E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Building customer trust in cloud computing model

Building customer trust is a huge problem in the cloud computing paradigm. Today, hundreds of companies around the world are offering cloud services in major or minor scale with global or local reach. In spite of the availability of numerous establishments for cloud services, there is a critical link missing with the customers - and that is the lack of appropriate customer trust in the Cloud Provider’s (CP’s) services. The issue of trust in clouds has already been addressed from multiple technical perspectives where the researchers suggested solutions based on the existing knowledge in other computing and communications systems. After our investigation, we suggest a different concept of ensuring trust in cloud services by using the power of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The basic idea lies in the fact that there should be a global standardization authority which would certify trusted cloud providers which in turn would earn customer trust. Novelty in this concept is mainly in its operational details that we have outlined. The main objective is to analyze various aspects of this proposed model from the policy making issues alongside slightly addressing technical issues. More issues about technicality and practicality can be addressed in future based on this initial framework

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

International center for monitoring cloud computing providers (ICMCCP) for ensuring trusted clouds

Cloud computing offers flexible and scalable IT (Information Technology) services for which many organizations are now interested in harnessing its benefit. In spite of the enthusiasm and great interest, Cloud computing has not yet earned full trust of the individual customers, banks, armed forces, governments, and companies who do sensitive computing tasks. While it is not the goal to persuade everyone to use the technology and some types of tasks are to be done with secrecy, for the general works done by the companies and customers, Cloud could be heavily used. However, it is very difficult to convince people that the Cloud Providers (CPs) would keep their data protected. To address this issue, what required is to employ some mechanism that can establish the trust of the users. With this motivation, in this paper, we present a novel concept for trust assurance in Cloud services with the proposal of implementing a Global Central Bank-like regulatory authority. Our initiative is termed International Center for Monitoring Cloud Computing Providers (ICMCCP). Various facets of ICMCCP model have been described alongside the policy making issues. Necessary backgrounds of Cloud are also presented

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

The Digital Transformation and Disruptive Technologies: Challenges and Solutions for the Electricity Sector in African Markets

The rise of disruptive technologies is profoundly transforming systems of production and management across sectors and industries, but primarily in wealthy countries. This paper considers how disruptive technologies could help improve power sector reform and development in African markets. In particular, it explores the role that might be played by the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and advanced analytics. After reviewing current trends in disruptive technologies, the paper illustrates the application of key elements with use cases in the areas of power infrastructure planning, power sector operations, and off-grid electrification. Finally, the paper looks at context-specific challenges to the widespread implementation of disruptive technologies. While disruptive technologies offer innovative ways of tackling some of the main challenges of traditional approaches to power sector development, their widespread adoption hinges on a concerted effort across public and private players to lend support to key aspects such as improved broadband connectivity, a vibrant startup scene and surrounding technology ecosystem, or simply the right to Internet access