Some empirical evidence on business-IT alignment processes in the public sector: A case study report

An empirical study that explores business-IT alignment processes in a networked organization among the province Overijssel, the municipalities Zwolle and Enschede, the water board district Regge & Dinkel and Royal Grolsch N.V. in The Netherlands, is summarized in this report. The aim of the study was to identify processes that contribute to improve such alignment. This study represents a continuation of previous validation efforts that help us to confirm the business-IT alignment process areas that should ultimately be included in the ICoNOs MM. Evidence was sought for the alignment of business and IT through the use of information systems to support the requirements of the organization in a specific project. The results of this study in the public sector also are relevant to the private sector where (i) business-IT alignment plays an increasingly valuable role, and (ii) the characteristics of collaborative networked organizations are present

SLA Establishment Decisions: Minimizing the Risk of SLA Violations

This thesis presents an approach for service providers to select an SLA portfolio that minimizes the SLA violation risk. It considers constraints on expected profit and available resources. The problem is addressed by applying decision theory and risk measures, especially by adapting the concept of portfolio selection by Harry Markowitz and the semi-variance. In order to capture a decision maker\u27s attitude towards risk, utility theory and the concept of risk aversion are used

Outcome-driven Service Provider Performance under Conditions of Complexity and Uncertainty

Proceedings Paper (for Acquisition Research Program)This paper describes applying ROI analysis principles for SOA performance management, creating Service-level Agreements (SLAs) to articulate agreements between the Government and external service providers, and managing SLAs through a governance framework (Hanf & Buck, 2009, March). This white paper highlights key findings of research undertaken by The MITRE Corporation (MITRE) and the resulting recommendations for (1) applying Return-on-Investment (ROI) analysis principles as the foundation for more effective performance management of Government Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), (2) creating comprehensive Service-level Agreements (SLAs) to articulate agreements between the Government and external service providers, and (3) managing SLAs through a governance framework (Oakley-Bogdewic & Buck, 2009; Hanf & Buck, 2009, March 25). As illustrated in Figure 1, MITRE''s recommendations address the additional managerial complexity and uncertainty that SOA objectives and proposed solutions often create.Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Auctioning Bulk Mobile Messages

The search for enablers of continued growth of SMS traffic, as well asthe take-off of the more diversified MMS message contents, open up forenterprises the potential of bulk use of mobile messaging , instead ofessentially one-by-one use. In parallel, such enterprises or valueadded services needing mobile messaging in bulk - for spot use or foruse over a prescribed period of time - want to minimize totalacquisition costs, from a set of technically approved providers ofmessaging capacity.This leads naturally to the evaluation of auctioning for bulk SMS orMMS messaging capacity, with the intrinsic advantages therein such asreduction in acquisition costs, allocation efficiency, and optimality.The paper shows, with extensive results as evidence from simulationscarried out in the Rotterdam School of Management e-Auction room, howmulti-attribute reverse auctions perform for the enterprise-buyer, aswell as for the messaging capacity-sellers. We compare 1- and 5-roundauctions, to show the learning effect and the benefits thereof to thevarious parties. The sensitivity will be reported to changes in theenterprise's and the capacity providers utilities and prioritiesbetween message attributes (such as price, size, security, anddelivery delay). At the organizational level, the paper also considersalternate organizational deployment schemes and properties for anoff-line or spot bulk messaging capacity market, subject to technicaland regulatory constraints.MMS;EMS;Mobile commerce;SMS;multi-attribute auctions

Business-driven IT Management

Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at ensuring successful alignment of business and IT through thorough understanding of the impact of IT on business results, and vice versa. In this dissertation, we review the state of the art of BDIM research and we position our intended contribution within the BDIM research space along the dimensions of decision support (as opposed of automation) and its application to IT service management processes. Within these research dimensions, we advance the state of the art by 1) contributing a decision theoretical framework for BDIM and 2) presenting two novel BDIM solutions in the IT service management space. First we present a simpler BDIM solution for prioritizing incidents, which can be used as a template for creating BDIM solutions in other IT service management processes. Then, we present a more comprehensive solution for optimizing the business-related performance of an IT support organization in dealing with incidents. Our decision theoretical framework and models for BDIM bring the concepts of business impact and risk to the fore, and are able to cope with both monetizable and intangible aspects of business impact. We start from a constructive and quantitative re-definition of some terms that are widely used in IT service management but for which was never given a rigorous decision: business impact, cost, benefit, risk and urgency. On top of that, we build a coherent methodology for linking IT-level metrics with business level metrics and make progress toward solving the business-IT alignment problem. Our methodology uses a constructive and quantitative definition of alignment with business objectives, taken as the likelihood – to the best of one’s knowledge – that such objectives will be met. That is used as the basis for building an engine for business impact calculation that is in fact an alignment computation engine. We show a sample BDIM solution for incident prioritization that is built using the decision theoretical framework, the methodology and the tools developed. We show how the sample BDIM solution could be used as a blueprint to build BDIM solutions for decision support in other IT service management processes, such as change management for example. However, the full power of BDIM can be best understood by studying the second fully fledged BDIM application that we present in this thesis. While incident management is used as a scenario for this second application as well, the main contribution that it brings about is really to provide a solution for business-driven organizational redesign to optimize the performance of an IT support organization. The solution is quite rich, and features components that orchestrate together advanced techniques in visualization, simulation, data mining and operations research. We show that the techniques we use - in particular the simulation of an IT organization enacting the incident management process – bring considerable benefits both when the performance is measured in terms of traditional IT metrics (mean time to resolution of incidents), and even more so when business impact metrics are brought into the picture, thereby providing a justification for investing time and effort in creating BDIM solutions. In terms of impact, the work presented in this thesis produced about twenty conference and journal publications, and resulted so far in three patent applications. Moreover this work has greatly influenced the design and implementation of Business Impact Optimization module of HP DecisionCenter™: a leading commercial software product for IT optimization, whose core has been re-designed to work as described here

A Reference Architecture for Service Lifecycle Management – Construction and Application to Designing and Analyzing IT Support

Service-orientation and the underlying concept of service-oriented architectures are a means to successfully address the need for flexibility and interoperability of software applications, which in turn leads to improved IT support of business processes. With a growing level of diffusion, sophistication and maturity, the number of services and interdependencies is gradually rising. This increasingly requires companies to implement a systematic management of services along their entire lifecycle. Service lifecycle management (SLM), i.e., the management of services from the initiating idea to their disposal, is becoming a crucial success factor. Not surprisingly, the academic and practice communities increasingly postulate comprehensive IT support for SLM to counteract the inherent complexity. The topic is still in its infancy, with no comprehensive models available that help evaluating and designing IT support in SLM. This thesis presents a reference architecture for SLM and applies it to the evaluation and designing of SLM IT support in companies. The artifact, which largely resulted from consortium research efforts, draws from an extensive analysis of existing SLM applications, case studies, focus group discussions, bilateral interviews and existing literature. Formal procedure models and a configuration terminology allow adapting and applying the reference architecture to a company’s individual setting. Corresponding usage examples prove its applicability and demonstrate the arising benefits within various SLM IT support design and evaluation tasks. A statistical analysis of the knowledge embodied within the reference data leads to novel, highly significant findings. For example, contemporary standard applications do not yet emphasize the lifecycle concept but rather tend to focus on small parts of the lifecycle, especially on service operation. This forces user companies either into a best-of-breed or a custom-development strategy if they are to implement integrated IT support for their SLM activities. SLM software vendors and internal software development units need to undergo a paradigm shift in order to better reflect the numerous interdependencies and increasing intertwining within services’ lifecycles. The SLM architecture is a first step towards achieving this goal.:Content Overview List of Figures....................................................................................... xi List of Tables ...................................................................................... xiv List of Abbreviations.......................................................................xviii 1 Introduction .................................................................................... 1 2 Foundations ................................................................................... 13 3 Architecture Structure and Strategy Layer .............................. 57 4 Process Layer ................................................................................ 75 5 Information Systems Layer ....................................................... 103 6 Architecture Application and Extension ................................. 137 7 Results, Evaluation and Outlook .............................................. 195 Appendix ..........................................................................................203 References .......................................................................................... 463 Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................. 498 Bibliographic Data............................................................................ 49

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Mercury: using the QuPreSS reference model to evaluate predictive services

Nowadays, lots of service providers offer predictive services that show in advance a condition or occurrence about the future. As a consequence, it becomes necessary for service customers to select the predictive service that best satisfies their needs. The QuPreSS reference model provides a standard solution for the selection of predictive services based on the quality of their predictions. QuPreSS has been designed to be applicable in any predictive domain (e.g., weather forecasting, economics, and medicine). This paper presents Mercury, a tool based on the QuPreSS reference model and customized to the weather forecast domain. Mercury measures weather predictive services' quality, and automates the context-dependent selection of the most accurate predictive service to satisfy a customer query. To do so, candidate predictive services are monitored so that their predictions can be eventually compared to real observations obtained from a trusted source. Mercury is a proof-of-concept of QuPreSS that aims to show that the selection of predictive services can be driven by the quality of their predictions. Throughout the paper, we show how Mercury was built from the QuPreSS reference model and how it can be installed and used.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Gerenciamento de nuvem computacional usando critérios de segurança

Orientador: Paulo Lício de GeusTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A nuvem computacional introduziu novas tecnologias e arquiteturas, mudando a computação empresarial. Atualmente, um grande número de organizações optam por utilizar arquiteturas computacionais tradicionais por considerarem esta tecnologia não confiável, devido a problemas não resolvidos relacionados a segurança e privacidade. Em particular, quanto á contratação de um serviço na nuvem, um aspecto importante é a forma como as políticas de segurança serão aplicadas neste ambiente caracterizado pela virtualização e serviços em grande escala de multi-locação. Métricas de segurança podem ser vistas como ferramentas para fornecer informações sobre o estado do ambiente. Com o objetivo de melhorar a segurança na nuvem computacional, este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia para a gestão da nuvem computacional usando a segurança como um critério, através de uma arquitetura para monitoramento da segurança com base em acordos de níveis de serviço de segurança Security-SLA para serviços de IaaS, PaaS e SaaS, que usa métricas de segurançaAbstract: Cloud Computing has introduced new technology and architectures that changed enterprise computing. Currently, there is a large number of organizations that choose to stick to traditional architectures, since this technology is considered unreliable due to yet unsolved problems related to security and privacy. In particular, when hiring a service in the cloud, an important aspect is how security policies will be applied in this environment characterized by both virtualization and large-scale multi-tenancy service. Security metrics can be seen as tools to provide information about the status of the environment. Aimed at improving security in the Cloud Computing, this work presents a methodology for Cloud Computing management using security as a criterion, across an architecture for security monitoring based on Security-SLA for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services using security metricsDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computação23/200.308/2009FUNDEC