Antonia Stefani

From application service provision to service-oriented computing: A study of the IT outsourcing evolution

Abstract IT outsourcing is not a new concept. Originating from the early 60’s in the form of time sharing, IT outsourcing has evolved to the application service provision (ASP) model, in the late 90’s to pure services in the beginning of the century. Services, and their major representative web services, are actually the next phase of the movement toward Internet-based componentized software, known in the not so distant past as ASP. As the continuous expansion of the Internet and its relating technologies creates new marketing opportunities, traditional monolithic architectures are giving way to service-oriented computing (SOC), the architecture that enables service provision. SOC permits the utilization of large systems which are comprised of self-containing building blocks: services. Services may be made public, searched, reused and combined to form complex business processes while in the same time retaining a significant level of flexibility. Services and SOC have emerged as a response to a fundamental shift in enterprise business culture that started at the late 90’s. Although they are promising as an IT outsourcing enabler, many issues need to be dealt with before they can be considered suitable for wide adoption. These issues are of technological, business, economic and cultural nature and they were also faced by ASPs in the past. It is worth revisiting the successes and failures of the ASP model in order to get a better understanding of the evolving IT outsourcing industry. In this work, we describe the evolution of service provision from its initial form as software application, through the application service provision era and towards the new trend of web services.

E-commerce system quality assessment using a model based on ISO 9126 and Belief Networks

As business transitions into the new economy, e-system successful use has become a strategic goal. Especially in business to consumer (e-commerce) applications, users highly evaluate the quality of their interactive shopping experience. However, quality is difficult to define and measure and most importantly, it is difficult to measure its impact on the end-user. Among the many research questions that arise, some of the most important concern the exact nature of the quality attributes that define an e-commerce system, and how one could model these attributes in order to increase its acceptance. Bearing in mind that e-commerce systems are actually user/data-intensive web-based software systems, this work performed a survey which resulted in a theoretical model that helps to measure such systems’ dynamics through their decomposition into primary quality characteristics. The proposed model is based on Bayesian Networks and ISO 9126. Besides the emphasis on specific software quality attributes, it also provides a quality assessment process aiding developers to design and produce e-commerce systems of high quality. Using a Bayesian Network the model can be used to combine different types of evidences and provide reasoning from effect to cause and vice versa.

On the Quality Assessment of Advanced e-Learning Services

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e‐learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E‐learning is data‐intensive, user‐driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competiveness. Although the complexity of such systems has increased exponentially, the design process still lacks a systematic quality control procedure. In this work we address the increasing need for new methods that maximize usability, and thus end‐user satisfaction. We analyse the technological, managerial and economic factors that affect the design and deployment of a large e‐learning platform with advanced services and propose a set of new metrics for assessing its quality. The metrics are based on the four external quality characteristics (functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability) of the ISO9126 standard for software systems.

Weight-modeling of B2C system quality

The efficiency and cost effectiveness of internet technologies have already transformed the web into a global environment for business. However, designing, developing and supporting e-commerce systems having quality in mind is a challenging task. The quality of a Business to Consumer system may be assessed from two complementary, orthogonal, points of view: as a software system and as a service to end-users/customers. As a software system it must be assessed by professional software engineers, the evaluators. They are best in assessing top down the system. As a service it must be assessed by customers perspective, the end-user. They provide a bottom up evaluation approach of the system. In this work, these points of view are combined in a weighted model which uses the external quality characteristics and sub-characteristics of ISO9126 as a baseline for further decomposition into technical and user-oriented features. The model can be used forward and backwards: forward for evaluating in detail the qualitative strengths and weaknesses of an existing B2C system; backwards for balancing quality improvement with development criteria.

Meta-metric Evaluation of E-Commerce-related Metrics

User-perceived software quality is subjective, and thus difficult to be measured. Its importance however in user-centric, web-based systems such as e-commerce systems is huge. How can one measure the subjective? Metrics are one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal for measuring quality. For such a weapon to be put in good use, guidelines for use should be available. In this paper we present a model based on meta-metrics that suggests what metrics should be used in what way and how, when evaluating an e-commerce system.

Modelling e-commerce systems' quality with belief networks

This paper focuses on quality aspects of e-commerce systems and proposes a method for modeling such systems based on belief networks. The paper discusses the theoretical background of the proposed model, as well as practical issues arising from its application. The basic notation and concept of belief networks is briefly presented, while emphasis is placed on the models structure and its usage. The presented model can be utilized for assessing the quality of e-commerce systems, as well as for aiding in quality assurance during the design and development phase of such systems.

EXPERIMENTAL BASED TOOL CALIBRATION USED FOR ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF E-COMMERCE SYSTEMS

This paper presents a method used to evaluate the quality of e-commerce systems. The presented method uses a Belief Network in order to model the factors and criteria affecting the quality of e-commerce systems. This model can be applied not only for assessing the quality of e-commerce systems, but also for ensuring quality design before development. It also offers numerical results for the overall quality of an e-commerce system, as well as for its intermediate factors and lower-lever criteria. This paper presents the experimental results and the data analysis that aided towards the calibration of the model, i.e. assessing an e-commerce system and its individual characteristics based on the numerical results derived from the model.

Bringing AI to E-learning: The Case of a Modular, Highly Adaptive System

This paper presents a newly developed student model agent, which is the basic part of an e-learning environment that incorporates Intelligent Agents and Computational Intelligence Techniques. The e-learning environment consists of three parts, the E-learning platform Front-End, the Student Questioner Reasoning and the Student Model Agent. The basic aim of this contribution is to describe in detail the agents architecture and the innovative features it provides to the e-learning environment through its utilization as an autonomous component. Several basic processes and techniques are facilitated through the agent in order to provide intelligence to the e-learning environment.

Behavioral Patterns in Hypermedia Systems: A Short Study of E-commerce vs. E-learning Practices

Web based systems are extremely popular to both end users and developers thanks to their ease of use and cost effectiveness respectively. Two of the most popular applications of web based systems nowadays are e-learning and e-commerce. Despite their differences, both types of applications are facing similar challenges: they rely on a “pull” model of information flow, they are hypermedia based, they use similar techniques for adaptation and they benefit from semantic technologies (Brusilovsky and Nejdl, 2004). The underlying business models also share the same basic principle: users access digital resources from a distance without the physical presence of a teacher or a seller. The above mentioned similarities suggest that, at least, some user behavioral patterns are similar to both applications. It is at least intriguing to notice that many published works relating to e-learning adaptation focus on machine learning techniques for log analysis or static user profiles with common characteristics. Despite the large number of related publications, very limited claims of success of such traditional adaptation techniques have been reported under real life e-learning situations (Xenos et al., 2002). Only within the past few years, researchers, originating mainly from the educational domain point out that little has been done for context-aware adaptation (Stash et al., 2004; Wolf, 2003; Spiliopoulou et al., 2002). In the case of e-learning, context-aware parameters that seem to have been ignored to date, stem from behavioral and pedagogical theories. From our point of view, a simple but yet important parameter still eludes many e-learning adaptive hypermedia efforts: systems and techniques should be designed by both engineers and educationalists in order for research to bear fruits in real situations. Although adaptability of web based systems has been the focus of a wide range of recent research efforts, these efforts are mainly focused on e-commerce. Most existing adaptation techniques for web-based systems are based on log analysis, user modeling or pre-determined rules (Brusilovsky and Maybury, 2002). E-learning adaptation has many common characteristics with e-commerce applications and many differences as well. This means that advances in e-commerce adaptation may be

IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF SELECTED TOPICS RELATED TO THE QUALITY ASSESSMENT OF E-COMMERCE SYSTEMS

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of selected important topics related to the quality assessment of e-commerce systems. It briefly introduces to the reader a quality assessment model based on Bayesian Networks and presents in detail the practical application of this model, highlighting practical issues related to the involvement of human subjects, conflict resolution, and calibration of the measurement instruments. Furthermore, the paper presents the application process of the model for the quality assessment of various e-commerce systems; it also discusses in detail how particular features (data) of the assessed e-commerce systems can be identified and, using the described automated assessment process, lead to higher abstraction information (desiderata) regarding the quality of the assessed e-commerce systems.