Anuradha Bhamidipaty

SymAB: symbol-based address book for the semi-literate mobile user

Developing countries like India are observing an increasing trend in the penetration of mobile phones towards the base of the pyramid (lower strata of the society). This segment comprises of users who are novice and semiliterate and are interested in the basic usage of the mobile phone. This paper explores one of the basic features, the address book for its usability and presents an enhanced symbol-based design to cater for the semi-literate user. The enhancement uses symbols to replace current text based storage and retrieval and also includes a call distribution based address book access to align with the skewed nature of the users requirements. The results of a preliminary evaluation of the prototype are encouraging regarding the value perceived through the design.

Automated Optimal Dispatching of Service Requests

In the services domain, the customers raise issues and service requests in the form of tickets. There is a pool of personnel who work on these tickets and resolve them. The problem at hand is to dispatch these tickets to the most appropriate personnel. Optimality is applied to metrics like the mean service time taken to resolve a ticket, the fair sharing of workload among the personnel, and the size and configuration of the pool. The current state of the art involves a human dispatcher for assigning incoming service requests. Though intelligent, a human dispatcher can be suboptimal with respect to the above mentioned objectives due to the large space of parameter values to be considered. Further, there exists an opportunity to achieve high-level goals such as on-the-job training, eliminating overproduction, and workload balancing among personnel through smarter dispatch decisions. For example, target skill levels of personnel can be achieved by assigning them tickets requiring those skills increasingly. Also, overproduction can be controlled by dispatching only those tickets that otherwise would be in the danger of missing deadline (SLO) constraints. Our work involves the design and implementation of an automated dispatcher which would take various characteristics of the tickets and the pool state as input and recommend an intelligent dispatching decision for the tickets, based on the above-mentioned goals and constraints.

Optimal control point selection for continuous business process compliance monitoring

Service delivery organizations fulfill their business obligations by defining and implementing business processes. Such processes also need to adhere to several regulations such as security, confidentiality and data integrity. These regulations are typically defined as policies, each of which contains a list of clauses. Organizations typically conduct periodic audits of executed process instances to determine how well they have adhered to the stated policies. Since such auditing takes place after the processes have been implemented, their efficacy as a tool for preventing non-compliances against policies is doubtful. In this paper, we analyze the problem of continuous compliance monitoring at run time. This involves selecting a subset of policy clauses at process tasks, called control points, at which compliance can be checked. Selecting control points involves a tradeoff. Selecting too few control points would raise the risk of increased non-compliance; however, selecting too many may not be cost-effective. In this paper, we represent this as an optimization problem, and discuss it from the viewpoint of two key optimization criteria. We also demonstrate our optimization techniques on a simplified version of a real-life example drawn from our industry experience.

RMI: A Framework for Modeling and Evaluating the Resiliency Maturity of IT Service Organizations

With increasing globalization and outsourcing, IT service providers need a way to assess the resilience of their operations (and of their vendors) to understand the impact that various failures can have on their output, and to guide their decisions on where to best invest for remediation. In this paper, we present the resiliency maturity index (RMI), a framework for characterizing and evaluating the resiliency of an IT services organization. The framework consists of (a) a model for capturing the hierarchical component structure of the organization and the relationships among (sub)components, and (b) a method to determine a quantitative score that indicates the overall resiliency maturity of the organization. We describe a case study of the application of RMI to a hypothetical IT service provider organization, based on our experience of applying it to actual real-world delivery centers. We also demonstrate the utility of the RMI framework through various realistic scenarios such as making investment decisions, .assessing the impact of organizational expansion, and outsourcing decisions.

Process Trace Identification from Unstructured Execution Logs

Many real world business processes are executed without explicit orchestration and hence do not generate structured execution logs. This is particularly true for the class of business processes which are executed in service delivery centers in emerging markets where rapid changes in processes and in the people executing the processes are common. In such environments, the process execution logs are usually natural language descriptions of actions performed and hence are noisy. Despite the lack of structured logs, it is crucial to know the trace of activities as they happen on the ground. Without such a visibility into the ground activities, regulatory compliance audit, process optimization, and best practices standardization are severely disabled. Process monitoring on top of unstructured execution logs has been a relatively unexplored research area. This paper proposes an approach for process trace identification from unstructured logs that applies state-of-the-art text mining techniques. It applies this approach on logs of a real-world business process used in a service delivery center and shows that individual process activities are correctly identified 90% of the time. Also, 65% of the activity traces were identified with zero errors and an additional 24% with a single error. This approach is generic and applicable to a wide array of business processes.

Indra: an integrated quantitative system for compliance management for IT service delivery

The explosive growth of business process implementations in various industries has brought into sharp focus the need for process compliance with regulatory policies. This has raised the need for business process compliance solutions requiring an automated and quantitative approach. Quantification of compliance enables an organization to accurately determine its compliance posture and take steps to improve process noncompliances in the future. To that end, in this paper, we propose Indra, our system for integrated compliance management. Indra takes a holistic approach toward compliance, focusing on a compliance life cycle comprising process modeling for maximal compliance at minimal cost, measuring noncompliance at runtime, analyzing the results of the measurement, and suggesting corrective actions to continuously improve process compliance in the future. The scope of this paper covers the analytic models and formulations for compliance maximization, along with a demonstration on a simplified version of a real-life example drawn from the IBM IT (information technology) service delivery units. We also describe ongoing piloting of our analytic models on real audit data from the IBM India Business Controls department. To the best of our knowledge, Indra is the first of its kind in providing integrated and quantitative compliance management.

Optimizing on mobile usage cost for the lower income group: insights and recommendations

There is an increasing trend in the penetration of mobile phones towards the lower strata (lower income) group of the society. Cost is perceived as the governing factor which determines the adoption of mobile phones in this group. This paper explores the effect of cost on the usage of mobile phones and proposes an enhanced design with features that optimize its usage cost for lower income group. These features help determine and restrict call duration, proactively alert user on usage deviations and avoid early call terminations. Preliminary evaluations of the enhanced design were decidedly positive about the effectiveness in controlling and optimizing mobile usage cost.

A Differential Approach for Configuration Fault Localization in Cloud Environments

Configuration fault localization is the process of identifying fault in the configuration of component(s) that is the source of failure given a set of observed failure conditions. Configuration faults are harder to detect than on/off failures as it involves analysis of the parameters that constitute the configuration. While distributed systems become more complex and interconnected, the requirements on configuration fault localization have changed. In this paper we present a new, simple but effective approach to configuration fault localization, which utilizes the difference in configuration parameters of components that share a resource. We establish a Reference Configuration State (RCS) by determining a set of non-faulty probing components for each faulty component with respect to shared resources. Performing difference in configuration of reference state with that of the faulty components localizes faulty configuration parameter. Experiments through simulations demonstrate that our approach is effective in identifying configuration faults with reduced time and increased accuracy. Our algorithm gracefully handles the complexity of the problem as the system size grows.

Intelligent user assistance for cost effective usage of mobile phone

Cost is the governing factor which defines the penetration and adoption of mobile phones in lower strata (lower income group) of the society particularly in developing countries like India. In this paper we describe an enhancement to the mobile phone design which interacts with the user to facilitate cost-conscious usage of the mobile phone. In particular, we propose an intelligent component in the mobile phone which tracks mobile usage pattern and informs the user of deviations in usage and suggests means of using the device cost effectively.

Compliance Measurement Framework (CMF)

IT service delivery processes need to adhere to several regulations such as security, confidentiality and data integrity. These regulations are typically defined as policies, each of which contains a list of clauses. These are usually verified by periodic audits, which are usually ad-hoc, time-consuming and difficulty verify objectively. In this paper, we present a formal framework - compliance measurement framework (CMF) - by which compliance of the instances of a process model to a policy can be formally modeled and objectively measured. The primary element of CMF is process policy compliance index (PPCI). It is the compliance score of a set of execution traces of a process model against the set of clauses of a single policy. This can be further extended to multi-PPCI - for multiple policies - and organizational compliance index (OCI) - for an aggregate score across the entire organization. This paper focus on dynamic compliance checks where the above indices are computed over several instances of process execution. By using enough instances of execution, the resulting index reflects the real state of non-compliance while also increasing the probability of all relevant paths within the process model being followed. In this paper, we focus on PPCI determination, leaving M-PPCI and OCI for future work.