ACE Research Papers

CETI research papers and publications.

Multi-Dimensional Performance Framework for Enterprise Knowledge Infrastrucutres — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

Within service-oriented business environments, the non-routine processing of requests requires a greater degree of social interaction and learning in order to achieve an effective response. Specific practices arise and evolve through these business-social interactions, however traditional enterprise data and content management systems are typically ‘closed’. They do not permit the evolution of practices through sharing within the network of practitioners. Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructure (EKI) has been defined as the phenomenon in which local knowledge emerges during practice. Support for capture and re-use of knowledge has many known challenges. We propose an interdisciplinary EKI portal framework to support business-social interactions and monitor their value to accelerate the creation and evolution of practice through reflexive knowledge. The main contributions of the framework are: 1) a multi-dimensional model for monitoring the value of social interactions to all stakeholders, 2) living objects that capture and feedback multi-dimensional performance as reflexive knowledge for the execution of tasks, and 3) the complete business-technology architecture for effective implementation.

Co-Engineering Business, Information use, and Operations Systems for IT-Enabled Adaptation — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

Today’s service-oriented organizations must embrace variation and learn to adapt to an externally-driven environment. They also must deal with increasing complexity among entities – business processes, internal/external organizations, enterprise software, and assets. We refer to enabling methods as Adaptive Complex Enterprise (ACE) architecture. The holistic ACE architecture here is based on complete dynamic performance traceability of interacting entities as they produce value. The architecture is operationalized through the related Co-engineering methodology of this chapter. With traceability, the business agents have the information for decision-making and adaptation, using IT as needed. The unified Business-IT architecture approach here is easier than applying a plethora of disconnected business, system engineering, and IT frameworks. We use examples to show the resulting analysis for continuous improvement both in the immediate and the longer time frames. The benefits occur from the roles of all the stakeholders - the business, internal and external organizations, as well as IT.

IT-Enabled Sense and Respond Strategies in Complex Public Organizations — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

City governments face difficult challenges in serving their increasingly Net-connected constituencies in an environment of change, uncertain demand, and reduced budgets. These conditions require their IT departments to enable governments to adapt to citizen requests in a sense-and-respond (S-R) manner. In this article, the application of S-R concepts is demonstrated by the approaches used in developing an IT strategic plan for Columbus, Ohio. The fractal-based, request-focused strategy used here creates a unified organizational and IT context for connecting the Department of Technology and city government departments to their customers by utilizing an incremental, lean portfolio-management- based action plan and architecture.

Fractal architecture for the Adaptive Complex Enterprise — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

Today’s businesses must continuously adapt to external conditions in accelerated time frames. This requires businesses to shift from strategies that eliminate variation to those that embrace variation and changing conditions. Industrial-age Make-Sell businesses accomplished objectives by steadily eliminating variation. In contrast, today’s sense-andrespond (S-R) businesses must often execute by embracing variation and learn to perform given widely varying circumstances [4].

Adaptive Complex Enterprise — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

It is common knowledge that individuals, the communities in which we live, and the organizations we create adapt over time and changing conditions. It is also generally understood that organizations, communities, and individuals are all complex entities. To state that organizations are adaptive complex enterprises (ACE) is neither novel nor new: What is new, however, is that we now have a language and a set of constructs that allow us to formally conceptualize and discuss these concepts.

IT Architecture and the Case for Lean eBusiness Process Management — by Jay Ramanathan — last modified 2006-04-26 18:58

Business Process Management (eBPM) offers potential value by enabling lean and virtual operations. Even though strides have been made in the technology areas (web services, middleware, workflow, and enterprise application integration), unequivocal return is more the exception. The main concept here is that there must be a direct empathetic correlation between electronic business processes and lean business practices in the physical world for business performance improvement and return. eBPM provides a lean model-driven approach to enterprise integration. The knowledge and business rules provide an executable layer, via the Internet, that uses the underlying services for the just-in-time delivery of information. The result is a direct cause and effect between successful IT and business performance improvement. Examples are drawn from manufacturing and telecommunications.

Integrating Goal Modeling and Execution in Adaptive Complex Enterprises — by Rajiv Ramnath — last modified 2008-02-10 18:28

Complex Enterprises consistently struggle with successfully gaining benefits from Enterprise Architecture (EA) initiatives for a variety of reasons, one of them being an end-to-end integration between enterprise goals and operations that links goals to the dynamic operations of the organization. In this paper we describe (a) our conceptualization of the Adaptive Complex Enterprise (b) our integrative notation and semantics for goal modeling and linking for such organizations and their operations and (c) an example drawn from an embedded industry project

A Taxonomy of Mobile and Pervasive Applications — by Rajiv Ramnath — last modified 2008-02-10 18:29

In this paper we present a taxonomy for characterizing pervasive applications. This taxonomy focuses on abstracting application characteristics, independent of the characteristics of the middleware or infrastructure that support the application, and provides a controlled vocabulary for thinking about the application. We provide an informal verification for the taxonomy by using it to categorize a range of pervasive applications, culled from the literature and from projects we are involved in, and showing that the taxonomy is (a) consistent and complete - similar applications are categorized similarly and applications that are different are not similarly categorized and (b) useful – each characteristic provides new information about applications not explained by the other characteristics. Finally, we present concrete uses for the taxonomy.