Business Architectures in the Public Sector: Experiences from Practice

Government agencies need to transform the way in which they are organized in order to be able to provide better services to their constituents and adapt to changes in legislation. Whereas much e-government research has a technology focus, our goal is to investigate whether business architectures can help governments to recreate agencies to make them robust in dealing with political preferences, and further, whether their adoption can guide the realization of IT-oriented enterprise architectures. In this article the concept of business architecture and its implications are analyzed by investigating the case study of the Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Services. The case demonstrates the mediating role business architectures can play between policy and strategy on the one hand, and enterprise IT architecture on the other. Business architectures help: (1) to define business domains and the events connecting them, and (2) to use principles to integrate the domains and ensure synergies. Business domains can be designed and operated independently, which enable higher levels of adaptability. Our case analyses show that the pluriformity of the political visions, public values, and actors involved and the division of responsibilities complicate the creation of a business architecture

Global Integration and Local Flexibility: Managing Contradictions in a Global Company - A Case Study of a Multi-National Service-Oriented Manufacturing Company

This dissertation addresses strategic change from the viewpoint of managing strategic dualities in the growth and internationalization of a company. The theoretical framework builds on theories of international business, organizational capabilities, and managing contradictions in organizations. The overarching theme of this research is the management of strategic dualities. Based on a cross-theory review, I frame a qualitative single case study, which produces a research narrative of a long-term strategic change, introducing various perspectives to provide a description of the research phenomenon in its context: a multinational service-oriented manufacturing company going through a strategic change. The data for the single case study were drawn primarily from a set of documentary data. The documentary data consisted of in-house employee magazines, company internal presentations and memos, annual reports, and articles and books on the company. This monograph starts with a review of existing literature. The literature review draws a line from traditional internationalization theories and managing the liability of foreignness to globalization and the needs to balance between global integration and local flexibility. A historical single case study follows the Finland-based multinational service-oriented manufacturing company and its growth and change. The research interest lies in the company’s attempts to harmonize its ways of working globally across the company. The results describe the various harmonization efforts and their impact on the growth and productivity of the company. The results shed light on how the company has managed tensions arising from the conflicting demands between global integration and local flexibility, between productivity and innovation, and between company internal and external views. These contradictions are addressed from three different aspects: structures and processes and adaptation thereof: technologies and products and innovation thereof: and short-term and long-term view and renewal thereof. The findings of this study explicate how the case company has developed its global operating model, the “company way” and what choices the company has made in managing tensions it has faced in the integration efforts. The key findings of this case study are the following. First, involving geographical business areas in global decision making has been helping the prioritization and allocation of scarce global resources across the network of local companies. Involving these businesses has also supported the global strategy – and the global mindset – of the company. Second, technological innovations have had a key role in developing global products and have thus supported the renewal from local to global business, differentiating the case company from many of its competitors. Third, harmonized ways of working are seen as key for agility and renewal, because the harmonized baseline enables faster changes. Fourth, the case company have chosen different approaches to manage the conflicting demands between global and local requirements. In many cases, the question has been about choices between global and local, and therefore about accepting possible trade-offs. However, in the case of an exceptional market situation in the emerging China market, local demands and pressure led to conflicts that in turn led to transformation and creation of even better ways of working by combining the global and local views. Finally, the results indicate how the drivers for harmonization have changed over time. The focus appears to have shifted from ensuring operational efficiency and economies of scale, towards making it possible for the company to integrate with external networks, especially as technological development has accelerated, and the locus of innovation has been moving outside companies. The main theoretical contribution of this dissertation is to examine international management theories with a historical long-term case study, where the need for harmonization remains but the drivers for a global strategy change. Through an empirical case study, this dissertation demonstrates the role of harmonization in a global company. It applies the existing theories to practice and illustrates how the case company has been managing the tensions that it has faced during the harmonization programs. This research complements existing international business research with a real-life case study on the global integration process of one company operating in a traditional industry

Performance in Consumer Financial Services Organizations: Framework and Results from the Pilot Study

Financial services comprise over 4 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States and employ over 5.4 million people. By offering vehicles for investment of savings, extension of credit and risk management, they fuel the modern capitalistic society. While the essential functions performed by the organizations that make up the financial services industry have remained relatively constant over the past several decades, the structure of the industry has undergone dramatic change. Liberalized domestic regulation, intensified international competition, rapid innovations in new financial instruments and the explosive growth in information technology fuel this change. With this change has come increasing pressure on managers and workers to dramatically improve productivity and financial performance. This paper summarizes the first year of a multi-year effort to understand the drivers of performance in financial services organizations. Financial services are the largest single consumer of information technology in the economy, investing $38.7 billion dollars in 1991 (National Research Council, 1994). While this investment has had a profound effect on the structure of the industry and the products it provides, its effect on financial performance of the industry remains elusive. Why this "productivity paradox" (Brynjolfsson and Hitt,1993) exists is an important part of this project. The authors describe the differences in productivity in services from manufacturing. In the service world, the consumer co-produces the product with the firm, ofte nadding labor to the creation of the service. In addition, the scope of the service enterprise typically is quite vast, with components of the service production process being both producers and deliverers of the service. In addition, the quality of the services provided is forever changing. Thus, the authors suggest that productivity gains from human resource improvements or technology investments may not show up in standard performance measures, but may rather be used to improve the quality of the service provided. What appears to be a stagnation in productivity may actually be an increase in value delivered to the customer. Delivering value to the customer may provide the institution with sales opportunities and much needed information about the institution's customer base. The pilot survey conducted by the authors examines the relationship between technological advancement and the relational part of service delivery by studying time spent with the customer in relation to technological sophistication and time spent on the entire delivery process. The authors adopt the view that processes are the central "technology" of an organization. As with any technology, the process must be maintained. After a process has reached its useful life, it should be scrapped or rebuilt. Thus, the authors suggest that researchers should take a life-cycle view of processes when undertaking efficiency studies. The authors rely heavily on a process-oriented methodology in their analysis of performance drivers in financial services. The study does not focus on traditional measures of productivity or financial performance. Rather, the authors base comparisons on intermediary measures which evaluate the drivers of performance from the perspective of all participants in the co-productive process. This pilot study starts with consumer financial services and in particular, retail banking. The authors review the relevant literature on financial services performance and then propose a conceptual framework for the study. The framework assumes that industry conditions and firm strategy are given. The authors focus is to examine the components of performance that managers can affect, given a strategy and industry operating conditions. Thus, their initial focus is guided by their desire to direct attention to issues of implementation and their effects on performance. The authors attempt to bridge the gap between traditional productivity measures and difficult-to-measure financial performance by developing a set of value creation components as an intermediary set of performance indicators. Based on pilot interviews, these indicators reflect effective performance in ways that are more meaningful than the more traditionalmeasure of productivity, as they are the goals toward which bank management strives. The key values the study attempts to measure are customer convenience, precision, efficient cost structure, adaptability and market penetration. The survey conducted by the research team benchmarks two types of management decisions that are presumed to drive these outcomes. The first set of management choices are implementation choices, human resources choices, technology implementation processes and product/servicedelivery processes. The second set of choices relates to management infrastructure, resource management processes, the information architecture of the firm, the performance management and control systems and the organizational structure of the firm. Based on interviews and the work of previous productivity studies, the research team developed a pilot survey focused on the practices of the functional areas, business lines, product groups and the retail distribution network. The pilot measured the outcomes and choices made by managers in seven large commercial banks. The pilot results will lead to a large scale survey of practices for the entire retail banking sector. Based on early pilot results, the researchers concluded that managers in consumer financial services firms typically assume that improvement in one area of performance is largely at the expense of decreased performance in other areas. The authors believe this is only partly true. Based on the pilot results, the authors believe that better management practices can move outcomes in a number of areas simultaneously. Through effective process design, use of technology and management of human resources, institutions can improve performance in multiple categories. The successful financial services organizations will be those which find processes and practices that enhance multiple measures of performance. The results of the large scale survey of practices will be available in early 1996.

Proposal for shared services performance management model applied to portugueses public administration

Comunicação apresentada no 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública - Desafios e Soluções, em Carcavelos de 21 a 22 de Novembro de 2011.In order to improve the quality of the services and the relationship between the central public administration and citizens the Portuguese government launched an egovernment initiative including both front and back-office processes. The implementation of shared services represents one of the transformation vectors having as major goal the gain of efficacy by reducing the organisational structures and the gain of efficiency through the rationalization of back-office processes. The main target was first the development and implementation of both financial and human resources shared services management solutions and afterwards the enlargement of this concept to other domains such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The shared services implementation target is the central public administration, which employs 550.000 workers. Depending on the success of this initiative it may be later extended to regional and local entities encompassing a total of 800.000 workers. This shared services initiative catalyzes the need of having a global public administration structure in order to provide services with the required quality and to implement adequate and flexible process oriented business models. In 2007 GeRAP, a public enterprise owned by the Ministry of Finances and Public Administration, was created aiming a suitable implementation of this paradigm. As an outcome of the financial and human resources shared services implementation experience, a Portuguese Governmental Open Cloud (GO-Cloud) project was launched with the aim of deploying an ICT public infrastructure able to integrate other private and public clouds and to offer quality infrastructure services at lower costs. The GO-Cloud overlays the double objective of establishing a technological platform that will leverage the shared services adoption spreading among public administration entities, concerning both the already deployed financial and budgetary management solution and the shared human resource management solution, and the provisioning of ICT resources and services in a more flexible and effective way. A successful implementation of shared services in a public and wide environment such as the Portuguese public administration requires a suitable reference architecture, reliable and scalable infrastructures, automated procedures, adequate management processes, an agile organization and adequate relationship models, based on a set of core competences. Thus, this paper focuses the way shared services are being implemented and managed in the Portuguese public administration, considering both the scope of this activity and the differences between public and private contexts. It 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública – 2011 | Página 338 also presents the adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and both the business model and the shared services analysis model (SSAM) used to grant GeRAP internal and external alignment. SSAM contributes with a formal analysis structure through the identification of main pillars that sustain the shared services implementation in Portuguese public administration. The defined pillars will be used as analysis vectors to create a performance model which will be able to evaluate the performance reached by shared services implementation and to anticipate some actions

Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges

Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures,Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 201

Adaptive object management for distributed systems

This thesis describes an architecture supporting the management of pluggable software components and evaluates it against the requirement for an enterprise integration platform for the manufacturing and petrochemical industries. In a distributed environment, we need mechanisms to manage objects and their interactions. At the least, we must be able to create objects in different processes on different nodes; we must be able to link them together so that they can pass messages to each other across the network; and we must deliver their messages in a timely and reliable manner. Object based environments which support these services already exist, for example ANSAware(ANSA, 1989), DEC's Objectbroker(ACA,1992), Iona's Orbix(Orbix,1994)Yet such environments provide limited support for composing applications from pluggable components. Pluggability is the ability to install and configure a component into an environment dynamically when the component is used, without specifying static dependencies between components when they are produced. Pluggability is supported to a degree by dynamic binding. Components may be programmed to import references to other components and to explore their interfaces at runtime, without using static type dependencies. Yet thus overloads the component with the responsibility to explore bindings. What is still generally missing is an efficient general-purpose binding model for managing bindings between independently produced components. In addition, existing environments provide no clear strategy for dealing with fine grained objects. The overhead of runtime binding and remote messaging will severely reduce performance where there are a lot of objects with complex patterns of interaction. We need an adaptive approach to managing configurations of pluggable components according to the needs and constraints of the environment. Management is made difficult by embedding bindings in component implementations and by relying on strong typing as the only means of verifying and validating bindings. To solve these problems we have built a set of configuration tools on top of an existing distributed support environment. Specification tools facilitate the construction of independent pluggable components. Visual composition tools facilitate the configuration of components into applications and the verification of composite behaviours. A configuration model is constructed which maintains the environmental state. Adaptive management is made possible by changing the management policy according to this state. Such policy changes affect the location of objects, their bindings, and the choice of messaging system