Rangachari Anand

Data Service Portal for application integration in cloud computing

Cloud computing offers both an opportunity and a challenge to the application interoperability. In a cloud computing environment, it may be easier to integrate software applications than in the traditional enterprise computing environment, if they all run on the same cloud platform, especially, on a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform, following a common programming model. However, making multiple applications running on different computing clouds would make it more difficult to deal with multiple cloud platforms and their differences. This paper presents a novel service and data management platform called DSP (Data Service Portal) in the cloud computing environment that facilitates the integration of applications by sharing their information in a loosely coupled manner. DSP enables applications to collectively exchange data through a platform in a fine-grained access control environment. The applications can work cooperatively, through the data sharing mechanism provided by the platform playing the role of a data broker, without being aware of each others presence. An individual application can maintain its own data and run independently of the other applications in the platform. The data sharing mechanism enables the applications to offer (or subscribe to) a set of data to be consumed by (or produced by) the other applications in the platform. The platform publishes the data model along with APIs and guidelines for applications to adapt to the DSP platform and get to on-board to the platform for the subscriptions.

The Dialog manager a system for managing procedural knowledge

The Dialog Manager is a conversational web-based tool that helps organizations manage procedural knowledge. In the modern enterprise, procedural knowledge is of particular importance for service delivery organizations. The Dialog Manager helps standardization of operating procedures in order to deliver a consistently high level of service. In turn, it provides a systematic approach to capturing, managing and disseminating procedural knowledge. The Dialog Manager captures procedural knowledge in the form of dialogs that serve as interactive guides by offering a visual knowledge representation and an integrated content management system. It also provides a sophisticated conversation management mechanism that records and manages the activation status of nodes in a conversation. With advanced question selection algorithms, it makes the performance of procedural knowledge effective. The Dialog Manager has been piloted with the Application Management Services practice of IBM Global Business Services. Currently, the Dialog Manager is being used primarily for teams managing and supporting software applications for large enterprise customers in service engagements. We currently have several hundred users and expect the user population to grow to several thousand by the end of the year. The system has been received enthusiastically by users and in a recent survey. We found that over 70% found the tool to be of value to them and that it significantly improves the productivity of the practitioners. While the initial area of deployment has been in the area of IT services, the Dialog Manager is equally well suited to handling all kinds of procedural knowledge in the enterprise.

Towards interoperability in municipal government: a study of information sharing practices

Municipal governments rely heavily on the sharing of data between departments as a means to provide high-quality and timely service to its citizens. Common tasks such as parcel renovations require the involvement of multiple departments such as Building, Planning, Zoning, Assessment and Tax to achieve the ultimate goals. However, the software applications used to support the work of these departments are provided by independent software vendors and are not integrated with one another. Therefore, municipal employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing. We conducted a study of 12 municipal governments to understand their information sharing needs and practices. We focused on the interaction and information sharing within and between municipal departments. Our findings can be used to shape future research on e-government initiatives and interoperability of municipal applications.

Enabling customizable service-based procedural knowledge applications — An service-orientation for Dialog Manager

The Dialog Manager is a conversational web-based tool that helps organizations manage procedural knowledge. A dialog is a visual knowledge representation of certain procedural knowledge enriched with interactive guides. To empower the usage of dialog, we further provide a service-orientation for Dialog Manager, aiming to enable customized service-based knowledge applications. Such service-orientation will enable a user to select services to answer questions from dialog automatically during runtime. It will also enable the subject matter expert (SME) to specify the external services to make good use of user dialog data to facilitate ticket issuing and resolution. Through a case study, we will demonstrate the great business impact of our proposal.

Municipal Shared Services Cloud

In essence, governments are information-intensive service enterprises. Electronic government (e-government also known as digital government, online government, among others) is an effort to address the issues in operations, information and IT. It aims to create open and efficient interactions among many stakeholders, e.g. governments, citizens, and business enterprises. In this paper, we detail the importance of information sharing in support of citizen-based service delivery and e-government initiatives. We also describe a study of 12 New York State municipalities and their specific needs and challenges relating to service delivery. We then present our research work on the Municipal Shared Services Cloud, and describe how this technology can be used to deliver municipal government IT services more efficiently and at a lower cost while providing enhanced and customizable information sharing capabilities.

Improving IT Service Incident Resolution by Using an FAQ System

As the enterprise computing becomes more and more complex, recently, the cost of IT system maintenance in enterprises has become a significant problem from the perspective of technology as well as business operations. One approach to managing the IT system maintenance cost is preparing and leveraging an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) system as a way of knowledge management and reuse. However, because the preparation of an FAQ system and data may take significant investment, a cost justification for such a system is essential. In an effort to analyze the cost and effect of the FAQ approach, in this paper, we observed a software maintenance project where 66 FAQs were prepared and monitored for a period of 15 months. We found that 67% of the practitioners resolution time was saved with FAQ references. We also applied our novel Natural Language Processing techniques using conditional branches, sequential analysis and topic detection as domain independent methods. We found that the number of text segments has strong correlation with the time and cost savings. We designed an FAQ system based on these findings and observed that more than 70% of the practitioners who tested the system reported that it is useful and significantly improved their productivity.

Information quality issues in municipal governments

E-government initiatives rely on information as the central resource for transparency in interactions between governments, citizens, and enterprises. The availability and quality of information is critical for the successful achievement of e-government. This paper details the findings of our study of the technology infrastructure and information sharing practices of 12 New York State local governments. We discovered a number of key information quality issues that plague local governments such as data fragmentation, redundancy, and conflict. We explain how these issues have an immediate impact on the work of the government employees and quality of service to citizens, and a longer-term impact as a barrier to e-government initiatives. Additionally, we detail factors that contribute to issues of information quality and suggest ways to address these issues and ultimately enable more efficient government.

A flexible security model for using Internet content

Java applets, Netscape plug-ins and ActiveX controls have led to the popularization of a new paradigm: extensive downloading of executable code into applications to enhance the functionality of the desktop. One of the problems with this paradigm is the need to control the access rights of the downloaded content. In this paper, we describe a system for downloading content from the Internet and controlling its actions on a client machine. Our system generates a protection domain for the downloaded content dynamically rising the contents requested domain and a policy database that describes the users trust in the contents manufacturer and type. Our system ensures that this protection domain is enforced throughout the execution of the content. We have modified the Java Virtual Machine to implement our security model. Our implementation, called Flexxguard, is freely available at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com.

Improving service coordination in municipal government with the Shared Data Manager

In this paper, we describe our work in the design and evaluation of a tool, the Shared Data Manager, to be used to enable automatic data sharing capabilities for municipal government applications. In an earlier study, we determined that municipal government employees rely heavily on manual methods for data sharing, which is time-consuming and error-prone. We describe in detail our findings from a two-week evaluation of the Shared Data Manager system with municipal employees. Overall, municipal employees found the tool to be useful for sharing data between departments and customizing data sharing access controls.

Shared Data Manager for Next-Generation IT for Municipal Governments

For the next generation IT services, we have created a cloud-based platform for delivering web-based IT services to municipal governments called the Government Data Portal (GDP). This portal, which draws up on the lessons learned from an extensive study of municipal governments and their operations, offer several features that are especially designed to address the needs of the target market. The GDP allows municipal governments to subscribe to a set of applications in a shared service computing environment. The portal employs a novel approach referred to as the Shared Data Manager (SDM) that facilitates sharing of data among GDP applications in a loosely coupled manner. The main function of the SDM is to allow the users to coordinate access to the shared data. Specifically, it controls the manner in which member applications of a subscription set access the subscribers central shared data. The GDP and the SDM were piloted with several municipal governments, validating the technology and the service operational model. This paper discusses the technical details of the design and implementation of the GDP and the SDM. Additionally, it presents results from an empirical study and discusses the implications. While this paper focuses on the IT services for municipal governments, the problems that are not unique to municipal governments, and the proposed solution is not limited to the area. Indeed, our solution can be effective and useful in the enterprise as well.