Week 8: Measure the Performance

Control Objectives for IT (COBIT) is an approach to standardize information technology security and control practices. This is done by providing tools to assess and measure the performance of IT processes. The IT Governance Institute (ITGI) at http://www.itgi.org is responsible for COBIT. It would seem reasonable for the State to begin structuring many of its governance designs around the CoBIT framework . It includes over three hundred specific 'control objectives' and includes a framework and audit guides for over 30 information technology processes. COBIT includes a range of support items and tools. These include: performance measurement items, a list of critical success factors (CSF's) and maturity models for benchmarking and comparison.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a detailed framework with hands-on information on how to achieve a successful governance of IT, developed and maintained by the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce, in partnership with the IT Service Management Forum. It is a globally recognized collection of best practices for information technology service management. The United Kingdom's Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) created the ITIL in response to growing dependence on information technology for meeting business needs and goals. The ITIL provides businesses with a customizable framework of best practices to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems. Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are two businesses that use ITIL as part of their own best practices frameworks. The ITIL is organized into "sets" of texts which are defined by related functions: service support, service delivery, managerial, software support, computer operations, security management and environmental. In addition to texts, which can be purchased online, ITIL services and products include training, qualifications, software tools and user groups such as the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF).

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. CMMI helps integrate traditionally separate organizational functions, set process improvement goals and priorities, provide guidance for quality processes, and provide a point of reference for appraising current processes.

References:
-Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System, Robert Steven Kaplan and David P. Norton
-Service Strategy- By OGC - Office of Government Commerce, Ogc
-COBIT 4.1 Excerpt, ISACA.org
-www.itil.co.uk/

Week 7: Inter-Organizational Systems

Interorganizational Systems (IOS) can have influences that extend beyond the organizations that implement them. IOSs can reduce the costs of communications and at the same time extend the possibilities of coordination industry . The use of IOS is argued to influence the power and control structures within interorganizational relationships . The propositions on how IOSs influence the power and control are divided along two directions. Some literature, mostly earlier published, argued that the use of IOS’s is exclusive to selected organizations that fulfilled the demands and rigorous criteria to join. They mostly referred to EDI systems that needed high set up costs. The technology restricted the IOS to organizations that possessed the required resources. Recent literature contends that the use of modern IOS leads to more just relationsips between organizations. The large organizations used previously their central position to dictate the terms of relationships and they exploited this by utilizing power to their favor.The progress of IT has and the emergence of standards, such as XML, has enabled small and mid-sized organizations to have a broader choice of trading partners.
Transaction cost economics (TCE) concentrates on the make or buy decision. The theory argues that it is more efficient for an organization to buy a standard product externally from a special supplier who is an expert in producing that product than to produce the product internally. Nonetheless, buying products on the market can be less attractive when certain conditions apply such as for example when the organization needs a specific customized product. The organization is forced to internalize production under these conditions. TCE justifies why and predicts when an organization chooses to internalize the production process or conduct market exchange to acquire the product. IOS Research applying the TCE has tried to investigate the impact of IOS on the transaction structure.

References

Angeles, R. (2000), "Revisiting the role of Internet-EDI in the current electronic scene," Logistics Information Management, 13 (1), 45-57.

Bakos, J.Y. and Erik Brynjolfsson (1993), "Infroamtion Technology, Incentives and the Optimal
Number of Suppliers," Journal of Management Information Systems, 10 (2), 37.

Bakos, Y. and B. Nault (1997), "Ownership and Investment in Electronic Networks," Information Systems Research, 8 (4), 321-41.

Banker, R., J. Kalvenes, and R. Patterson (2000), "Information Technology, Contract Completeness and Buyer-Supplier RElationships," in The 21st Annual International Conference on Information Systems. Brisbane, Australia.

Week 6:Enterprise Integration Technologies-

The main idea behind the Semantic Web is to develop technologies and applications that will make the machines to understand information semantically and perform
the desired task.
Introduction
“To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make
up for this.” The present day search engines like Google, Yahoo!, etc though they give us lot of hits, mostly spew out irrelevant information in answer to a search query. The problem with these search engines is that they use mostly statistical methods like frequency of occurrence of words, co-occurrence of words, etc. this results in the search queries resulting in irrelevant hits. Though, some search engines like Google and Yahoo! use human edited entries, still they come up with a large number of wrong hits. That is when people started talking about making the Web more meaningful. In other words, metadata should be attached to the content of the Web that it becomes easier to retrieve it.
The concept of Semantic Web was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee, the developer of
HTML, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and
World Wide Web (WWW). His visualization of Semantic Web is that in future we will
have intelligent software agents that will analyze a particular given situation and present
us with the best possible alternatives. In other words, the connectivity that is found today
only on PCs through the Web, will become a part of our daily life.
The idea behind Semantic Web is to develop such technologies that make the information more meaningful for the machine to process, which in turn makes search and retrieval of information more effective for humans. For instance, available Web technologies include parsers which can validate the display of Web documents by checking for syntactical errors. But as of now, computers are unable to understand the semantics underlying the documents. For example, a computer cannot understand that a particular Web page is the homepage of an Institute or that of an individual; or that a hyperlink leads to the resumeof a person.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gives the following two definitions for the
Semantic Web :
"The Semantic Web is the representation of data on the World Wide Web. It is a
collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers
and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF),
which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs (Uniform
Resource Identifiers) for naming." Also ,"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
The conception of Semantic Web is characterized by developing languages, tools, etc.
that make information processing semantically by machines. And also a very important
aspect of Semantic Web is development of standards and protocols, as there is hardly any consensus among the people working on projects about what the future Semantic Web will be.

Underlying Technologies of Semantic Web
"The principal technologies of the Semantic Web fit into a set of layered specifications.
The current components of that framework are the RDF Core Model, the RDF Schema
language and the Web Ontology language. These languages all build on the foundation
of URIs, XML, and XML namespaces."
Most of the technologies involved in the development of the Semantic Web are still in
their infancy. Some of them already in use are the URIs (for identifying documents
uniquely and globally), XML (to semantically structure the data), RDF (to base the
structures of the documents on a common model base), Ontologies (to define the
objects/entities and the interrelations between these objects/entities) etc.

Conclusion
Tim Berners-Lee visualized the Semantic Web as a layered structure with resource
identifying systems like the Unicode and URI at its foundations. Then, the next layer
consists of the XML Schema used to describe resources. Next to XML comes the RDF
layer – RDF is used to harmonize the different descriptions used to describe the Web
resources.
Ontology defines the concepts and the relationships between each of these concepts. On
the ontology layer sits the logic layer. This is more at an abstract level. The assertions
made on Web can be used to derive new knowledge. The most important aspect of his
visualization is that the topmost levels are of proof and trust. It is very essential to
establish the validity and reliability of resources accessible over the Web. This can be
achieved by digital signatures. Digital signatures can establish the origin of the document
and thus establish trust about a given resource on the Web.

References
1. Berners-Lee, Tim, et al. The Semantic Web. In Scientific American, May
2001. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-
84A9809EC588EF21
2. W3C Semantic Web. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
3. Semantic Web Activity Statement. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity
4. XSL Transformations (XSLT). Version 1.0 W3C Recommendation, 16
November 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
5. Interactive Glossary of Internet Terms. www.walthowe.com/glossary/r.html
6. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification:
W3C Recommendation, 22 February 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-
rdf-syntax-19990222/#intro
7. Namespaces in XML. World Wide Web Consortium, 14-January-1999.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#sec-intro
8. Gruber, T. R. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications.
http://gicl.mcs.drexel.edu/people/regli/Classes/KBA/Readings/KSL-92-71.pdf
9. Berners-Lee, Tim. Semantic Web - XML2000
http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2k-tbl/slide10-0.html

Week 5 : Enterprise Integration Technologies - EDI

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a tool that can be used for the transmission of business transactions through these electronic networks. Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, is the automated exchange of structured business documents, such as purchase orders or invoices, between an organization and its trading partner(s). The structured, machine-readable format allows business documents to be transferred, without re-keying, from an application in one location to an application in another location, without human intervention or interpretation. EDI is intended to replace paper documents and eliminate the inefficiencies of manual systems.
EDI is not a new concept. It is based on the notion that original data should be entered only once and subsequently passed electronically between relevant parties. In the most common EDI scenario, the EDI cycle begins when the purchaser sends the supplier an EDI purchase order. The supplier returns a purchase order acknowledgment to the purchaser. Next, at shipping time, the supplier sends the purchaser an EDI advance shipping notice. An EDI invoice follows and, finally, the purchaser sends payment information to his bank and the funds are transferred electronically to the supplier's bank account through electronic fund transfer (EFT) or financial EDI. The EDI cycle is now complete. There are other uses for EDI:
universities use EDI to exchange transcripts quickly
manufacturers use EDI to transmit complex engineering designs
consumers use EDI for credit card and banking transactions
governments are beginning to use EDI to support the electronic filing of income tax returns
HISTORY OF EDI
EDI was first introduced in North America in the 1970s. It was implemented first in the transportation sector, followed by the food and drug distribution, the automotive, and the banking and financial sectors. Electronic processing and transfer of information was significantly faster, more efficient and more accurate than the manual exchange of paper. This translated into increased productivity and faster order fulfillment, and thus provided a competitive advantage. Industry estimates indicate that processing a paper purchase order costs about $70, whereas an EDI purchase order costs about $1. EDI has been a part of Canadian business landscape since the early 1980s. The book and serials industry, which includes libraries, entered the EDI scene only recently.
In EDI, the emphasis is on the automation of business transactions. Therefore, EDI is not electronic mail, fax or tape transfer because in all of these transactions a human- to-machine interface is involved, at least at one end of the interchange, and usually someone has to interpret and re-key the exchanged information.

For EDI to work, the industry must agree on standard formats for messages and the way in which they are applied. It is not necessary for trading partners to have identical systems since standardization makes the process independent of any specific hardware or software. The linkage of heterogeneous systems is achieved through the use of a common format for data transfer. In North America, the agreed upon standard is ANSI X12 for the North American traffic, whereas UN EDIFACT is the preferred standard for international traffic. Translation software is usually required to interpret the data extracted from local systems.
The delivery of these standardized data to their destination (trading partner's application) may be achieved in a number of ways. The most common methods are:
Point-to-point or direct EDIDirect EDI , as the name implies, is a direct link between two computers. Direct EDI typically requires considerable expertise to incorporate EDI translation software into an organization's computing environment but it is also considerably cheaper than other methods and as such is often preferred to support high-volume ordering.
Value-Added-Network (VAN)A VAN provides an electronic mailbox with a store-and- forward facility as well as other added services for which the subscriber is charged a monthly and/or per use fee. However, using a VAN as a communications component can greatly facilitate EDI and is often critical to the success of the EDI implementation. Therefore, the use of a VAN is often the recommended delivery method for EDI messages.
InternetThe Internet has shown potential as a way to deliver EDI messages because it allows a fast and economical delivery of these messages, either through electronic mail or file transfer. The issues of authentication, access control, data integrity, and confidentiality on the Internet are currently being addressed.
Integration of standardized data into existing or re- engineered processes is crucial to a successful EDI implementation. Hence, the major task in implementing EDI is the process of mapping the proprietary format data (extracted from a local system) to the prescribed structured format.
In the library environment, EDI can be applied primarily to the acquisitions process, with EDI considered an ordering mechanism. Many libraries send or receive acquisitions data electronically but generally some human intervention (rekeying, tape load, special processing) is required. The issues associated with the implementation of EDI in libraries will be addressed in greater detail in a future Network Backgrounder.

Examples of companies using EDI:

R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. places more than 80,000 orders with 2,300 supplier world-wide for a total of $1 billion dollars a year. It is saving more than $5,000,000 a year in inventory costs now that almost all suppliers are EDI. The savings are illustrated by their spare parts inventory. It used to take 30 to 45 days from the time a part was ordered until it arrived. Now R. J.’s suppliers provide the inventory items in two days. Additional cost savings come from the purchasing department where it previously cost $75 to process each paper order. With EDI ordering costs limited to $.93 the company is saving almost $6,000,000 each year.

R. J. Reynolds is in the process of linking bar coding information to EDI using the Advance Ship Notice (ASN) procedures. A supplier sends a ASN via EDI to R. J., providing information about the shipment (including a package or pallet number and the estimated date of arrival). The number is downloaded from the mainframe to a handheld scanner that matches its number against those recorded by scanning incoming boxes or pallets. When the scanner detects matching numbers, it posts the receipt to the purchase order system automatically. A related project now being implemented, Evaluated Receipt Settlement, will make it unnecessary for supplier to send invoices in many cases. On regular inventory items, where the price is known, R. J. will order goods through EDI and post the order to the system When the goods are received, R. J. puts them in the system and pays for them without receiving an invoice. Obviously much more is involved than simply exchanging messages with supplier.

Kmart began using EDI in 1976 and had to hit people over the head to get them interested. Now vendors come to them. Kmart’s latest effort is Quick Response which is the marriage of three technologies; Scanning (capturing information at the POS), EDI and shipping container markings. The program involved 300 of Kmart’s vendors participating in Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). On a daily basis, Kmart sends the vendors a transaction set called Product Activity Data. The vendor massages that information, adds his own intelligence, comes up with an order, and sends it back to Kmart via EDI. Once in Kmart’s system, the order is treated as though Kmart itself created it. Kmart doesn’t question the order and trusts its vendors to create the type of order that will best meet their inventory needs.

Seminole Manufacturing Co. reported that they used EDI to cut delivery time by 50 percent (twenty two days) for a particular item of clothing being delivered to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was then able to increase sales for the particular line of clothing by 31 percent over a nine-month period.

Egghead Software is a company that was forced to use EDI by one of its customers. Now they sing its praises. The volume of business with the customer went from 10 orders a day to sometimes nearly 200 and Egghead has landed major contracts worth multiple millions of dollars a year based solely on their EDI capability.

ADVANTAGE OF EDI
§ Strategic competitive advantage over competitors--locks in customers and can use cost savings to be low cost supplier.
§ Reduced operations costs from elimination of the expensive process of data entry and verification from paper documents.
§ Reduced paperwork and mailing costs.
§ Cost savings from better inventory turnover and lower inventory holding costs.
§ Increases accuracy of information by reducing transcription errors, thereby producing better quality information on a more timely basis.
§ Also increases accuracy of information because trading partners will not tolerate errors.
§ Better customer service available from the faster turn-around/response time, and service representatives have freedom to spend more time on analyzing customer needs.
§ Enhances and reinforces ties with business trading partners
§ Better production planning through facilitation of JIT and MRP practices.
§ Reduced production lead time and raw materials inventory levels.
§ Makes international business more feasible and efficient

RISK IN EDI-BASED SYSTEMS
EDI systems expose an organization to risks of far greater magnitude than existed in the past
EDI systems transcend the boundaries of an entity, thus allowing outside parties to directly or indirectly access the organization’s information system.
Transactions are being initiated electronically by systems interacting directly with each other (often no authorizing signatures).
Traditional audit trials change or disappear, making error correction, disaster recovery, and application testing more difficult.
External and internal auditor’s work is made more difficult because of the elimination of the customary forms of audit trail and audit evidence.
More automated processing exists with greater concentration of control and data in a single location. Traditional audit trails change or disappear, making error correction, disaster recovery, and application testing more difficulty
There is greater risk of unauthorized access to data within the company and a greater need to protect data during transfer outside the company.
Network failures can be disastrous.

EDI IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Integration of EDI with computer software applications
Difficulty in understanding EDI technology
EDI user training
Setting up Trading Partner Agreements

FACTORS INFLUENCING SUCCESSFUL ADOPTION OF EDI
Implemented as part of an overall business strategy.
Top management support
Cooperation across functional areas (i.e. purchasing, production, information systems)
Good relationships with trading partners.
Being an early adopter.

FUTURE OF EDI
EDI is expected to grow with business-to-business e-commerce overall, a sector that was growing quickly in the early 2000s. In 2000 alone, business-to-business sales were estimated to be $3.3 trillion, with forecasts predicting an increase to $5.2 trillion by 2004, according to Corporate EFT Report. The Gartner Group forecast sales in this sector to be even higher, reaching $7.29 trillion by 2004. The use of EDI also is expected to grow along with international trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
According to Corporate EFT Report, in the early 2000s the lines between EDI and other Internet channels—including hybrid EDI/Internet electronic trading networks, Internet e-marketplaces, extranets, Internet company-to-company links, and private emarkets—were beginning to blur, and companies were relying on a variety of channels to conduct business with suppliers, depending on the nature of their business goals.

References

• 
  Bottomley, Lucy. An Introduction to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Network Backgrounder #6; Information Technology Services, National Library of Canada, January 1995 .
• Crocker, Dave. IETF draft specification for structuring MIME for EDI. Brandenburg Consulting, Sunnyvale, California, 1996. URL: http://ftp.sterling.com/rfc/rfc1767.txt. EDI: Electronic Data Interchange -- Theme Issue. Vine. Issue No. 94, March 1994. ISSN 0305-5728.
• E-Commerce Growth Prospects Remain Strong." Corporate EFT Report, January 17, 2001.
• Karpinski, Richard. "The Future of EDI." Planet IT, March 3, 1999. Available from www.PlanetIT.com.
  
  

Week 4: Enterprise Integration Patterns (II)

Hohpe’s Book briefs about the information on Enterprise integration which describes large-scale integration solutions across many technologies. Some of the detailed information includes advantages and limitations of asynchronous messaging architectures. In addition, Hohpe’s Book discusses code design that connects an application to a messaging system, how to route messages to the proper destination and how to monitor the health of a messaging system. On the other hand SOA pattern touches on Service Orientation (SO of SOA) and the business aspects of SOA, the Architecture (the A of SOA).This includes solutions to various SOA challenges which are patterns and anti-patterns. These patterns and anti-patterns help to express architectural concerns and solutions, and provide a context for the problem as well as covering the forces and consequences of both the problem and the solution. Thus Hohpe’s book involves basically application on messaging system which involves the type of technology applied. SOA pattern is focused mainly on the architectural part of the technology (concerns and solutions).

Chapter 6 discusses these two types of models: Request/reply and Publish/subscribe. Channel is the implementation of a queue for requests or reply. Request/reply involves transmitting a request from the requester system or system object and transmitting back a reply from the replier system or system object. The requester sends the request message and expects to receive the reply message, and the replier receives the request message and sends a reply message in response. Publish/Subscribe involves the Observer Pattern, in which an object notifies its dependents of a change. But the object is kept decoupled from its dependents so that it works fine regardless of the number of dependents. The object announcing the changes in its state is the Subject and the objects interested in receiving notification of any changes in the Subject are Observers. An Observer could get notified of any changes in the Subject by using the push or pull model.

Chapter 9, consists of composed messaging examples, shows a good example of how a messaging system can be developed and adapted to changing conditions and specifications. All messaging systems (email, IM, etc.) started out as relatively basic concepts and they have expanded to complex systems which can handle complicated operations.

Chapter 12 demonstrates how to compose routing and transformation patterns into a larger solution.Author chose to model the process of a consumer obtaining quotes for a loan from multiple banks. Based on the patterns that are defined creates three alternative implementations for this process, using different programming languages, technologies and messaging models.

Week 3: Enterprise Integration Patterns

In the Enterprise Integration Patterns the author talks about application coupling and that “applications should minimize their dependencies on each other so that each can evolve without causing problems for the others because when the applications change and break those assumptions, the integration breaks.” There’s more than one approach for integrating applications. Each approach addresses some of the integration criteria better than others. The various approaches can be summed up in four main integration styles:
File Transfer — Have each application produce files of shared data for others to consume, and consume files that others have produced.
Shared Database — Have the applications store the data they wish to share in a common database.
Remote Procedure Invocation — Have each application expose some of its procedures so that they can be invoked remotely, and have applications invoke those to run behavior and exchange data.
Messaging — Have each application connect to a common messaging system, and exchange data and invoke behavior using messages.

Messaging involves more than just connecting them to the messaging system so that they can send messages. The messages must have Message Channels to transmit on. Slapping in some channels doesn’t get the job done either. They have to be designed with a purpose, based on the data type being shared, the sort of application making the data available, and the sort of application receiving the data.Messaging makes applications loosely coupled by communicating asynchronously, which also makes the communication more reliable because the two applications do not have to be running at the same time. Messaging makes the messaging system responsible for transferring data from one application to another, so the applications can focus on what data they need to share but not worry so much about how to share it.

When an application has information to communicate, it doesn't just fling the information into the messaging system, it adds the information to a particular Message Channel. An application receiving information doesn't just pick it up at random from the messaging system; it retrieves the information from a particular Message Channel. When two applications wish to exchange data, they do so by sending the data through a channel that connects the two. The application sending the data may not know which application will receive the data, but by selecting a particular channel to send the data on, the sender knows that the receiver will be one that is looking for that sort of data by looking for it on that channel. In this way, the applications that produce shared data have a way to communicate with those that wish to consume it.

Week 2 :differences between component-based software systems and service-based software systems in the context of enterprise systems integration

According to Wang, G. and C.K.Fung current software system comprises of the following three technical architecture paradigms which are Object-oriented architecture (OOA), component-based architecture (CBA), and service-based architecture (SBA) .Object, component, and service are three key concepts in distributed software systems. From implementation point of view, a service is implemented by one or more components, which in turn are often implemented in object-oriented programming languages like C+ + and Java.

Component-based software system development focuses on building large software systems by integrating previously-existing software components. By enhancing the flexibility and maintainability of systems, this approach can potentially be used to reduce software development costs, assemble systems rapidly, and reduce the spiraling maintenance burden associated with the support and upgrade of large systems. Component-based systems encompass both commercial-off-the-shelf products and components acquired through other means, such as non developmental items . In Component-based software system, the notion of building a system by writing code has been replaced with building a system by assembling and integrating existing software components. In contrast to traditional development, where system integration is often the tail end of an implementation effort, component integration is the centerpiece of the approach; thus, implementation has given way to integration as the focus of system construction. Because of this, integrability is a key consideration in the decision whether to acquire, reuse, or build the components.The four major activities which characterize the component-based development approach; these have been adapted from Brown:
component qualification (sometimes referred to as suitability testing)
component adaptation
assembling components into systems
system evolution

The construction of service-based software systems, composed of several interconnected off-the-shelf components (COTS, open source, web services, etc.), requires some activities to be performed, among which component evaluation, that is becoming increasingly more critical, due to the ever-growing number of component domains and products available.

For the past 40 years, the techniques, processes and methods of software development have been dominated by supply-side issues, giving rise to a software industry oriented towards developers rather than users. To achieve the levels of functionality, flexibility and time-to-market required by users, a radical shift is required in the development of software, with a more demand-centric view, leading to software which will be delivered as a service within the framework of an open marketplace. Already, there are some signs that this approach is being adopted by industry, but in a very limited way.

References:
Brown, Alan W. & Wallnau, Kurt C. "Engineering of Component-Based Systems," 7-15. Component-Based Software Engineering: Selected Papers from the Software Engineering Institute. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 199