would be delighted to hear from you or discuss the project further.

thank you for your time,

Mike Nolan,

TIMBUS FP7 Project.

FORWARDED MAIL:

· Does your organisation need to retain critical business processes or datasets over the long term?

· Has your Organisation struggled to retrieve and access 5, 10, 15 year old datasets?

· Does your I.T. infrastructure struggle to meet the requirements of your organisations record retention policy?

· As part of your organisation business continuity plans, has your I.T. organisation struggled to reinstate the complete business systems and processes to a fully consistent state following a simulated or real disaster?

If you have answer YES to any of these questions - then rest assured, you are not alone as most organisations face similar challenges keeping pace with changing technologies, growth in datasets, increasing regulatory / compliance requirements and reducing I.T. budgets. These challenges are being addressed by a European FP7 Research Project called TIMBUS and we would welcome your contribution to participate in and influence the direction of the research.

TIMBUS is a European Commission FP7 three year co-funded project with 12 partners in the consortium. The project is focused on addressing the growing challenge of long term preservation of business data, processes and services so that the complete business processes can be retrieved and replayed in years to come.

Consider any of the following scenarios where an investigation team needs to recreate the interdependent systems associated with either a design or manufacturing environment –

· A suspected failure of an aircraft component (wing, fuselage) has led to an aircraft crash.

· A pharmaceutical drug currently on the market is suspected of causing long term negative conditions.

· A public {dam, bridge, highway}, or industrial {Nuclear, Energy, Chemical, hospital facility fails.

· An organisation needs to prove that it developed intellectual property following claims of patent infringement litigation (eDiscovery).

· An organisation wishes to revalidate scientific conclusions maybe using alternative / improved tools / techniques i.e. searching for oil/gas/mineral resources deposits / atomic particle data.

· Following a natural disaster, an organisation needs to restore its complete business operations as part of it BCP capabilities.

In all these scenarios, being able to rewind the clock, restore the system(s) and data and replay portions or complete versions of business process may be critical to enable an organisation to identify the root cause of a fault, prove or disprove a hypotheses or recover the business following a disaster. The TIMBUS research agenda is aimed at addressing these preservation and retrieval and re-execution challenges.

So to assess your needs in this area, we have developed a questionnaire which is structured to capture basic information about your organization's activities and its need to preserve data and business processes over the long term. We wish to understand your organisations high level requirements, its current digital preservation capabilities and to see if there are opportunities where a TIMBUS like solution would deliver value to your organisation.

Once all the data has been collected, we will make the findings available to you. Please note that your responses will be kept confidential and will be used for research purposes only. Should you have any questions at any point, please contact: timbus...@gmail.com

Please proceed to the survey itself. https://intel.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1LWzcs15h0TIiAk