The Transformation of AT&T’s Enterprise Network Systems Group to Avaya: Enabling the Virtual Corporation through Reengineering and Enterprise Resource Planning

This case discusses the management and control of a large enterprise-wide implementation of an ERP system while the business model and corporate culture were shaping and being shaped by that implementation. In 1995, the Enterprise Networks Systems business unit of AT&T faced a triad of problems caused by its legacy IT infrastructure, including the lack of timely, accurate financial and operating data, looming Y2K issues and systems capacity issues that were beginning to limit growth. A business plan for change was developed and approved. A project team was assembled to replace 25 years of legacy systems architecture (400+ systems) with a new enterprise systems architecture. The team was to act as change agent by supplanting a myriad of business processes and people practices that were seen as impediments to future growth and profitability. This case describes the design, development and deployment of one of the largest ERP implementations. The project required the implementation of standardized business processes and people practices for 30,000+ associates globally while minimizing the impacts on 1.3 million customers and on shareholders. Simultaneously, upper management set out on a strategy of creating a virtual business by outsourcing major business functions, including IT, Manufacturing and Distribution, and major parts of the sales and service operations. Other major events included the spin-offs of Lucent Technologies and Avaya

Software Solutions for Agile Business

Businesses, like people, are continuously evolving and as such face rapid and continual change. As markets and customer needs evolve, enterprises must respond with new ways to attract and retain customers and partners, increase operational efficiency, and achieve greater visibility into their business processes. IT staff see business processes through the lens of the low-level parts of the flow, rather than at the business level. As a result, they aren't capable of implementing the processes so that they will meet continuously changing business requirements, thus impeding business agility. Business users are increasingly demanding that they have control over their own business processes - and so, are requiring systems that put control of the flow and logic into their hands, not those of IT. An Enterprise Service Bus based on a Service Oriented Architecture could be a solution and tie together the notions of service oriented process, service oriented integration and event-driven, message based interaction into a single environment that enables users to combine their assets and information from multiple points of view.Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), loosely coupled events

Towards Run-Time Verification of Compositions in the Web of Things using Complex Event Processing

Following the vision of the Internet of Things, physical world entities are integrated into virtual world things. Things are expected to become active participants in business and social processes. Then, the Internet of Things could benefit from the Web Service architecture like today’s Web does, so Future ser-vice-oriented Internet things will offer their functionality via service-enabled in-terfaces. In previous work, we demonstrated the need of considering the behav-iour of things to develop applications in a more rigorous way, and we proposed a lightweight model for representing such behaviour. Our methodology relies on the service-oriented paradigm and extends the DPWS profile to specify the order with which things can receive messages. We also proposed a static verifi-cation technique to check whether a mashup of things respects the behaviour, specified at design-time, of the composed things. However, a change in the be-haviour of a thing may cause that some compositions do not fulfill its behaviour anymore. Moreover, given that a thing can receive requests from instances of different mashups at run-time, these requests could violate the behaviour of that thing, even though each mashup fulfills such behaviour, due to the change of state of the thing. To address these issues, we present a proposal based on me-diation techniques and complex event processing to detect and inhibit invalid invocations, so things only receive requests compatible with their behaviour.Work partially supported by projects TIN2008-05932, TIN2012-35669, CSD2007-0004 funded by Spanish Ministry MINECO and FEDER; P11-TIC-7659 funded by Andalusian Government; and Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Aligning enterprise risk management with business strategy and information systems

Business leaders recognise effective risk management as one of the main success drivers for enterprises. Even though the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) concept has evolved significantly in the past years, in the aftermath of recent economic crises it became evident some of its critical challenges still need to be addressed. The review of subject literature led to a conclusion that current ERM approaches failed to protect enterprise value in turbulent and risky market conditions. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a conceptual analysis of the most common ERM practices and frameworks, in order to identify their shortcomings and areas requiring development. It is further aimed to provide guidance to business practitioners in implementing more integrated and effective Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) solutions. This research recognises the importance of aligning ERM programmes with business strategies, and with consolidated Information Systems. A “New Approach ERM Model” is developed as guidance for a successful alignment of ERM with enterprise business strategy, and for an effective adaption of Information Systems to requirements of ERM programmes. The “New Approach ERM Model” steers risk management initiatives and strategies in the same direction, and consequently allows enterprises to improve organisational effectiveness, increase shareholders value, and gain competitive advantage in the market

Anomaly Detection for Soft Security in Cloud Based Auditing of Accounting Systems

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Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

An exploratory study of enterprise architecture practices in Malaysia

This study was an exploratory investigation of the practice of the enterprise architecture (EA) in private and public enterprises in Malaysia. The Zachman Framework was used to evaluate the practice of EA in these enterprises. Ten enterprises from public and private sector participated in the study. Multiple sources including interviews, documents and survey were used as the data sources of the study. The findings presented in this paper were exploratory in our attempt to gain an insight of the EA practices in Malaysia. The paper would give the general outlook of the current practices of EA in Malaysian enterprises