Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Missing the target: Lessons from enabling innovation in South Asia

This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on agricultural innovation were "not put into use" in the programme's implementation. However, the experience provides three important lessons for donors and governments to make use of agricultural research: (i) Promoting research into use requires enabling innovation. This goes beyond fostering collaboration, and includes a range of other innovation management tasks (ii) The starting point for making use of research need not necessarily be the promising research products and quite often identifying the promising innovation trajectories is more rewarding (iii) Strengthening the innovation enabling environment of policies and institutions is critical if research use is to lead to long-term and large-scale impacts. It is in respect of this third point that RIU Asia missed its target, as it failed to make explicit efforts to address policy and institutional change, despite its innovation systems rhetoric. This severely restricted its ability to achieve wide-scale social and economic impact that was the original rationale for the programme.Research Into Use, Innovation Management, Agricultural Research, Innovation, Development, Policy, Value Chain Development, South Asia, Innovation Trajectory

Peripherality and proximity. Do business support services matter?

This essay is based on empirical evidence from the case of Tuscany (Italy) and follows previous work on the role and meaning of image in regional development and innovation policies (Bellini, 2004). Discussions about image and branding policies is usually placed in the framework of "place marketing" and marketing literature helps in defining the features, components and main characters of image and of its relationship with local identity. We suggest, however, that managing images is also a political process with significant impact in supporting and shaping the scenario (perceptions and expectations) for innovation policies. In fact this process implies a competition between images in order to "control" the representation of the past, present and future of an area. This competition aims at influencing the policy agenda by manipulating the gap between image and identity. In other words, we suggest that image-related policies should be considered part of the toolbox of a modern innovation policy.

Management of RH Services in India and the Need for Health System Reform

For the last ten to fifteen years, a comprehensive agenda of health sector reforms and health systems development has engulfed the health system in many countries in structural and organisational changes. Experience with varying degrees and types of reforms have now been reported from many countries. In our paper, we begin by describing some important issues facing the management of RH programs in India, based on our research done in a few states over the last five years. The failures in the management of RH services are complex and multi-factorial, and cannot all be addressed through health system reform. It is therefore necessary to identify which failures in service are attributable to causes, which could be removed or changed by reform in the health system. In our paper, we identify those failures and causes which could be corrected through health system reforms and propose certain concrete steps to expedite the reforms in the health system to enable the improvement of RH services in India.

Working in decentralised service systems: challenges and choices for the Australian aid program

The report examined Australia’s support for service systems in decentralised contexts - the evaluation focussed on the health, education and infrastructure (water, sanitation and roads) sectors. Foreword Public services have been decentralised in most countries where Australia provides aid. This means Australia, like other donors, must be willing and able to engage effectively with developing country governments at all levels to improve service delivery. To ensure sustainable improvements, this engagement should carefully coordinate support for governance reforms with assistance to strengthen or expand service delivery systems. As the World Bank has observed, done well, decentralisation can result in more efficient and effective services for communities. However, done poorly, or where the context is inappropriate, decentralisation may have negative effects. This evaluation builds on the Office of Development Effectiveness’s 2009 evaluation of Australian aid for service delivery. It answers important questions about whether Australian aid has appropriately considered the role of subnational authorities, including specific issues identified in 2009. It assesses how well Australian aid has addressed the challenges of decentralisation, with a focus on the major sectors of education, health and infrastructure. This evaluation utilised a clear methodology, applied it consistently, and draws together a range of evidence to provide a balanced account of Australian aid performance. It concludes that Australian aid is beginning to respond to the challenges of supporting service delivery in decentralised contexts, but notes that results are mixed and there is room for further improvement. The evaluation suggests Australia needs to improve its country-level analysis, program planning and design to better address decentralisation. In particular, there is a need to carefully assess short-term service delivery needs against long-term structures and incentives for governments to achieve sustainable service delivery and meet sovereign responsibilities. Australia needs to get the right balance of engagement with different levels of government, and appropriately address both supply and demand aspects of service delivery, especially to improve equity.   &nbsp

Blockchain, Leadership And Management: Business AS Usual Or Radical Disruption?

The Internet provided the world with interconnection. However, it did not provide it with trust. Trust is lacking everywhere in our society and is the reason for the existence of powerful intermediaries aggregating power. Trust is what prevents the digital world to take over. This has consequences for organisations: they are inefficient because time, energy, money and passion are wasted on verifying everything happens as decided. Managers play the role of intermediaries in such case: they connect experts with each others and instruct them of what to do. As a result, in our expert society, people's engagement is low because no one is there to inspire and empower them. In other words, our society faces an unprecedented lack of leadership. Provided all those shortcomings, the study imagines the potential repercussions, especially in the context of management, of implementing a blockchain infrastructure in any type of organisation. Indeed, the blockchain technology seems to be able to remedy to those issues, for this distributed and immutable ledger provides security, decentralisation and transparency. In the context of a blockchain economy, the findings show that value creation will be rearranged, with experts directly collaborating with each others, and hierarchy being eliminated. This could, in turn, render managers obsolete, as a blockchain infrastructure will automate most of the tasks. As a result, only a strong, action-oriented, leadership would maintain the organisation together. This leadership-in-action would consist in igniting people to take action; coach members of the organisations so that their contribution makes sense in the greater context of life

Sector Monitoring and Evaluation Systems in the context of Changing Aid Modalities: The case of Niger‘s Health Sector

Within the context of the 2005 Paris Declaration (PD) and the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) recipient countries have committed themselves to setting up transparent results-oriented reporting and assessment frameworks, while donors are expected to use these frameworks and to collaborate with recipients in order to strengthen recipient countries‘ systems. However, progress in this area is slow: only three out of 54 countries in the 2008 PD Survey had adequate results-oriented frameworks. Donors, from their side, are reluctant to rely on systems which are only partially developed, which simultaneously blocks the further elaboration and maturing of recipient systems. Progress at sector level is generally stronger and particularly within health and education sectors where, in the context of Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps), several initiatives have been taken to strengthen monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. Prior to strengthening an M&E system it is important to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system, taking both M&E supply and demand sides into account. This working paper analyses the M&E system in the health sector of Niger and focuses on issues of policy, methodology, organisation (structure and linkages), capacity, participation of actors outside government and use of M&E outputs. The assessment of the M&E system in Niger‘s health sector shows a mixed picture of a partially developed system. When taking into account that Niger is one of the least developed countries in the world, with very weak scores on many health indicators, this outcome is more positive than expected. The very prominent role of donors might possibly be related to the scores obtained. The authors of this working document, however, argue that if M&E system strengthening is to a large extent pushed from the outside (donors) and not motivated through an internal M&E demand and supply side (both from within as well as outside government), it is likely that the outputs of the system as well as their use will be weak.