Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

An Agent Enabled System for Personalizing Wireless Mobile Services

Handheld wireless devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have limited memory, storage, and processing power. In addition, small screens and limited input facilities make entering information tedious. It is therefore important that wireless mobile applications optimize resource usage and minimize input effort imposed on the user. One way is to download to the client only the information most relevant to the user, then present that information effectively, taking into account the user\u27s preferences and history as well as the task at hand. This personalization approach minimizes the information to be displayed. In this paper, we present a mobile agent-based system for personalizing mobile services; we use mobile agents simply because such autonomous software entities have characteristics that can benefit mobile devices and the wireless environment. We introduce the tiered architecture of the proposed system and the functions of the different components; then we discuss how we use the Composite/Capabilities Preferences/Profile (CC/PP) in personalizing wireless mobile services. A proof of concept implementation has been developed using Java technologies

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

LCG MCDB -- a Knowledgebase of Monte Carlo Simulated Events

In this paper we report on LCG Monte Carlo Data Base (MCDB) and software which has been developed to operate MCDB. The main purpose of the LCG MCDB project is to provide a storage and documentation system for sophisticated event samples simulated for the LHC collaborations by experts. In many cases, the modern Monte Carlo simulation of physical processes requires expert knowledge in Monte Carlo generators or significant amount of CPU time to produce the events. MCDB is a knowledgebase mainly dedicated to accumulate simulated events of this type. The main motivation behind LCG MCDB is to make the sophisticated MC event samples available for various physical groups. All the data from MCDB is accessible in several convenient ways. LCG MCDB is being developed within the CERN LCG Application Area Simulation project