John Vergo

User Attitudes Regarding a User-Adaptive eCommerce Web Site

Despite an abundance of recommendations by researchers and more recently by commercial enterprises for adaptive interaction techniques and technologies, there exists little experimental validation of the value of such approaches to users. We have conducted user studies focussed on the perceived value of a variety of personalization features for an eCommerce Web site for computing machinery sales and support. Our study results have implications for the design of user-adaptive applications. Interesting findings include unenthusiastic user attitudes toward system attempts to infer user needs, goals, or interests and to thereby provide user-specific adaptive content. Users also expressed equivocal opinions of collaborative filtering for the specific eCommerce scenarios we studied; thus personalization features popular in one eCommerce environment may not be effective or useful for other eCommerce domains. Users expressed their strong desire to have full and explicit control of data and interaction. Lastly, users want readily to be able to make sense of site behavior, that is, to understand a site’s rationale for displaying particular content.

MedSpeak: report creation with continuous speech recognition

MedSpeakiRadiology is a product that allows radiologists to create, edit and manage reports using real-time, continuous speech recognition. Speech is used both to navigate through the application, and to dictate reports. The system is multi-modal, accepting input by either voice, mouse or keyboard. This paper reports on how we addressed the critical user need of high throughput in our interface design, and ways of supporting both error prevention and error correction with continuous speech. User studies suggest that for this task there was low tolerance for accuracy less than 100?40,but the additional time required for corrections was considered by many radiologists to be acceptable in view of the overall reduction in report turn around time.

Personalizing the user experience on ibm.com

In this paper, we describe the results of an effort to first understand the value of personalizing a Web site, as perceived by the visitors to the site as well as by the stakeholder organization that owns it, and then to develop a strategy for introducing personalization to the ibm.com Web site. We started our investigation by conducting literature reviews, holding brainstorming sessions with colleagues around the world, and performing heuristic usability evaluations of several relevant Web sites. We adopted a User-Centered Design approach and conducted a number of usability studies applied to the subset of the ibm.com Web site that business customers use for all aspects of purchase, service, and support of computer equipment. These studies employed a number of low- and medium- fidelity prototypes that we developed for this purpose. Our proposal for personalizing ibm.com consists of a set of 12 personalization features, selected for the value they offer to customers and to the business.

Artifact-Based Transformation of IBM Global Financing

IBM Global Financing (IGF) is transforming its business using the Business Artifact Method, an innovative business process modeling technique that identifies key business artifacts and traces their life cycles as they are processed by the business. IGF is a complex, global business operation with many business design challenges. The Business Artifact Method is a fundamental shift in how to conceptualize, design and implement business operations. The Business Artifact Method was extended to solve the problem of designing a global standard for a complex, end-to-end process while supporting local geographic variations. Prior to employing the Business Artifact method, process decomposition, Lean and Six Sigma methods were each employed on different parts of the financing operation. Although they provided critical input to the final operational model, they proved insufficient for designing a complete, integrated, standard operation. The artifact method resulted in a business operations model that was at the right level of granularity for the problem at hand. A fully functional rapid prototype was created early in the engagement, which facilitated an improved understanding of the redesigned operations model. The resulting business operations model is being used as the basis for all aspects of business transformation in IBM Global Financing.

Siena: From PowerPoint to Web App in 5 Minutes

Siena lets users design web applications using commonly available PowerPoint as the modeling/development tool. From PowerPoint, users can model business artifacts and processes, transform applications to a standard representation and then immediately deploy and execute these composite applications on a model execution engine.

Object oriented reuse: experience in developing a framework for speech recognition applications

The development of highly interactive software systems with complex user interfaces has become increasingly common, where prototypes are often used as a vehicle for demonstrating visions of innovative systems. Given this trend, it is important for new technology to be based on flexible architectures that do not mandate the understanding of all complexities inherent in a system. In this context, we share our experience with developing an object oriented framework for a specific new technology, i.e. speech recognition. We describe the benefits of the object oriented paradigm rich with design patterns, which provide a natural way to model complex concepts and capture system relationships effectively, along with achieving a high level of software reuse.

Using component business modeling to facilitate business enterprise architecture and business services at the US Department of Defense

Component business modeling (CBM) is an aggregation of models, methods and techniques that are designed to organize, understand, evaluate, and ultimately, transform an enterprise. The decomposition of an enterprise into well bounded and discrete business components enables a straightforward understanding of a complex enterprise and facilitates the realization of business intent by information technology. This paper examines the use of CBM within the government sector. At more than twice the size of the worlds largest commercial enterprise, the Business Management Modernization Program (BMMP) of the Department of Defense (DoD) is undertaking a dramatic and complex business transformation. Our team proposed the use of CBM to address their objectives. We first discuss how business components (referred to as business capabilities by the DoD) is used to leverage the enterprise architecture, to analyze business transformation opportunities, and to identify business services. We then describe how the results of CBM can be used to refine a service oriented view of the business

Summarizing technical support documents for search: expert and user studies

One factor that may affect whether users of technical support Web sites can rapidly find information relevant to their needs is the quality of the summary of documents returned as the result of search queries. This paper reports on two studies that were part of an effort to create high-quality machine-generated summaries for the presentation of search results for technical support documents. The initial study asked experts to compose document summaries. The results of the first study were used to guide the development of heuristics for generating programmatic summaries that were tested in the second study, which was a user evaluation that compared the effectiveness of four types of document summaries for search purposes: programmatic summaries based on selective sentence extraction using knowledge of the semantic structure of documents, a term-hits-in-context (THIC) summary, the current summaries on the companys live site, and document titles alone. This comparison sought to determine the techniques most likely to help users find information, hence increasing customer goal attainment and satisfaction. The implications of our results for summarizing technical support documents for search are discussed.

Evaluation of IT portfolio options by linking to business services

The management of IT portfolios in most enterprises is a complex and challenging ongoing process. IT portfolios typically contain large numbers of inter-related elements. In this paper, we present a model and a method for determining and evaluating IT portfolio options for use as a decision aid in the ongoing management of the portfolio. Business benefits of the portfolio options are articulated by linking IT portfolio elements to componentized business services. Characteristics of the IT portfolio elements are abstracted to a level of granularity suited for portfolio analysis. Our model allows various forms of uncertainty that are utilized in the evaluation. Our evaluation method determines a set of portfolio options with the associated cost/benefits tradeoffs. Business constraints and pruning methods are used to present only the relevant and available options and their tradeoffs to the IT portfolio manager.

Cognitive company discovery

Cognitive Company Discovery is an application that helps business professionals identify companies of interest to them. The application employs a variety of artificial intelligence and data science techniques to build a corpus of company data, rapidly search the corpus based on implicit and explicit user queries, present the results using visualization techniques that yield insight into areas of interest to the user and to scan vast amounts of news and blog posts to aid users in discovering new companies. The application is currently deployed in a major corporation. A video that demonstrates our system can be found at the following URL: https://player.vimeo.com/video/278031050