Chun Hua Tian

Business Transformation Workbench: A Practitioner's Tool for Business Transformation

Business transformation is a key management initiative that attempts to align people, process and technology of an enterprise more closely with its business strategy and vision. It is an essential part of the competitive business cycle. Existing consulting methods and tools do not address issues such as scalability of methodology, knowledge management, asset reuse, and governance well, to name a few. This paper presents business transformation workbench, a practitioners tool for business transformation addressing these problems. It implements a methodical approach that was devised to analyze business transformation opportunities and make business cases for transformation initiatives and thereby provides decision-support to the consultants. It provides an intuitive way to evaluate and understand various opportunities in staff and IT consolidation and process standardization. It embodies structured analytical models, both qualitative and quantitative, to enhance the consultants practices. BT workbench has been instantiated with data from finance management domain and applied to address a client situation as a case study. An alpha testing of the tool was conducted with about dozen practitioners. 90% of the consultants who tested the BT workbench tool felt that the tool would help them do a better job during a client engagement. The tool is currently being piloted with customer engagements in a large IT consulting organization.

Service analytics framework for web-delivered services

Web-delivered service is an emerging approach for IT service to reduce IT service cost and improve delivery efficiency by leveraging the partnership and web technology. This paper proposes a three-tier analytical framework of web-delivered service to improve business deign based on the centralised information from the platform. At business model design tier, a role-based service ecosystem modelling method is presented to contain the duplication and evolvement of participants functionalities within the same model. Through the model, we can analyse the impact of business model on the business performance. At service analytics tier, we summarise the available data and categorise the operational analysis by roles. At self-transform tier, several potential functionalities are listed to help end client to do business transformation by themselves. Based on such framework, a case study in mini-ERP services is presented to illustrate how the analytics technology can help in business design of web-delivered service.

Modelling emission limits in product planning

We present a novel method to model different emission limits in product planning. Along with the increasing environmental pollution charges and taxes, modelling emission limits becomes critical for manufactories. We divide emission limits into three categories based on different regulations or rules from governments: periodical emission limits, overall emission limits and tradable emission limits. Then three implosive models are presented to integrate emission limits in product planning. Further, we introduce Watson Implosion Technology toolkit to model and optimise these emission limits uniformly, while emission limits are modelled as capacity, material and purchasable material respectively. We also study the extended problem that a replaceable product with lower emission is considered. Experiments demonstrate the quantitative influences on product planning from different kinds of emission limits, and the results can help manufactories to make decisions to maximise the profits with emission limits compli...