Obinna Anya

rSLA: Monitoring SLAs in Dynamic Service Environments

Today’s application environments combine Cloud and on-premise infrastructure, as well as platforms and services from different providers to enable quick development and delivery of solutions to their intended users. The ability to use Cloud platforms to stand up applications in a short time frame, the wide availability of Web services, and the application of a continuous deployment model has led to very dynamic application environments. In those application environments, managing quality of service has become more important. The more external service vendors are involved the less control an application owner has and must rely on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). However, SLA management is becoming more difficult. Services from different vendors expose different instrumentation. In addition, the increasing dynamism of application environments entails that the speed of SLA monitoring set up must match the speed of changes to the application environment.

Evaluating practice-centered awareness in cross-boundary telehealth decision support systems

CaDHealth.Multi-method evaluation.Practice features enhance telehealth decision support. Building systems to enable knowledge sharing and decision support among clinicians across organizational and geographical boundaries is a complex but important task that lies at the core of the idea of telehealth. Practice-centered awareness has the potential to enhance the usability of cross-boundary clinical decision support systems by providing a shared context of work for decision support across organizational and geographical boundaries based on awareness of a clinicians work contexts and practice-related work activities, including local workarounds, non-explicit rules, improvisation strategies, institutional agenda and patients needs. We present a multi-method evaluation of the practice-centered awareness features of CaDHealth. CaDHealth is a clinical decision support system that enables clinicians to construct awareness of one anothers work activities and contexts across geographical and organizational boundaries based on three categories of work practice - ontological, stereotyped and situated work practices. Evaluation results indicate that incorporating practice-centered awareness features in telehealth systems results in better work coordination across organizational and geographical boundaries, leads to more effective cross-boundary clinical decision support, and enhances the perceived usefulness and adoption of telehealth and e-health applications.

A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job

Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer “sharing economy” are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of “open” and “crowd” work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this paper explores how experiences with open and crowd work systems serve as sites of workplace cultural re-imagining. A marketplace, a crowdwork system and a crowdfunding experiment, all implemented within IBM, are examined as instances of new workplace configurations.

Back to the future of organizational work: crowdsourcing and digital work marketplaces

Businesses increasingly accomplish work through innovative sourcing models that leverage the crowd. As a new way of distributing work across units within an organization and as a form of outsourcing work beyond organizational boundaries, crowdwork is inherently disruptive. Crowdwork raises a number of questions about its implications to the future of organizational work, including reconfigurations to the very nature of work, consideration of the opportunities and threats to both organizational forms and worker status, and about the systems that underlie and are meant to support crowdwork. There is a need for a clear research agenda to address these challenges and to inform the design of solutions for crowdwork as it integrates with other forms of organizational work.

rSLA: A Service Level Agreement Language for Cloud Services

The quality of Cloud services is a key determinant of the overall service level a provider offers to its customers. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are crucial for Cloud customers to ensure that promised levels of services are met, and an important sales instrument and a differentiating factor for providers. Cloud providers offer services at different levels of abstraction, from infrastructure to applications. Also, Cloud providers and services are often selected more dynamically than in traditional IT services, and as a result, SLAs need to be set up and monitoring implemented to match this speed. This paper presents the rSLA language for specifying and enforcing SLAs for Cloud services, allowing for dynamic instrumentation of heterogeneous Cloud services and instantaneous deployment of SLA monitoring. This is predicated on formal representations of SLAs in the language. We describe how the rSLA language and its supporting framework as well as underlying SLA execution model enable the fast deployment of custom SLAs in heterogeneous and hybrid Cloud environments.

The rSLA Framework: Monitoring and Enforcement of Service Level Agreements for Cloud Services

Managing service quality in heterogeneous Cloud environments is complex: different Cloud providers expose different management interfaces. To manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in this context, we have developed the rSLA framework that enables fast setup of SLA monitoring in dynamic and heterogeneous Cloud environments. The rSLA framework is made up of three main components: the rSLA language to formally represent SLAs, the rSLA Service, which interprets the SLAs and implements the behavior specified in them, and a set of Xlets - lightweight, dynamically bound adapters to monitoring and controlling interfaces. In this paper, we present the rSLA framework, and describe how it enables the monitoring and enforcement of service level agreements for heterogeneous Cloud services.

Bridge the Gap!: What Can Work Design in Crowdwork Learn from Work Design Theories?

Integrating crowd-based systems to organizations is highly complex. A major of source of this complexity stems from the nature of organizational work design. Work design and configurations of work performance, in the traditional organizational model, are tightly woven into the structure and functions of organizations, whereas crowdwork leverages an undefined network of people without an organized managerial or hierarchical model. This paper examines work design theories in organizational studies with a view to exploring their potential for addressing the fundamental challenges of work design in organizational crowdwork. Drawing on review of extant literature on crowdwork and analysis of perspectives in work design theories, the paper outlines ways in which crowdsourcing research, on one hand, can interpret and utilize work design theories, and on the other, contribute to redesigning work design theories to keep pace with the important and rapid transformation of work from the traditional staffing paradigm to crowd and open models.

Designing for practice-based context-awareness in ubiquitous e-health environments

Existing approaches for supporting context-aware knowledge sharing in ubiquitous healthcare give little attention to practice-based structures of knowledge representation. They guide knowledge re-use at an abstract level and hardly incorporate details of actionable tasks and processes necessary for accomplishing work in a real-world context. This paper presents a context-aware model for supporting clinical knowledge sharing across organizational and geographical boundaries in ubiquitous e-health. The model draws on activity and situation awareness theories as well as the Belief-Desire Intention and Case-based Reasoning techniques in intelligent systems with the goal of enabling clinicians in disparate locations to gain a common representation of relevant situational information in each others work contexts based on the notion of practice. We discuss the conceptual design of the model, present a formal approach for representing practice as context in a ubiquitous healthcare environment, and describe an application scenario and a prototype system to evaluate the proposed approach.

rSLA: An Approach for Managing Service Level Agreements in Cloud Environments

Cloud providers offer services at different levels of abstraction from infrastructure to applications. The quality of Cloud services is a key determinant of the overall service level a provider offers to its customers. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are (1) crucial for Cloud customers to ensure that promised levels of services are met, (2) an important sales instrument and (3) a differentiating factor for providers. Cloud providers and services are often selected more dynamically than in traditional IT services, and as a result, SLAs need to be set up and their monitoring implemented to match the same speed. In this context, managing SLAs is complex: different Cloud providers expose different management interfaces and SLA metrics differ from one provider to another. In this paper, we will analyze how IT service quality has been defined and managed over time, discuss how to manage SLAs in today’s multi-layer, multi-sourced Cloud environments, and what to expect going forward. A particular focus will be made on the rSLA framework that enables fast setup of SLA monitoring in dynamic and heterogeneous Cloud environments. The rSLA framework is made up of three main components: the rSLA language to formally represent SLAs, the rSLA Service, which interprets the SLAs and implements the behavior specified in them, and a set of Xlets-lightweight, dynamically bound adapters to monitoring and controlling interfaces. rSLA has been tested in the context of a real pilot and found to reduce the client on-boarding process from months to weeks.

Supporting practice-centered awareness in computer-mediated collaboration across communities of practice

Current approaches to supporting awareness in computer-mediated collaboration appear to fall short in two ways - (1) they focus primarily on synchronous collaborations among individuals working on a shared task, and (2) they do not sufficiently take account of the situated and socially mediated nature of work practices. This paper explores an alternative approach to awareness support in computer-mediated collaboration, which focuses on understanding and supporting awareness of activity at the work practice level, and enables coordination among individuals working on separate tasks across communities of practice. We describe a study that suggests how an understanding of the ontological, stereotyped, and situated aspects of human activity leads to awareness support at the work practice level. We outline a set of guidelines for supporting practice-centred awareness in system design, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in enabling decision support among clinicians working separately across boundaries of communities of practice.