Laura C. Anderson

Toward cloud-agnostic middlewares

Cloud computing is a natural progression of service-oriented architecture. The Web as the platform: data with Web 2.0, programming and development with mashups, and deployments and resource provisioning with cloud computing. However, the Web was not necessarily designed to be an on-demand compute platform and infrastructure and certainly not designed to be a network for data centers which is what it is displacing with cloud computing. What are the challenges to advance cloud computing? For example, how do users of compute clouds make efficient usage of the heterogeneous nature of the Web and specifically of the choices between potentially engaging with public clouds versus creating enterprise private clouds, or some hybrid combination thereof? Additionally, since there are usually no single answers, due to a variety of compute workload demands, how should cloud providers and cloud users harvest, create, and utilize best practices in this new platform, thereby encouraging improvements in cloud engagements?

A digital library system for periodicals distribution

As part of IBMs Digital Library Initiative, IBMs Almaden Research Center has teamed with the Institute for Scientific Information in a joint project to deliver on-line access to the bibliographic information and abstracts from the scientific journal articles indexed in Current Contents/Life Sciences as well as articles offered by the respective publishers. This requires both adaptation of existing technologies and development of new capabilities, especially regarding copyright protection. Since the Fall of 1995, a pilot system has been installed at four universities, two corporate libraries, and a major public research library, beginning a study that involves many publishers, libraries, and users to test the system and to experiment with new economic models. This article describes some requirements we identified for this system, and the solutions we have devised for these requirements.

Process variation analysis using empirical methods: a case study

Large organizations often weigh the trade-offs of standardization versus customization of business processes. Standardization of processes results in cost reduction due to the focus on one process management system, one set of applications supporting it, and one set of process specifications and instructions to maintain and support. On the other hand, specific requirements for different business units, e.g., for a particular country or customer, often require several business processes variants to be implemented. When introducing a standardized process an organization has to identify howprocesses have been conducted in the past, identify variations and adjudicate which variations are necessary and which can be eliminated. This paper outlines a method of identifying process variations and demonstrates its application in a case study.

The Almaden Distributed Digital Library System

In this chapter we describe the architecture for the Almaden Distributed Digital Library System, which is intended to support an emerging “information marketplace”. Using a distributed server approach and accommodating heterogeneous environments, the system is designed to meet the diverse needs of the publishers, distributors, and users of scientific journal information at low cost, while protecting the information assets of the publishers and the privacy of the users. A prototype is currently being implemented in a joint effort by IBM Almaden Research Center and the Institute for Scientific Information. A pilot is planned to test the system and to explore new economic models.

Using Digital Trace Analytics to Understand and Enhance Scientific Collaboration

Social interaction and idea flow have been shown to be important factors in the collaboration work of scientific and technical teams. This paper describes a study to investigate scientific team collaboration and activity through digital trace data. Using a 27-month electronic mail data corpus from a scientific research project, we analyze team member participation and topics of discussion as a proxy for interaction and idea flow. Our results illustrate the progression of participation and conversational themes over the project lifecycle. We identify temporal evolution of work activities, influential roles and formation of communities throughout the project, and conversational aspects in the project lifecycle. This work is the first step of a larger research program analyzing multiple sources of digital trace data to understand team activity through organic products and byproducts of work.

The Strategic IP Insight Platform (SIIP): A Foundation for Discovery

With billions at stake in new product development, acquisitions and alliances, IBMs Strategic IP insight Platform (SIIP) delivers transformative results, helping clients gain strategic insights. Applied to the pharmaceutical industry, SIIP accelerates the discovery of information to more quickly and accurately answer questions such as: which chemical compounds are good for which targets? Whats the likelihood this compound will succeed? What diseases could be treated with this target? What are the candidate drugs that can be re-purposed for a given disease? Applied to drug discovery in life sciences, the SIIP platform leverages and integrates a wide range of public and private content, rich set of deep analytics and a massive-scale architecture to improve patient outcomes. SIIP was born prior to the proliferation of the many big data tools available today. We describe what tools and architecture decisions have been helpful in this first phase of solution development, and what tools and architectures we are relying on as we raise our own standard for performance and service delivery.

People and Social Interaction: Drivers of Service Innovation

Building an understanding of service innovation and how to foster it continues to be an important topic to academics and practitioners alike. This chapter examines service innovation from the vantage point of the service team. We introduce a research framework utilizing digital trace data from service team interaction and activity system analysis. An example research scenario illustrates the application of the research framework using email, meeting transcripts, and system application logs to work towards a broad and more real-time perspective of team interaction to identify innovation. We note that changes in the ebb-and-flow of service team activity and the appearance of unique signals may be a starting point. The challenge is to determine which metrics in the analyses are representative of innovation and how to automate the aggregated view to create a timeline of activity that will identify the emergence and impact of innovation. Future research opportunities include automated activity system analysis, the development and validation of metrics to measure service innovation, and the incorporation of an economic perspective.

Identifying and Managing Variation Scope in Service Management

Delivering services cost-effectively benefits from economies of scale, not dissimilar to the production of goods. Customizing services to the specific needs of a customer - either the service interfaces or the delivery system - incurs additional costs of setting up the service delivery system to be able to fulfill a specific variant and the excess costs of operating this additional system. Service providers need to understand the trade-off between service standardization and customization. We propose a domain independent approach to identify the variation scope of existing instances and derive a normative model of admissible configurations.