SweeFen Goh

Instance-level access control for business-to-business electronic commerce

The emergence of e-marketplace Web sites that contain proprietary information from multiple organizations requires the creation of new access control schemes that provide fine-grained access control while reducing both administrative and run-time overhead. It is also desirable to have clear, concise, and easily configurable definitions of access control policies that are aligned with business processes, and to have these policies enforced consistently throughout an ecommerce system. In this paper, we describe a policy-based access control scheme, and its implementation, that allows access to individual instances of resources to be specified in a concise and computationally efficient manner. We model business relationships between users and business objects and use implicit grouping of users and resources. These concepts allow policies to refer efficiently to aggregates of resources and users and to document the intention of an authorization policy. Our access control scheme is implemented as an application-level access control mechanism within IBMs WebSphere® Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition. We use this implementation to provide examples and give performance data. For future work, we discuss how our policy-based, resource-level access control scheme might be enhanced to augment language-level access control schemes, such as the Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) security model.

Disconnected processes, mechanisms and architecture for mobile e-business

With the tremendous advances in hand-held computing and communication capabilities, rapid proliferation of mobile devices, and decreasing device costs, we are seeing a growth in mobile e-business in various consumer and business markets. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and framework for end-to-end mobile e-business applications (e.g., point of sales). The architecture takes into consideration disconnection, application context, synchronization, transactions and failure recovery modes to provide mobile users with seamless and transparent access to business transactions and business-context specific data. In our architecture, we consider a novel business process design based on state-machines and event management to handle disconnection, resource limitations and failures. We designed, implemented and deployed a system for mobile e-business on clients (e.g., PDAs and PocketPCs) integrated with private exchanges and sell-side servers. The state-machine model with failure recovery mechanisms enables handling of one-to-many and many-to-one disconnections in large mobile e-business environments. The e-business framework on mobile clients is implemented based on J2ME, Webservices, and open XML standards. A detailed performance study of commerce transactions was done on different mobile client devices with diverse computing, memory and storage capabilities. We compare the performance of a purchasing application and the middleware on various devices such as PDAs and Laptops. We demonstrated that for small devices with limited capability the performance is reasonable. For devices with more computing capability, the response time is excellent.

Self-managing, disconnected processes and mechanisms for mobile e-business

With the tremendous advances in hand-held computing and communication capabilities, rapid proliferation of mobile devices, and decreasing device costs, we are seeing a growth in mobile e-business in various consumer and business markets. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and framework for end-to-end mobile e-business applications such as purchasing, retail point of sales, and order management. The design takes into consideration disconnection, application context and failure modes to provide mobile users with seamless and transparent access to commerce and content activities. In our architecture, we consider a novel business process design based on state-machines and event management to handle disconnection and resource limitations. We designed, implemented and deployed a system for mobile e-business on clients integrated with private exchanges and sell-side servers. The e-business framework on mobile clients is implemented based on J2ME and open XML standards. A performance study of simple e-business transactions was done on the client using the above mechanisms and programming environment. We show that the performance of a purchasing process using the framework does reasonably well.

Consultant assistant: a tool for collaborative requirements gathering and business process documentation

In this paper we present Consultant Assistant (CA), a tool to assist business consultants in collaborative requirements gathering and business process documentation. CA is a web tool that uses a model-based approach to capture the requirements. CA allows users to select relevant components of industry-specific process hierarchies, reuse documents from past engagements, collaboratively author requirements, and publish these requirements in a document based format. These documents can further be published to an asset repository for future reuse.

Using MATCON to generate CASE tools that guide deployment of pre-packaged applications

The complex process of adapting pre-packaged applications, such as Oracle or SAP, to an organizations needs is full of challenges. Although detailed, structured, and well-documented methods govern this process, the consulting team implementing the method must spend a huge amount of manual effort to make sure the guidelines of the method are followed as intended by the method author. MATCON breaks down the method content, documents, templates, and work products into reusable objects, and enables them to be cataloged and indexed so these objects can be easily found and reused on subsequent projects. By using models and meta-modeling the reusable methods, we automatically produce a CASE tool to apply these methods, thereby guiding consultants through this complex process. The resulting tool helps consultants create the method deliverables for the initial phases of large customization projects. Our MATCON output, referred to as Consultant Assistant, has shown significant savings in training costs, a 20 - 30% improvement in productivity, and positive results in large Oracle and SAP implementations.

IBM system G Social Media Solution: Analyze multimedia content, people, and network dynamics in context

We present IBM System G Social Media Solution, which includes a suite of applications designed for in-context monitoring, exploration, and analysis of social multimedia content as well as related people and network dynamics. Each individual application focuses on a unique aspect of social media data analysis in relevant context; collectively, they provide a comprehensive set of tools for exploring and analyzing real-time and historical social media data at large scale. The solution is empowered by a unified data management platform, based on a property graph model, to efficiently handle a large variety of social media applications.

Improving Service Quality through Use of Standard Workbenches

Service providers strive to provide consistently high quality services to their clients, in the same way that manufactures strive to provide high quality products to their customers. To paraphrase W. E. Deming, a pioneer in improving manufacturing quality, unnecessary variation leads to poor quality. Eliminating variation, through standardization and better training is one way to improve service quality. With this view in mind, we examined how IBM Global Services delivered business consulting services, especially ERP deployment. Such services follow prescribed methods which specify tasks to perform and work products to deliver. However, how to perform the activities and which tools and starting content to use was left to the individual project. The workbenches that we have implemented and deployed to IBM Global Services aim to eliminating unnecessary variation in how the service is preformed and increasing the reuse of assets. Each tool provides guidance, is integrated with tools providing support for upstream and downstream activities and automates routine activities, where possible. Beyond the benefits achieved by using workbenches to reduce unnecessary variation, and therefore improve quality, we are also seeing significant efficiency gains. In particular, by using standard workbenches, consultants moving from one project to other can easily and quickly get started without having to learn a new environment. This helps consultants increase their efficiency by 20% to 30% when project assignments are short. In addition, we estimate is that IBM will save 60-70% of training cost since consultants will need to learn fewer tools and can take advantage of in-task guidance to learn tasks as needed. Finally, by integrating the complete project lifecycle around a single, integrated, toolset, we are able to push an additional 15% work to global delivery centers, where specialist can perform the same task for many projects, again reducing variation and improving quality.