Evan D. Morrison

Strategic alignment of business processes

Strategic alignment is a mechanism by which an organization can visualize the relationship between its business processes and strategies. It enables organizational decision makers to collect meaningful insights based on their current processes. Currently it is difficult to show the sustainability of an organization and to determine an optimal set of processes that are required for realizing strategies. Further, there is not a general framework for strategic alignment that can ease this problem. In this article, we propose such a general framework for strategic alignment, which helps develop a clear understanding of the relationships between strategies and business processes. The framework gives organizations an understanding of the relationship between a set of processes and the realization of a set of strategies; it also shows the optimal set of processes that can achieve these strategies.

Definition of a Description Language for Business Service Decomposition

In the last few years, service-oriented computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for describing Web services. There has not been as much work in defining languages or ontologies for describing services from business perspectives.

The business service representation language: a preliminary report

The recent interest in services science has led to research in business service management, using a multi-disciplinary synthesis of thinking from the disciplines of computing, management, marketing and potentially several others. Business services can be of many different kinds. The notion includes within in its ambit business process outsourcing services, clinical services, customer contact services as well as IT-enabled services, to name a few representative examples. A key component of any business service management framework is a service modeling language.

First-Stage Development and Validation of a Web-Based Automated Dietary Modeling Tool: Using Constraint Optimization Techniques to Streamline Food Group and Macronutrient Focused Dietary Prescriptions for Clinical Trials.

Background Standardizing the background diet of participants during a dietary randomized controlled trial is vital to trial outcomes. For this process, dietary modeling based on food groups and their target servings is employed via a dietary prescription before an intervention, often using a manual process. Partial automation has employed the use of linear programming. Validity of the modeling approach is critical to allow trial outcomes to be translated to practice. Objective This paper describes the first-stage development of a tool to automatically perform dietary modeling using food group and macronutrient requirements as a test case. The Dietary Modeling Tool (DMT) was then compared with existing approaches to dietary modeling (manual and partially automated), which were previously available to dietitians working within a dietary intervention trial. Methods Constraint optimization techniques were implemented to determine whether nonlinear constraints are best suited to the development of the automated dietary modeling tool using food composition and food consumption data. Dietary models were produced and compared with a manual Microsoft Excel calculator, a partially automated Excel Solver approach, and the automated DMT that was developed. Results The web-based DMT was produced using nonlinear constraint optimization, incorporating estimated energy requirement calculations, nutrition guidance systems, and the flexibility to amend food group targets for individuals. Percentage differences between modeling tools revealed similar results for the macronutrients. Polyunsaturated fatty acids and monounsaturated fatty acids showed greater variation between tools (practically equating to a 2-teaspoon difference), although it was not considered clinically significant when the whole diet, as opposed to targeted nutrients or energy requirements, were being addressed. Conclusions Automated modeling tools can streamline the modeling process for dietary intervention trials ensuring consistency of the background diets, although appropriate constraints must be used in their development to achieve desired results. The DMT was found to be a valid automated tool producing similar results to tools with less automation. The results of this study suggest interchangeability of the modeling approaches used, although implementation should reflect the requirements of the dietary intervention trial in which it is used.

Correlating Services with Business Objectives in the ServAlign Framework

We present a novel approach to modeling business objectives (strategies) and a novel notion of alignment between strategy and service models leading to the successfully deployed ServAlign tool that supports automated alignment analysis.

A Novel Use of Big Data Analytics for Service Innovation Harvesting

Service innovation has assumed considerable significance with the growth of the services sectors of economies globally, yet progress has been slow in devising carefully formulated, systematic techniques to under pin service innovation. This paper argues that a novel approach to big data analytics offers interesting solutions in this space. The paper argues that the use of big data analytics for generating enterprise service insights is often ignored (while the extraction of insights about customers, the market and the enterprise context has received considerable attention). The paper offers a set of techniques (collectively referred to as innovation harvesting) which leverage big data in various forms, including object state sensor data, behaviour logs as well large-scale sources of open data such as the web to mine service innovation insights. The paper also outlines how systematic search might help overcome the limitations of big data analytics in this space.

Dealing with imprecise compliance requirements

Business process compliance management is a field of study involving the co-ordination of business process management and compliance systems. A compliance system is an organisation wide tool that links legislative and business rules to organization policies and processes. The objective of such a system is to promote a self sustaining level of operations that minimizes the losses caused to the business through breaches of laws or internal misappropriations. We view a compliance system in a similar fashion to that of an accounting system where each process is treated as a transaction. Each process may be monitored and valuations of costing and benefits associated to each task. Both high order policy creation as well as low order transactional histories of single processes must be considered to obtain a complete picture of current operations. In this paper we discuss benefits and shortcomings in some of the currently implemented compliance schemes and present a method for measuring the degree of compliance that each business process may achieve.

Using crowd-sourcing to Verify a Radiation Oncology Ontology: a Summer Project

We have been unable to nd a verifi ed, published Radiation Oncology Ontology. We undertook the process of verifying a Radiation Oncology Ontology with a mixture of crowd-sourcing and expert-based approaches to verify relationships in the ontology. We used a natural language based approach to portray concepts and relationships, surveying users to assess the relationships between concepts in the Radiation Oncology ontology. The work used a description of a patients history expressed in XML. The natural language statements relating concepts are available on a website for veri cation, and readers are invited to complete the survey at http://coi-hs-survey.appspot.com/ to contribute.