Neil Boyette

Smarter Financial Management -- An Answer to the Missing Link between Key Performance Indicators and Budgeting Decisions for Smarter Cities

Most government entities (cities, schools, etc) use traditional accounting systems and related financial tools to plan budgets. Some introduce more advanced technologies, such as ERP systems to perform this task. However both tend to focus on budgeting from a purely financial perspective and are incapable of linking the impact of budgeting decisions with the strategic objectives trying to be achieved. Even ERP systems typically focus on gathering the data and comparing it with the budget, not on the models underlying the budget itself. To address this gap, we introduce outcome based budgeting for cities and local governments, which takes a radically different approach to the budgeting process. Instead of departments, it looks at the government entities as the service systems they are. Every service a government entity provides has both a financial model, as well as a performance model. These models are linked so that the performance impacts of financial decisions can be investigated and studied. Individual service systems are also linked together into a larger service system, allowing the big picture for each financial decision to be seen. This approach offers better insight to decision makers and could help them prioritize projects for budgeting. It might even make the process politically less contentious by offering transparency and rationale to staff and citizens alike. Impacts that were once invisible are brought to light, allowing for smarter, fact-based decision making by the government leaders. Once adopted, outcome based budgeting opens up opportunities for various analytics, as services are well defined and have concrete models. These analytics allow for better decision-support via what-if scenario planning, and can over time help in project prioritization.

Exploiting XML technologies for intelligent document routing

Today, XML is increasingly becoming a standard for representation of semi-structured information such as documents that combines content and metadata. Typical document management applications include document representation, authoring, validation, and document routing in support of a business process. We propose a framework for intelligent document routing that exploits and extends XML technologies to automate dynamic document routing and real-time update of business routing logic. The document-routing logic is stored in a secure repository and executed by a business rules engine. During rule execution, the input parameters of each business rule are bound with the data from each inbound XML document. This document routing framework is validated in a real-world implementation with reduced development cost, accelerated rule update cycle and simplified administration efforts.

Forecasting Service Profitability

This paper describes ways to connect ledger cost behavior of a service delivery project with cost estimations derived at the time of contractual agreement. The purpose of this connection is to improve the management of the service life cycle, providing long range forecasting of the profitability of various service offerings. We emphasize cost, but our methods apply also to revenue, and consequently to profit. In a perfect financial world the connection between the cost estimate and the actual costs would be maintained in a tight feedback loop. The complex real world of multi-year and multi-country service delivery projects requires accommodation of (1) historical changes in accounting practices and (2) missing data. We describe the content of a cost case, the content of the ledger, and methods for forecasting profitability of parts of delivery projects using both the cost case and historical ledger experience of other similar projects. This paper reports a work in progress. We limit discussion of accuracy measurements to one benchmark, and we discuss potential improvements we have not yet implemented.

On the Role of Analytics in Estimating the Cost of Delivering Complex Information Technology (IT) Outsourcing Services Projects

In this paper, we describe the challenges in accurately estimating the cost of delivering complex IT outsourcing services deals from an IT services providers point of view, and we discuss how and which analytics can be employed to improve the accuracy of cost estimations. The accuracy of cost estimation is measured by the gap between the costs predicted at the time of contract signing and the actual costs incurred in delivering those solutions. Our proposed analytics are grounded in a set of observed influencing factors that are derived from our experience in developing costing tools for a large IT services provider, Also, we present a vision for building an ideal operational environment for IT service providers to achieve increased levels of visibility into their operations to improve the accuracy of their project cost estimates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of its kind that articulates the issues, challenges and the role of analytics for improving the accuracy of estimating the costs of delivering complex IT outsourcing projects from IT Service Provider point of view. We hope that our work serves as a call for future research in this area. We are currently actively developing some of the analytics proposed in this paper at a large IT services provider.

Eclipse modeling framework for document management

The lifecycle of document management applications typically comprises a set of loosely coupled subsystems that provide capture, index, search, workflow, fulfillment and archival features. However, there exists no standard model for composing these elements together to instantiate a complete application. Therefore, every application invariably incorporates custom application code to provide the linkages between each of these loosely coupled subsystems. This paper proposes a model-based approach to instantiating document management applications. An Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) based model is used to formalize the variable elements in the document management applications. The modeling tool supports the instantiation of an EMF model for every new application and supports the generation of runtime artifacts - this includes code, XML configurations, scripts and business logic. This approach to creating new instances of document management applications with a formal EMF model has been validated with a real-world document management application.

Towards a Low-Cost High-Quality Service Call Architecture

Efficient and effective call centers are critical to quality customer service. A framework and a system presented in this paper lower the operational costs and increase availability and scalability of global dynamic call centers in a major corporation. The framework decouples the runtime application perspective from the engine perspective of call flow execution, fundamentally improving the design paradigm of call center scripting

Towards Scaleable and Adaptive Document Routing Services

We propose a framework for intelligent document routing that extends XML technologies and enables realtime update of business routing logic. A novel feature of our system is the ability to semi-automate the process of creating and updating the routing rules. This is achieved by a closed loop system that performs clustering and inductive rule learning of document features. This framework was tested and deployed in a large real-world enterprise environment resulting in reduced development costs and simplified administration. The user interacts with the system using an application to graphically create, edit and publish the business processes

Budget allocation optimization in a complex multi-project environment

Most organizations are complex environments, where multiple projects interact with each other in many different ways. Projects can collaborate either serially or in parallel, yet at other times they compete with each other to test different approaches for the same goal. In such organizations, it is not uncommon for the wrong project to be funded or a right project to be under funded apparently for all the right reasons. In turn these project failures can cause big problems to their dependent projects, even having catastrophic impacts to the whole organization. Given a limited budget, it is critical to the organizations success to strategically optimize the set of projects that are initiated, and for these projects to be able to depend on their selected project dependencies or collaborators. Conceptually this is obvious, but in practice to identify the right set of projects and to allocate the right amount of budget is very challenging. We propose an approach to tackle the problem from a risk management perspective: first model each project as a chain of executable tasks and model the organization as a network of tasks; then optimize the budget allocation from the systems perspective.