Shun Jiang

Value network model for service ecosystem in business environment

Thanks to the speedy development of science and technology, the service sector of economy has plays more and more important role in modern society. Its rapid growth has led it outstrip the other two sectors of economy, agriculture and industry. However the research of service, such as service science, management and engineering, comparing with agriculture and industry, is rare. In this paper, the service characteristics, definitions and classifications of services have been analyzed and compared. The modeling methods for services have been illustrated too. Based on this illustration and comparison, we suggest describing service by its components. By analyzing the relationship of each component, a value network model is provided to describe the service ecosystem in business environment. At last a simple example is given to analyze how the service providers work in a competitive business environment.

Pricing IT Services Deals: A More Agile Top-Down Approach

Information technology service providers bid on high valued services deals in a competitive environment. To price these deals, the traditional bottom up approach is to prepare a complete solution, i.e., know the detailed services to be offered to the client, find the exact costs of these services, and then add a gross profit to reach the bidding price. This is a very time consuming and resource intensive process. There is a business need to get quick (agile) early estimates of both cost and price using a core set of high level data for the deal. In this paper, we develop a two-step top down approach for doing this. In the first step, we mine historical and market data to come up with estimates on the cost and price. We provide some numerical results based on industry data that statistically shows that there is a benefit of using historical data in this step beside the traditional way of using market data. Because the bidding price is not the sole factor affecting the chances of winning a deal, we then enter the different price points in a predictive analytics model (step two) to calculate the relative probability of winning the deal at each point. Such probabilities with the corresponding prices can provide significant insights to the business helping them reach quick reliable pricing.

Extensive Epidemic Spreading Model Based on Multi-agent System Framework

In current epidemic spreading study, continuous system dynamics model and discrete agent model are often regarded as two types of incompatible models. However these two types of models may coexist in large-scale epidemic simulation. A multi-agent based framework for such coexisting is proposed in this paper consisting of location agents with hierarchical structure, participant agents to denote host, pathogen, or medium, and event agent to model the epidemic outbreak, control policy, etc. Transformation algorithm is provided for the communication between locations with different types of epidemic models. Such a framework is illustrated by SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak case.

Business Value Assessment of Packaged Applications

Unlike others, IT services using packaged applications such as SAP and Oracle modules highly reuse and configure prepackaged software modules. However, the implementation and configuration situation of a packaged application project may significantly differ from another. In this paper, we propose a generic method and model for assessing the cost and benefit of IT services using packaged applications. The proposed method utilizes a questionnaire-based approach to project scoping to capture the heterogeneity. The questionnaire also helps define rules to model the relationship between effort requirements and possible scenarios of packaged application implementation. The proposed method utilizes a rule-based approach to generate cost estimations of given IT service projects. For packaged applications, template data can be pre-defined and customized by using reference process and metrics models, and solution hierarchies. Then, for a given implementation scenario, the business value is estimated by using and customizing the template data. Once the cost and benefit of an IT initiative is assessed as described, other derivative analyses such as business case analyses and pricing can be done by using the estimated costs and business benefits.

On Assessing the Competitiveness of IT Service Solutions

We present a method and a system for assessing the competitiveness of IT service solutions. The method enables sales teams to assess the competitiveness of their IT service solutions created during the sales phase in response to request for proposal (RfP). It involves comparing unit costs and unit prices of a given solution with those of client expectations, comparable prior deals and agreed upon rates defined within an IT service provider organization, competition and market. Our contributions include an approach to modeling IT service solutions in a consistent manner to enable comparison. This is a pre-requisite to the second step of comparing IT service solutions. Second, an approach to comparing IT service solutions is proposed. The approach takes into account structured and unstructured attributes as well as qualitative and quantitative values of attributes during comparison. We are currently performing precision and recall experiments at an IT service organization using 200 prior deals. Initial results are encouraging. In the absense of any prior tools to do this, our system is already proving to be a valuable asset to the IT service organization that we are developing the solution for.

Asynchronously Rendering Interoperable Remote Portlets

Under current synchronous portal rendering mechanism, a user has to wait until all the portlets are ready for the next interaction. In the case of consuming remote portlets with Web services for remote portlets (WSRP) specification, the situation can be worse. To improve user experiences, an asynchronous mechanism is proposed in this paper leveraging popular Ajax technology. We also discussed several issues such as URL rewriting, cross-portlet interaction, security, etc. that have to be considered while applying asynchronous mechanism, and built up a prototype to prove that using Ajax in rendering remote portlets while providing cross-portlet interaction capability is feasible.

A Dynamic Concept Interpretation Approach for OWL Extension

To add descriptive ability to knowledge representation (KR) system based on OWL, many extensions to OWL are proposed to augment its expressive power. Many of these extensions take the approach by changing the syntax and semantic of the description logic corresponding to OWL. A new approach is proposed in this paper by using a dynamic concept interpretation method without changing the structure of original description logic. This approach provides a flexible extension mechanism outside the description logic framework, which will not bring any additional logical computational complexity or uncertainty to the original description logic. And various implementations can be realized through this approach for different extension purposes.