Experiences of Various Forms of Commercial Partnerships in Indian Railways

This paper brings out issues of governance between the Ministry of Railways and various service delivering commercial entities under the Ministry. Some of this is accentuated by both the ministerial and administrative powers vested in the same body, namely the Railway Board. We examine a set of eight case situations, wherein there has been an attempt to focus on a commercial approach. However, the extent of success/failure is varied. A study of these cases brings out the potential of improving railway infrastructure under a governance framework of (i) distancing the ministerial role from the commercial activity, (ii) increased private participation, (iii) improving transparency, contestability and competition, and (iv) appropriate regulations We describe salient features of each of the cases, with comments from the perspective of commercial viability. A concluding section brings out some of the key concepts which would be relevant for such commercial partnerships in the future. At a broader level, given the budgetary constraints, under exploited potential of the IRs assets and service possibilities, lack of commercially oriented professional and accountable management, such commercial partnerships have implicitly been accepted (by both the central government and the top management of IR) as the way forward.

An integrative service operations management approach towards operations capabilities improvement: an evidence from service industries in Malaysia / Abg Hamizam Abg Mohar

Service sector has transformed itself as one of the key driver and contributors in today's economic systems. In addition to the increasing globalisation and technological development, its complementing nature that easily transcends beyond industry has further accelerated its transformation and growth. Under this pretext, since then service providers has invested diverse range of operational practices to achieve higher operations performance. Despite an encouraging operational practices and performance relationships, direct and indirect investments in operational activities are costly and time consuming before any affect can be seen. Thus, operations managers need to know the best management approach to ensure the right investment to affect the optimum efficiency. Despite ample of studies conducted in the field, these however are overshadowed by production practices rather than services. In addition, the inherent differences between producing goods and delivering a service, and warranted a need to re-evaluate the platform as a mechanism for service operations management (SOM). Total Operations Management in Service (TOMS) is a holistic approach from the perspective of the service delivery provider in Malaysia. The approach used in the study is both qualitative and quantitative. Literatures reviews and interviews were undertaken, and further supported by multiple analysis; EFA, CFA, Multivariate test of Normality, Correlation analysis and Multiple Regression analysis. The procedures revealed seven factors of TOMS are System Delivery (SD), Human Delivery (HD), Technological Applications (TApps), Service Quality Culture (SQC), Customers Oriented Layout (COL), Service Design (Sdesign) and Employees Management (EM), which are a requirement for TOMS operating environment. This multi-factor framework illustrates the dynamic nature of SOM through which the interaction of these factors as a total provides a new perspective towards SOM by emphasizing on internal efficiency, economies of scale, cost reduction and customer satisfaction to achieve higher operations capabilities. Service operations manager would be able to better leverage internal capabilities by exploiting and manipulating relationships between factors. The determinant factors, allow the service managers to access the "right factor/s" which would reduce the chances of operational efforts to end up in failure and waste of organization resources. Specific operational investments decisions such as robotic technology, computerised manufacturing, software and quality programmes, would optimize resource utilizations and allow access to optimum operations capabilities. Under this pretext, the framework is expected to uncover neglected relationships intricacies and relevancy relationship where such potentially neglected areas. This in turn would unveil new pastures of operational practices to focus and direct their decision-making, planning and directing operational efforts towards achieving higher service operational performance. Supply chain management (SCM), which has always been important platform in operations studies to improve operations performance in manufacturing yet findings pointed out that in a service context is not a critical factor, but its associations are incorporated as items into other factors. The relationships between factors, and against operations capability, empirically suggested the need to approach SOM holistically for optimum performance. The findings reflects the departure to a more service oriented operations management

A Thematic Review of the Models of ICT Integration in Tracking Malaria Drug Administration in Ugandan Health Units.

Background This study aimed at reviewing models propounding thematic linkage to system integration of ICT transaction processes that inform tracking administration of malaria drugs in health units in Uganda.  Methods  The study engaged structural and thematic review approaches for narrative and meta-synthesis of literature analysis to cite, make comparisons, and contrast including criticisms of directed stimulation of information-oriented integration, process-oriented integration, service-oriented Integration, user-oriented integration, and other success drivers of the need for ICT integrations. Comparisons of models by case analysis qualified a structured proposition of development of the model for tracking the administration of Malaria drugs in health units. Scope  Integration review was guided by the Enterprise Application Integration solution model, Model Driven Integration Approach, Technology Transfer of Reference, DeLone & McLean IS Success Model among others, focusing on the stimulation of information, processes service and user-oriented integrations, valid ability, technology context, ease of use, scalability, flexibility, and trainability as success drivers.  Findings Studies on integration and IC-enabled development reveal that ICT is widely accepted, and its crucial functions increase efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and competitiveness. Failure of integration of ICT in developing countries has a positive relationship with lack of awareness, management commitment, defined ICT based-roles as tools rather than solutions for organizational transformation, responsiveness to vision and mission goals, systemic methods of implementation, system ownership, and poor policy and planning.  Conclusion Integration of Information Communications Technology in health units is a major driver of information, processes, service, and user-oriented transactions for effective service provision and delivery in Uganda. Technology Context has a negative but linear correlation on ease of use (Intension and Actual) of ICTs (B = - 0.087) and negatively influences the same (β= - 0.050). The intention and actual use of Technology Context in tracking drug administration is influenced by the ability of application of the users.

Cost-effective feature placement of customizable multi-tenant applications in the cloud

Cloud computing technologies can be used to more flexibly provision application resources. By exploiting multi-tenancy, instances can be shared between users, lowering the cost of providing applications. A weakness of current cloud offerings however, is the difficulty of creating customizable applications that retain these advantages. In this article, we define a feature-based cloud resource management model, making use of Software Product Line Engineering techniques, where applications are composed of feature instances using a service-oriented architecture. We focus on how resources can be allocated in a cost-effective way within this model, a problem which we refer to as the feature placement problem. A formal description of this problem, that can be used to allocate resources in a cost-effective way, is provided. We take both the cost of failure to place features, and the cost of using servers into account, making it possible to take energy costs or the cost of public cloud infrastructure into consideration during the placement calculation. Four algorithms that can be used to solve the feature placement problem are defined. We evaluate the algorithm solutions, comparing them with the optimal solution determined using an integer linear problem solver, and evaluating the execution times of the algorithms, making use of both generated inputs and a use case based on three applications. We show that, using our approach a higher degree of multi-tenancy can be achieved, and that for the considered scenarios, taking the relationships between features into account and using application-oriented placement performs 25-40 % better than a purely feature-oriented placement

Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract—The SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by ‘Airport Collaborative Decision Making’ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously — e.g. to manage ‘local’ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Terms—resilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA

Maintaining consistency in distributed systems

In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability