Jeaha Yang

Data Service Portal for application integration in cloud computing

Cloud computing offers both an opportunity and a challenge to the application interoperability. In a cloud computing environment, it may be easier to integrate software applications than in the traditional enterprise computing environment, if they all run on the same cloud platform, especially, on a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform, following a common programming model. However, making multiple applications running on different computing clouds would make it more difficult to deal with multiple cloud platforms and their differences. This paper presents a novel service and data management platform called DSP (Data Service Portal) in the cloud computing environment that facilitates the integration of applications by sharing their information in a loosely coupled manner. DSP enables applications to collectively exchange data through a platform in a fine-grained access control environment. The applications can work cooperatively, through the data sharing mechanism provided by the platform playing the role of a data broker, without being aware of each others presence. An individual application can maintain its own data and run independently of the other applications in the platform. The data sharing mechanism enables the applications to offer (or subscribe to) a set of data to be consumed by (or produced by) the other applications in the platform. The platform publishes the data model along with APIs and guidelines for applications to adapt to the DSP platform and get to on-board to the platform for the subscriptions.

Incident Ticket Analytics for IT Application Management Services

An important IT service outsourcing business is to resolve incidents related to IT infrastructures our clients contract our company to support. Incidents are recorded as structured and unstructured data in tickets, which contain various characteristics about the incidents including timestamps, description and resolution Analyzing such incident tickets becomes a critical task in managing the operations of the service in order to keep the operations within the agreed upon service level agreement. Ticket analytics is essential to identify anomalies and trends, as well as detect unusual patterns in the operations; such analysis is hard to do manually especially for large accounts with complex organization and scopes. This paper focuses on ticket analytics and some key statistical techniques applied in the analyses. Finally, we use real-data examples to demonstrate these techniques and discuss major challenges of ticket analyses.

Towards interoperability in municipal government: a study of information sharing practices

Municipal governments rely heavily on the sharing of data between departments as a means to provide high-quality and timely service to its citizens. Common tasks such as parcel renovations require the involvement of multiple departments such as Building, Planning, Zoning, Assessment and Tax to achieve the ultimate goals. However, the software applications used to support the work of these departments are provided by independent software vendors and are not integrated with one another. Therefore, municipal employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing. We conducted a study of 12 municipal governments to understand their information sharing needs and practices. We focused on the interaction and information sharing within and between municipal departments. Our findings can be used to shape future research on e-government initiatives and interoperability of municipal applications.

Municipal Shared Services Cloud

In essence, governments are information-intensive service enterprises. Electronic government (e-government also known as digital government, online government, among others) is an effort to address the issues in operations, information and IT. It aims to create open and efficient interactions among many stakeholders, e.g. governments, citizens, and business enterprises. In this paper, we detail the importance of information sharing in support of citizen-based service delivery and e-government initiatives. We also describe a study of 12 New York State municipalities and their specific needs and challenges relating to service delivery. We then present our research work on the Municipal Shared Services Cloud, and describe how this technology can be used to deliver municipal government IT services more efficiently and at a lower cost while providing enhanced and customizable information sharing capabilities.

Application management services analytics

Enterprises often maintain many IT applications to support their business. Application Management Services (AMS) aim to maintain high levels of service quality and availability by restoring normal application service operations and minimizing negative business impact. In this paper, we present the AMS Analytics System for improving the productivity and quality of delivery for AMS practices. Issues regarding IT applications are formally referred as IT incidents or tickets, which are an important vehicle for measuring quality of AMS. IT incident ticket analytics, an important component of of the analytics system, measures workload variability, resource productivity and delivery performance using algorithms from statistics, queuing theory, data clustering and signal processing. The AMS Analytics System provides a standardized, integrated analytics platform supporting AMS delivery. It is built on a Web platform using a set of standard open stack software, enhanced with advanced analytics. Since its initial release, we have applied the AMS Analytics System to several dozens of real-world enterprise users, receiving very positive feedback.

Information quality issues in municipal governments

E-government initiatives rely on information as the central resource for transparency in interactions between governments, citizens, and enterprises. The availability and quality of information is critical for the successful achievement of e-government. This paper details the findings of our study of the technology infrastructure and information sharing practices of 12 New York State local governments. We discovered a number of key information quality issues that plague local governments such as data fragmentation, redundancy, and conflict. We explain how these issues have an immediate impact on the work of the government employees and quality of service to citizens, and a longer-term impact as a barrier to e-government initiatives. Additionally, we detail factors that contribute to issues of information quality and suggest ways to address these issues and ultimately enable more efficient government.

Improving service coordination in municipal government with the Shared Data Manager

In this paper, we describe our work in the design and evaluation of a tool, the Shared Data Manager, to be used to enable automatic data sharing capabilities for municipal government applications. In an earlier study, we determined that municipal government employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing, which is time-consuming and error-prone. We describe in detail our findings from a two-week evaluation of the Shared Data Manager system with municipal employees. Overall, municipal employees found the tool to be useful for sharing data between departments and customizing data sharing access controls.

Shared Data Manager for Next-Generation IT for Municipal Governments

For the next generation IT services, we have created a cloud-based platform for delivering web-based IT services to municipal governments called the Government Data Portal (GDP). This portal, which draws up on the lessons learned from an extensive study of municipal governments and their operations, offer several features that are especially designed to address the needs of the target market. The GDP allows municipal governments to subscribe to a set of applications in a shared service computing environment. The portal employs a novel approach referred to as the Shared Data Manager (SDM) that facilitates sharing of data among GDP applications in a loosely coupled manner. The main function of the SDM is to allow the users to coordinate access to the shared data. Specifically, it controls the manner in which member applications of a subscription set access the subscribers central shared data. The GDP and the SDM were piloted with several municipal governments, validating the technology and the service operational model. This paper discusses the technical details of the design and implementation of the GDP and the SDM. Additionally, it presents results from an empirical study and discusses the implications. While this paper focuses on the IT services for municipal governments, the problems that are not unique to municipal governments, and the proposed solution is not limited to the area. Indeed, our solution can be effective and useful in the enterprise as well.