SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company’s IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance.Information Systems, SOA, Web Services, BPM

SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company's IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance

Development of a web application for solving the problem of project management methodology selection with fuzzy input data

Проведен анализ последних исследований и публикаций, посвященных проблеме выбора методологии управления для определенного проекта и исследованию влияния применяемой методологии на успех проекта. На основе проведенного анализа установлена необходимость автоматизации решения задачи выбора методологии для конкретного проекта. В качестве подхода для решения задачи использован метод выбора методологии управления проектом на основе нечетких представлений. В методе применена анкета с вопросами, касающимися количества людей, вовлеченных в проект, опыта работы заказчика с командой, оценки компетентности команды проекта менеджером проекта, отчетности по проекту, вероятности появления рисковых событий. Для каждой ситуации, заданной в анкете, с помощью опроса экспертов определены функции принадлежности всех рассматриваемых методологий управления проектами, т.е. их применимость к конкретной ситуации. В соответствии с ответами на вопросы анкеты по проекту, формируются функции принадлежности оценки проекта по каждому его параметру. Для всех рассматриваемых методологий рассчитываются их суммарные взвешенные расстояния от оценки проекта по анкете при использовании расстояний Хэмминга и Евклида. Выбирается тот подход, для которого вычисленные расстояния являются минимальными. Разработано веб-приложение решения задачи выбора методологии управления проектом при нечетких исходных данных "PMGuide". Данное веб-приложение применено для выбора методологии управления проектом по разработке программного обеспечения оптимизации содержания проекта "PTCQR Optimization". Исходя из результатов расчета расстояний Евклида и Хемминга от проекта до каждой из семи альтернатив (PMBOK, PRINCE2, ISO21500, SWEBOK, SCRUM, XP и KANBAN), выбрана гибкая методология SCRUM, как лучшая для условий рассматриваемого проекта. На тестовом примере подтверждена корректность работы веб-приложения для выбора методологии управления проектом "PMGuide".The analysis of the latest research and publications devoted to the problem of choosing a management methodology for a particular project and studying the influence of the applied methodology on the project's success has been carried out. On the basis of the analysis performed, the necessity of automatization of the methodology selection problem’s solution is established. The method for choosing a project management methodology based on fuzzy concepts was used as an approach for solving the problem. The method uses a questionnaire with questions regarding the number of people involved in the project, the customer’s working experience with the team, the assessment of the project team’s competence by the project manager, project reporting, and the likelihood of risk events. For each situation specified in the questionnaire, with the help of the survey of experts, the membership functions of all considered project management methodologies are defined, i.e. their applicability to a specific situation. In accordance with the answers to the questions of the project questionnaire, the membership functions of the project evaluation for each of its parameters are formed. For all considered methodologies, their total weighted distances from the evaluation of the project by the questionnaire are calculated using Hamming and Euclidean distances. The approach, for which the calculated distances are minimal, is chosen. A web application PMGuide has been developed to solve the problem of choosing a project management methodology with fuzzy input data. This web application is used to select a project management methodology for developing PTCQR Optimization software to optimize the scope of the project. Based on the results of calculating, the Euclidean and Hamming distances from this project to each of the seven alternatives (PMBOK, PRINCE2, ISO21500, SWEBOK, SCRUM, XP, and KANBAN), the flexible SCRUM methodology was chosen as the best alternative for the conditions of the considered project. The test case confirmed the correctness of PMGuide web application for choosing the project management methodology

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design.Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems