Thesis Student or Intern: Digital Preservation of Business Processesby SAP AG

Do you demand the best from your professional career? Are you inspired by excellence? At SAP, you will have the power to make a real impact. As the global market leader for business software, SAP helps companies and organizations in more than 25 industries to run better. PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES SAP Research Zürich and St. Gallen support SAP's long-term strategy through technology research. Located to the campus of ETH Zürich and University of St. Gallen (HSG), SAP Research Switzerland combines SAP's technological know-how with the expertise of ETH Zürich and the leading business school of St. Gallen. The objective of the EU-funded new research project “TIMBUS” is to enlarge the understanding of digital preservation (DP). This means, to include the set of activities, processes and tools that ensure continued access to services and software necessary to produce the context within which information can be accessed, properly rendered, validated and transformed into context based knowledge. A primary motivation for TIMBUS is the declining popularity of centralized in-house business processes maintained and owned by single entities. The presence of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Internet of Services (IoS) means business processes are increasingly supported by service oriented systems where numerous services provided by different providers, located in different geographical locations are composed to form value added service compositions and service systems which will continue changing and evolving. Besides the advantages of SaaS and IoS there is the danger of services and service providers disappearing (for various reasons) leaving partially complete business processes. It is this enlarged understanding that brings digital preservation also into the domain of Business Continuity Management. SAP's contributions to this project are on a technical as well as on a business research level. The main tasks for the student will include: Analyse major cost components for digital preservation actions. Define and apply methods for the calculation of digital preservation costs. Beyond our contribution to the project, we continuously contribute to sustaining and increasing SAP's success by transferring strategic relevant results to other units within the organization. EXPECTATIONS AND TASKS We are looking for a highly motivated student (f/m) interested in writing a business and technology related diploma / master thesis or a student (f/m) who is interested in doing an intership in a highly qualified and international environment. The concrete topic of the thesis can be tailored to your skills and research interests and is open to include further ideas and suggestions.