Jih-Shyr Yih

An intelligent event adaptation mechanism for business performance monitoring

Business performance monitoring is to observe, analyze, and possibly control the execution of business operations. Often in the information technology implementation environment, dynamic events are generated to indicate the states of the business processes. These isolated and heterogeneous low-level events create needs for adaptation and standardization, before the events can be handled by a central mediation engine, which fillers, sorts and correlates events into key performance indicators relating to business goals. In this paper, we propose an intelligent event adaptation mechanism for capturing, analyzing, enriching and transforming application-dependent IT-level events into a standard event format called the common base event. The resulting event adapter can capture and process low-level events and forward only business related events to the central mediation engine. We select the SAP system as a reference application, and illustrate the configuration issues between the application and its adapter. The architecture and functionality of the proposed event adaptation mechanism are explained with practical industry problems and scenarios

A practical approach to extracting DTD-conforming XML documents from heterogeneous data sources

XML documents are becoming popular for business process integration. To achieve interoperability between applications, XML documents must also conform to various commonly used data type definitions (DTDs). However, most business data are not maintained as XML documents. They are stored in various native formats, such as database tables or LDAP directories. Hence, a middleware is needed to dynamically generate XML documents conforming to predefined DTDs from various data sources. As industrial consortia and large corporations have created various DTDs, it is both challenging and time-consuming to design the necessary middleware to conform to so many different DTDs. This problem is particularly acute for a small- or medium-sized enterprise because it lacks the IT skills to quickly develop such a middleware. In this paper, we present XLE, an XML Lightweight Extractor, as a practical approach to dynamically extracting DTD-conforming XML documents from heterogeneous data sources. XLE is based on a framework called DTD source annotation (DTDSA). It treats a DTD as the control structure of a program. The annotations become the program statements, such as functions and assignments. DTD-conforming XML documents are generated by parsing annotated DTDs. Basically, DTD annotations describe declaratively the mappings between target XML documents and the source data. The XLE engine implements a few basic annotations, providing a practical solution for many small- and medium-sized enterprises. However, XLE is designed to be versatile. It allows sophisticated users to plug in their own implementations to access new types of data or to achieve better performance. Heterogeneous data sources can be simply specified in the annotations. A GUI tool is provided to highlight the places where annotations are needed.

Network access fairness control for concurrent traffic in gigabit LANs

A buffer insertion ring with network access fairness control for gigabit LANs is proposed. The basic buffer insertion ring has the maximum spatial reuse on the multiple ring segments by allowing concurrent traffic, but it suffers from the possibility of station starvation. To solve this problem, a notion of adjustable fairness based on mutual interference between pairs of stations in bandwidth usage is defined. The adjustable fairness definition serves as a basis for conditions to trigger backpressure signals. A cooperative backpressure mechanism is invented for flow regulation. The effectiveness of the proposed network access mechanism is demonstrated by comparisons with other buffer insertion rings based on simulations.<<ETX>>

Pervasive computing technologies for retail in-store shopping

Retailers are constantly in search for ways to enhance customer satisfaction so as to differentiate with the competition and increase revenue. This paper describes an in-store commerce server implementation that leverages pervasive computing technologies to redefine the in-store shopping experience. The server evolves the existing point-of-sale systems into a store integration platform complete with reusable in-store solution building blocks. The paper illustrates how customer touch points such as cart-mounted Web pads can be supported to enable location-sensitive, personalized shopping assistance, and incremental self-checkout. New collaborative shopping paradigms can be created by service-oriented process choreography with other sales channels.

Enterprise data center governance using Web 2.0 portal and services integration

As the growth of IT spending has trended down to the mid-single digits in recent years, the IT services industry has continued to focus on productivity improvement to take out costs. While innovations in new service business and delivery models are keys to margin growth, service quality is ever more important to protect the client base. This paper reports end-to-end current practices in the enterprise hosting business, which is by far the largest revenue source in the overall IT services industry. The current preeminent problem is how data centers can be consolidated to host large numbers of servers economically. It is found that the scalability challenge is primarily a governance bottleneck. Research focus has been placed on streamlining the on-boarding processes with visual accountability of the delivery roles and collaboration with clients. It is shown how Web 2.0 technologies can be utilized in a new governance model for both productivity and quality improvements.

A Personalized Offer Presentation Scheme for Retail In-Store Applications

Retailers are constantly seeking new innovations to improve people’s shopping experience in order to deliver greater consumer and business values. One key objective is to keep the shoppers internet-connected for seamless and informed shopping, and be offered with timely and relevant shopping ideas. Complementing the existing Point-Of-Sale (POS) system, a new retail in-store server supporting personal mobile devices or kiosks is emerging in the retail chains towards the objective. This paper introduces such an in-store server and its role in the overall retail architecture, with the main focus placed on the in-store offer presentation scheme for personalizable service. A lightweight keyword-based rule engine is proposed for selecting offers. A detailed rule processing flow and an efficient implementation for the engine are described. For the ease of reviewing presented offers on a limited display space of a wireless shopping device, an offers layout method which organizes presented offers with individual items is also suggested. The in-store server can lead to seamless multi- channel collaborative shopping.

Data Center Hosting Services Governance Portal and Google Map-Based Collaborations

In the IT services business, a multi-year enterprise application hosting contract often carries a price tag that is an order of magnitude larger than that of the solution development. For hosting services providers to compete over the revenue stream, the ability to provide rapid application deployment is a critical consideration on top of the price differences. In fact, a data center is tested repeatedly in its responsiveness, as application hosting requires iterations of deployment adjustments due to business condition, IT optimization, security, and compliance reasons. In this paper, we report an enterprise application deployment governance portal, which coordinates service delivery roles, integrates system management tools, and above all keeps the clients involved or at least informed. In the data center operations such as: early engagement, requirement modeling, solution deployment designs, service delivery, steady state management, and close out; this paper illustrates how the Google Map technology can be used in representing both the target deployment architecture and delivery process. The Google map model can then be used in delivery process execution and collaborations. The resulting governance portal has been fully implemented and is in active use for the data center business transformation in IBM.

Enterprise Telesales Opportunity Pipelines Performance Management

Enterprise telesales is most different from consumer sales by having a prolonged sales cycle, in weeks or months, in order to integrate various internal supports to validate and satisfy complex client demands and needs. Managers of such telesales centers are often challenged by the elaborate tasks of tracking the subtle progress of these pipelines of sales opportunities. Thus, an on-demand dashboard for the managers as well as the telesales representatives is a critical IT tool to address this unique problem. This paper provides insights into the business performance management (BPM), a technology used in business intelligence to enable users to observe, analyze, and act upon the information at the right time. To describe a sales cycle and the tracking needs, we start with a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a staged pipeline progression model. Based on business rules and threshold conditions for these KPIs, sets of business situations and alerts are generated for presentation. Finally, a hierarchical design is explained with drill-down capabilities for a typical reporting structure of a telesales center. The productivity of an IBM telesales center under such proactive management has been found to be six to seven times more cost effective than traditional field sales

An active adapter with edge cache approach for order status information integration

Sharing information among multiple business operations and distributed locations in an integrated manner has always been one of the central issues in business activity and process management. The effectiveness of the entire commerce value chain for an enterprise is largely dependent on the satisfaction of the information requesters. Improving upon the typical data federation approach, we propose to add data caches in the adapters that connect directly to the information requesters for fast data retrieval. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we have implemented the new active features for the IBM Websphere Business Integration middleware. Experimental results show that the active adapter approach significantly reduces the average data access time under a real order status tracking system.

A Model-Driven SOA Implementation of Multi-Channel Websphere Commerce Gift Center

This multi-channel commerce gift registry solution is a design using a service-oriented architecture for real-time communication amongst a central Web application server, store branches and telesales centers. Product information, promotions, order entries, and services are fully integrated across sales channels and customer touch points, such as Web browsers, telephones, store kiosks, wireless shopping buddies, and scanners. This solution was developed by a model-driven approach, which begins with modeling of business processes of how shoppers can be enabled from gift ideas to coordinated gift givings, during which each is possibly working with a different channel and at different stores. The solution has helped create the Websphere Commerce Gift Center as a leadership product offering, recognized by the Gartner Magic Quadrant for e-Commerce in 2007.