Exchange Communication Point Modeling in the context of the Enterprise Architecture

It is important to understand the performance and operation of an Internet Exchange Point to improve the management, and to reduce the cost associated with implementation and the information shared. Enterprise Architecture supports the design of systems, according to the business domain processes, network infrastructure and all the different applications running. Existing Enterprise Architecture modelling languages only provide a general concept of a network and do not represent specific information such as the protocols used, the internet protocols or the network addresses used for sharing information. This paper proposes a set of new concepts and attributes to the technology layer of reference language (ArchiMate) to enhance the representation and management of the network infrastructure. The ArchiMate language extensions are then used in modelling two Case Studies of Internet Exchange Point implementation in the Portuguese Public Administration. It was possible to compute which services will have impact in case of failure

An Approach to Transform Public Administration into SOA-based Organizations

Nowadays, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is widely spread in private organizations. However, when transferring this knowledge to Public Administration, it is realized that it has not been transformed in terms of its legal nature into organizations capable to operate under the SOA paradigm. This fact prevents public administration bodies from offering the efficient services they have been provided by different boards of governments. A high-level framework to perform this transformation is proposed. Taking it as starting point, an instance of a SOA Target Meta-Model can be obtained by means of an iterative and incremental process based on the analysis of imperatives and focused on the particular business context of each local public administration. This paper briefly presents a practical experience consisting in applying this process to a Spanish regional public administration.Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Data warehouse - opportunity for local authorities

Local government exists in a very complex organizational environment, which has been subjected to an ever increasing pace of changes. This situation has generated a huge impact on the local government's reaction towards two major elements in is administration - decision making and technology approaching. The data warehouse technology offers a solution to this problem. But there are various obstacles that inhibit the government from adopting this technology

Value-driven Security Agreements in Extended Enterprises

Today organizations are highly interconnected in business networks called extended enterprises. This is mostly facilitated by outsourcing and by new economic models based on pay-as-you-go billing; all supported by IT-as-a-service. Although outsourcing has been around for some time, what is now new is the fact that organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical business processes, engaging on complex service bundles, and moving infrastructure and their management to the custody of third parties. Although this gives competitive advantage by reducing cost and increasing flexibility, it increases security risks by eroding security perimeters that used to separate insiders with security privileges from outsiders without security privileges. The classical security distinction between insiders and outsiders is supplemented with a third category of threat agents, namely external insiders, who are not subject to the internal control of an organization but yet have some access privileges to its resources that normal outsiders do not have. Protection against external insiders requires security agreements between organizations in an extended enterprise. Currently, there is no practical method that allows security officers to specify such requirements. In this paper we provide a method for modeling an extended enterprise architecture, identifying external insider roles, and for specifying security requirements that mitigate security threats posed by these roles. We illustrate our method with a realistic example

Tieto- ja viestintäteknisten kehitystarpeiden esivalmistelu

Toiminnallisen opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena oli selvittää, miten toimintaympäristön muutoksista johtuvat tieto- ja viestintätekniset kehitystarpeet saadaan selville riittävän ajoissa ja miten kehitystarpeiden valmisteluvaihe tulee toteuttaa. Tavoitteena oli kehittää Tullin toimintaympäristöön soveltuva toimintamalli, jossa huomioidaan julkisen hallinnon ja Tullin strateginen linjaus käynnistää tietohallintolain (10.6.2011/634) mukainen kokonaisarkkitehtuurityö. Opinnäytetyössä sovellettiin konstruktiivisen tutkimuksen lähestymistapaa. Opinnäytetyöprosessin aikana kehitettiin olemassa olevaa tietopohjaa hyödyntäen uusi toimintamalli tieto- ja viestintäteknisten kehitystarpeiden esivalmisteluun. Tuotoksen tietoperustana käytettiin valtiovarainministeriön aineistoja julkisen hallinnon tieto- ja viestintätekniikan yhteisestä ohjauksesta, tietohallintolakia ja julkisen hallinnon suosituksia kokonaisarkkitehtuurityön käynnistämiseksi. Toimintamalli kuvattiin tuotokseen ja raportissa selostettiin kehittämisprosessi. Valintoja perusteltiin tietohallintomallilla sekä tietohallinnon ja liiketoiminnan yhteistyötä käsittelevillä aineistoilla. Tieto- ja viestintäteknisten kehitystarpeiden esivalmistelun toimintamalli kytkeytyy Tullin strategiaan ja täyttää tietohallintolain velvoitteet. Kehitystarpeiden esivalmistelu mahdollistaa kokonaisarkkitehtuurityön kokonaisvaltaisen käynnistämisen. Tieto- ja viestintäteknisiin kehitystarpeisiin on saatu parempi näkyvyys. ICT-kehityssalkussa on tällä hetkellä noin 180 tunnistettua kehitystarvetta. Toimintamallia ja kehityssalkun sisältöä on jatkokehitettävä ennen varsinaisen kokonaisarkkitehtuurityön käynnistämistä ja kehitystarpeisiin pohjautuvan toteutussuunnitelman laatimista.The purpose of this study was to create a management process for identifying the ICT development needs in Finnish Customs that commissioned the present thesis. The aim was to develop a management model based on strategy and the Act on Information Management Governance in Public Administration (10.6.2011/634). The law requires that all public administration has to adopt the common enterprise architecture. Finnish Customs is a public central state agency and, therefore, Customs IT Department needed to ensure that the operating model comply with the law. This study applied constructive research methodology. The work was based on the analysis of the Public Administration recommendations, which provides guidelines for the use of enterprise architecture. Taking into account Public Sector ICT Strategy, the Act on Information Management Governance in Public Administration and the operational situation, the new construction was created in practice. During the thesis process, the ICT development portfolio was created together with instructions to collect and classify the ICT development needs at Finnish Customs. Choices were based on the IT Governance Model and the reference material. As the result of this thesis, a process was developed and implemented. The Public Admin-istration recommendations include useful information about enterprise architecture but Finnish Customs IT Department could not use them directly. The new operating model meets the requirements of the law, but further development is needed. Nowadays the ICT development portfolio includes about 180 ICT needs which IT Department has to manage. How to do it is a challenge for the next stage of development

Migrating medical communications software to a multi-tenant cloud environment

The rise of cloud computing has paved the way for many new applications. Many of these new cloud applications are also multi-tenant, ensuring multiple end users can make use of the same application instance. While these technologies make it possible to create many new applications, many legacy applications can also benefit from the added flexibility and cost-savings of cloud computing and multi-tenancy. In this paper, we describe the steps required to migrate a. NET-based medical communications application to the Windows Azure public cloud environment, and the steps required to add multi-tenancy to the application. We then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our migration approach. We found that the migration to the cloud itself requires only a limited amount of changes to the application, but that this also limited the benefits, as individual instances would only be partially used. Adding multi-tenancy requires more changes, but when this is done, it has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of running the application