Ajantha Dahanayake

Improving the understanding of BAM technology for real-time decision support

Business activity monitoring (BAM) provides real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Ideally, BAM systems should allow enterprises to improve their operational performance by helping them perceive, understand and respond to events that have a significant impact on their business processes. Despite the fact that most enterprises have pressing needs to improve their operational performance in highly competitive and dynamic business environments, BAM systems have been poorly utilised. This is mainly due to the fact that there are no formal standards which enumerate what specific features BAM systems must include or theoretical models which support comparative analyses between BAM systems. Indeed, selecting a suitable BAM system is a challenge. To improve the ability of enterprises to understand and select a BAM system for their particular decision support needs, a BAM definitional model as well as BAM classification criteria are proposed.

Co-evolution of (Information) System Models

Information systems’ modelling is based on separation of concern such as separation into facets or viewpoints on the application domain from one side and separation of aspects (structuring, functionality, interactivity, distribution, architectural components) from the other side. Facets and aspects are typically specified through different models that must be harmonised and made coherent. Such varieties of models are difficult to handle, to evolve, to maintain and to use. Most design methodologies adopt the master-slave principle in order to handle the coherence of such model assemblies by assigning one model to be the master and mapping the master to slave models. Moreover, these models diagrams are typically not developed from scratch. They are incrementally completed step by step depending on the modelling methodology. Models evolve during development and are not independent, are interrelated, and in most applications also intertwined. Their interrelationships are often not made explicit and impose changes resulting in inconsistencies to other models due to the variety of models.

W∗H: The Conceptual Model for Services

Services as an emerging paradigm in modern information technology (IT) infrastructures underwent the first hype for service-oriented computing caused by Web services and the second hype by IT market pressures on large corporations (e.g. SAP), leading to standardisations incorporating logical-level specifications leaving much of the low-level details unaccounted for.The conception of a service needs a conceptual reflection. However, the service notation lacks a conceptual model. This gap is caused by the variety of aspects that must be reflected, such as the handling of the services as a collection of offerings, a proper annotation facility beyond ontologies, a tool to describe the service concept and the specification of the added value of a business user. Those requirements must be handled at the same time. Therefore, this chapter contributes to the development of a conceptual model of a service through a specification framework W∗H and through an embedding framework to the concept-content-annotation triptych and Hermagoras of Temnos inquiry frames.

Role-Based Situation-Aware Information Seeking and Retrieval Service Design Approach for Crisis Response

Crisis response involves handling information intensive processes, and coordination of large quantities of information from and for different relief-response organizations. The information needs and responses of such organizations are closely related to the situations and roles these organizations are involved during a crisis relief-response process. The information seeking and retrieval processes associated with crisis situations influence the affectivity of response vigor and the coordination of relief-response activities. To provide an effective solution for a European Main Port’s crisis response needs, a role-based situation-aware information seeking and retrieval conceptual framework is formulated. The Conceptual framework, the design approach, and the implementation in a prototype are presented as an approach to design future crisis response information seeking and retrieval services. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]

Improving IT-Enabled Sense and Respond Capabilities: An Application of Business Activity Monitoring at Southern International Airlines

Commercial airlines face an extremely challenging operating and competitive environment. To remain in business they must comply with ever-changing regulatory requirements while, at the same time, minimizing their operational costs without sacrificing customer expectations of service levels. Increasingly, airlines are realizing that a “plan-execute†mode of operation must give way to a “sense-respond†mode of operation; in other words they must become a real-time (agile) organization, capable of sensing the occurrence of unforeseen events such as the placement of a last-minute shipping order, flight delays, and cancellations, and respond effectively in real-time to such events. To enable enterprises in general, and the airline industry in particular, to improve their sense-and-respond capabilities and ensure better resource utilization, a number of software vendors are offering event stream processing and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions. This case examines a longitudinal set of real-world implementation projects using such a solution at a major US airline (referred to as Southern International Airlines) and the results and lessons gained from this deployment.

Factors That Influence the Quality of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a technique that aims to obtain data, ideas, and funds, conduct tasks, or even solve problems with the aid of a group of people. It’s a useful technique to save money and time. The quality of data is an issue that confronts crowdsourcing websites; as the data is obtained from the crowd, and how they control the quality of data. In some of the crowdsourcing websites they have implemented mechanisms in order to manage the data quality; such as, rating, reporting, or using specific tools. In this paper, five crowdsourcing websites: Wikipedia, Amazon Mechanical Turk, YouTube, Rally Fighter, and Kickstarter are studied as cases in order to identify the possible quality assurance methods or techniques that are useful to represent crowdsourcing data.

Continuous database engineering

This paper provides a new approach for continuous development of database systems. Classically, complete knowledge about the application is a starting point for the requirements development. It is also often assumed that requirements are held stable over a longer period of time. Business practice is however different. Applications, technology and business users are constantly changing. Moreover, quantity structures of classes in a database oscillate in databases lifetime. Therefore, we observe a continuous change for the databases that needs sophisticated and thoughtful support. We propose a new approach to continuous database engineering. It incorporates classical database engineering and bases change management on business activity monitoring BAM. BAM supports the tracking of real life usage of the system, i.e., elicitation of real application portfolio and important tasks. This information can be used for derivation of change strategies to database redesign since we can capture which part of the system is nonessential, which functions are noncrucial, which support is unnecessary and which class hampers high system performance.

Enriching Conceptual Modelling Practices through Design Science

Models, modelling languages, modelling frameworks and their background have dominated conceptual modelling research and information systems engineering for last four decades. Conceptual models are mediators between the application world and the implementation or system world. Design science distinguishes the relevance cycle as the iterative process that re-inspects the application and the model, the design cycle as the iterative model development process, and the rigor cycle that aims in grounding and adding concepts developed to the knowledge base. This separation of concern into requirements engineering, model development and conceptualisation is the starting point for this paper.

Towards a framework for emergent modeling

The unpredictability in crisis situations and the time to respond during emergencies require the development of toolkit support for modeling approaches that produce models of information processing views within a very short time interval. The present approach to designing such systems is based on the traditional modeling practice of starting from scratch to arrive at a solution. Based on the observations of shortcomings in crisis response and recovery coordination systems developed at a main European harbor, a framework for emergent modeling is presented in this paper. Emergent modeling is an approach to model coordination structures for unpredictable emergency response coordination work. The emergent modeling relies on the concept of model evolution through reusing available models and model patterns. An assessment is made to explore the extent to which MetaCASE and model suites are available and to what extent they are appropriate to fulfill those requirements of emergent modeling toolkit support.

Extending the Information-Processing View of Coordination in Public Sector Crisis Response

Coordinating the response of multiple public agencies to a large-scale crisis is a challenge that has been studied predominantly according to the information-processing view. In this paper, the authors extend this view with the notion of emergence giving special attention to information and communication technology ICT. The extended framework is applied in a case study of crisis response exercises in the public sector. The findings suggest that current practices concentrate on standards and hierarchy, but mutual adjustment and emergent coordination also occur and are susceptible to analysis and equally relevant to understand coordination practices. In addition, ICT can provide information processing capabilities needed for coordination but may also create information processing needs by increasing the volume of data and the interconnectedness of responders. Applying the extended framework improves the understanding of coordination and forms the basis for its future use in designing ICT to support coordination in crisis response and e-government.