SSME Workshop, Edmonton March 6-7 2008

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/frappier.pdf

The APIS (Automated Production of Information Systems) project addresses the rapid development of information systems (IS), which are essentially the same as service systems. The main challenges of this research are to reduce the effort required to develop an IS, to shorten the cycle time for development and evolution, and to provide reliable IS. These challenges can be addressed by using appropriate notations for specifying IS and by using algorithms for automatically generating an implementation from the specification. In turn, this approach reduces or eliminates the need for the design and implementation steps of IS. We specify IS using EB3, a trace-based formal language. It is supported by a set of tools called the APIS framework which covers the business logic, the data and the user interface. This research is funded by and conducted in cooperation with CGI, the National Bank of Canada and BFD-ÆBIS. NSERC recently awarded a strategic grant for the functional security project. An industrial chair is being finalized with CGI. An NSERC CRD will be submitted this spring with CGI and BFD-ÆBIS.

Marc Frappier is a professor of software engineering in the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Sherbrooke. Holding a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Ottawa (1995), his research interests focus on specification, synthesis and construction of software, project management, and functional size measurement. Before joining the University of Sherbrooke, he spent over five years in industry, as a consultant, senior analyst, and project manager for several companies: consulting (Accenture), manufacturing (Alcan et Cascades), banking (Royal Bank of Canada), pharmaceutical (Merck Frosst), aerospace (Canadian SpaceAgency) and telecommunications (Nortel).

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/hoover.pdf

Much is said by both academics and industry about the importance of tools to addressing software productivity. However, I believe that there are fundamental facts about the nature of software production that tool builders ignore at their peril. This partially explains why tool adoption is so pathetic. In this short talk I want to discuss these facts and comment on where I think formal methods need to go to support the kinds of systems we are are building, and the techniques we use to build them.

Jim Hoover is an Professor and member of the Software Engineering Research Lab (SERL) in the Dept. of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He is also a principal of Avra Software Lab, which is the industrial side of SERL. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of Toronto in the area of complexity theory of real analysis. He has co-authored two theory books, both of which have nothing to do with software architecture. His research involves a combination of the formalism of theoretical computer science and the pragmatics of software engineering. His current work is on using formal tools to support agile development. This research is done in conjunction with industrial partners, and forms the core of a number of commercial applications in the petro-chemical process industry: one of which is installed in over 1500 sites world-wide, and another which is one of the first high-end engineering tools to be web-delivered.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/zou.pdf

A business process contains a set of interdependent activities that describe operations provided by an organization. Business applications are designed to automate business processes. A business process specification (i.e., a workflow) is defined by a business analyst from the viewpoint of the end-users. The process encapsulates the knowledge related to the natural work rhythms that a business user would follow when using a business application. In this paper, we analyze the information embedded in business process specifications, and infer the functional and usability requirements. We use the inferred information in a model driven approach to automatically generate user interfaces and infrastructures from a business process specification through a set of transformations.

Ying (Jenny) Zou is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen's University, Canada. She is a visiting faculty fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), IBM Canada. Her research interests include software engineering, software re-engineering, model-driven software development, and service oriented architecture. She is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award 2007.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/smit.pdf

SOAs allow us to offer our software as services. The oft-touted loose-coupling and modularity properties allow individual services to be composed into larger services, both intra- and inter-corporation. However, wrapping data in XML and transferring it to a well-defined interface is only the first step. Composition introduces a new set of problems, some of which we thought we had solved. I'll describe two important problems: first, given the current security and privacy climate, how do we meet the requirements of laws, contracts, and our customers? Second, composing services affects their performance, so how do we configure a set of composed services to meet SLAs? I'll offer some initial thoughts on the answers to those two questions.

Mike Smit is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta, in the Software Engineering group, supervised by Eleni Stroulia. His research interests include privacy, service-oriented architectures, and autonomic computing. He is an IBM Ph.D. Fellow and an IBM Centers for Advanced Studies student. His community involvement, interest in student outreach, and varied interests both delight and dismay his supervisor.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/chen.pdf

The emergence of new information system (IS) service technologies yields opportunities and challenges in identifying and monitoring quality of services that providers are delivering. Unfortunately, very few approaches have applied accurate and unbiased views on service quality that takes into account the true value of the service provided. Our research poses the definition of quality of service for IS services (QoSIS) and examines how to discover and select high-quality IS services from the viewpoint of the service customers. This will be accomplished through the development of a QoSIS-based service acquisition model by introducing a quality assurance party (QAP) and two quality notions that are respectively referred for traditional customer/provider service and SaaS (software as a service).

Xian Chen is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta, in the Software Engineering group, supervised by Dr. Paul Sorenson. His research interests include quality measurement and improvement in Service-Oriented architecture, quality model for information system services, and continuous assessment in software process management.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/woo.pdf

Having the right requirements is critical to the success of developing and using information systems. However, getting the correct requirements can sometimes be rather complex. For routine, procedural, common tasks (e.g., payroll), this might be less of an issue because people have many reference points and past experience to based on. The situation is different when dealing with information systems that are, for example, unique, critical to bringing out the niche of the business, and reflect new ways of doing business. We believe that service systems fall under this category. To reduce incorrect, missing, and changing requirements in a service system, we believe that an understanding of how business strategy relates to services is necessary. Business strategy includes concepts such as mission, market, employee skills, and share values, which are generally not explicitly represented in existing approaches. Since organizations compose of employees implementing business strategy, we propose to use intelligent agent concepts (e.g., goal, belief, reasoning, perceiving, learning, and acting) as a conceptual modeling paradigm to elicit and represent business strategy, and use them to guide the development of service systems.

Carson Woo received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. He is currently the Stanley Kwok Professor of Business at the Sauder School of Business, The University of British Columbia. He is also an Associate Member of the Department of Computer Science at the same University. His current research focus is on studying how to effectively support the change and evolution of information systems from the business and organizational perspective. He experiments the effectiveness of incorporating and utilizing various contextual information in the information systems architecture. Contextual information, in this case, includes commonly use concepts in Intelligent and multi-agents systems such as goals, beliefs, and intentions, organizational concepts such as organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities, and business concepts such as mission, market, and regulations. The challenges are how to acquire, represent, and take advantage of these knowledge to effectively enable business changes. The output of the research includes methodologies and computer-based tools for developing information systems.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/yu.pdf

An important step in advancing the science, engineering, and management of services is the development of suitable models. Most models used in information systems development focus on expressing the "what" or the "how", but not on the "why". I argue that to understand systems as socio-technical phenomena, we need models that can help understand the motivations and intentions of participants as strategic actors. I believe this is especially relevant for analyzing and designing services, as they involve complex social relationships.

Eric Yu is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1995. His interests are in the areas of information systems design, requirements engineering, knowledge management, enterprise architecture, and software engineering. His research emphasizes concepts and techniques for modeling and systematically analyzing strategic relationships among social actors. In services science, a modeling paradigm based on agent orientation and multi-agent systems concepts could provide a basis for integrating strategic business analysis (e.g., business model innovation and disruptive technologies) with software engineering methods and techniques. Social concepts are also crucial for analyzing security, privacy, and trust. The i* agent-oriented modeling framework is widely recognized in requirements engineering. GRL (Goal-oriented Requirements Language), a version of i*, has been submitted for ITU-T standardization.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/kim.pdf

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/tansey.pdf

Modern businesses rely on software systems to implement their service-delivery processes. Web services are a special case of these systems; business services can easily be accessed by consumers and other businesses alike, which creates a large dynamic market. As the demands of the market change, software services can rapidly evolve to suit emerging conditions. Yet rapid evolution risks producing hasty, suboptimal, decisions: decisions that, if optimized, could produce more income for the business. Adhering to a structured framework for evaluating possible evolution alternatives would reduce the quantity of income lost to uninformed choices. To this end, we describe the Real Options-based Modularity ANalysis (ROMAN) Framework for evaluating the net value of a prospective service. Baldwin and Clark specify a list of six operators that can be applied to such modular systems; changes to a modular system can be represented as combinations of these operators. The ability to use these operators to model future flexibility directly corresponds to the concept of real options in financial literature. ROMAN performs real option analysis, in conjunction with cost estimation and a net value calculation, on alternate evolution choices, which allows a business to choose the alternative with the greatest expected value. In this paper we discuss the ROMAN framework and our decision support system that implements it, illustrated with a realistic example.

Brendan Tansey is a Master's student in Computing Science at the University of Alberta who recently defended his thesis on software service valuation. He also holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science with a minor in Business. His research interests lie in software engineering, service-oriented architecture, economic modeling, and valuation, with brief forays into robotics and natural language processing.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/messinger.pdf

Virtual worlds, where thousands of people can interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional space, represent a frontier in social computing with critical implications for service delivery. In this talk, we first trace the history of virtual worlds back to its antecedents in electronic gaming and social computing. We then discuss a detailed case study of Second Life, which includes a survey we conducted of 197 residents. Lastly, we provide a review of past research and open question concerning service delivery.

Paul R. Messinger is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Alberta School of Business and Principle Investigator of the SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Research Alliance, "Harnessing the Web-Interaction Cycle for Canadian Competitiveness." Paul has served as Director of the Canadian Institute of Retailing and Services and was the founding Director of the University of Alberta School of Retailing. Paul's research focus is on emerging retail formats, electronic service, power in distribution channels, dynamic pricing, and recommendation systems for e-commerce; his publication outlets include Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, and a text, The Marketing Paradigm, published by ITP. Paul holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.A. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Marketing Science, as guest editor for a special issue on eService for the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, and on the advisory board of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). He also represents ISMS on the Subdivisions Council of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and previously served as Treasurer of ISMS. Paul teaches undergraduate retailing, marketing models in the Ph.D. program, and participates in executive education for companies including Telus and Maritz Market Research. Paul's awards include Finalist for the John D. C. Little Award for Best Marketing Paper in 1997, the Reid Teaching Award 1993-1994, best paper nomination for the 2005 AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the Referee Service Award for the journal Management Science. Paul has consulted for the Clark Oil Company and has worked on antitrust, merger, and business law cases involving solar energy, book publishing, truck retailing, oil drilling, and life insurance. "Tall" Paul speaks French and enjoys folk dancing, piano, and camping.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/arazy.pdf

Ofer Arazy is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta (Canada), School of Business, since 2004. Ofer earned his B.Sc. and MBA from the Technion (Israel), and Ph.D. in Management Information Systems at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada). Ofer's industry experience includes positions as project manager, logistics manager, and operations manager. Dr. Arazy's research interests - broadly speaking - are in knowledge management and social computing. Ofer adopts the Design Science methodology to research, grounding the design of systems in theory of human behavior.

The Canadian government recently announced a new competition to form Networks of Centres of Excellence. This competition will focus on Business-led Networks of Centres of Excellence with funding up to $2M/yr from the public sector. IBM, in conjunction with a larger group of universities and businesses, has taken the lead on a proposal to form an NCE focusing on Services. The 36-page letter of intent was submitted on January 30 of this year and we are currently waiting for April's announcement of proposals to go forward with full scale proposals. This presentation will cover a high level overview of the proposal to come, and will highlight opportunities for participation in the full proposal when this goes forward in May.

Stephen Perelgut, MSc, is IBM Canada's University Relations Manager working out of the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Markham. He graduated from the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science with his MSc in 1984. Since then, he has helped start a software company, Holt Software Associates Inc., which he ran as Vice-President before leaving to join IBM. He is currently in charge of IBM's University Relations within Canada and works with universities across Canada as well as linking to other academic and research institutions around the world. He has been the Chair of the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (the leading software engineering research group in the world and recognized by the NSERC Leo Derikx Synergy Award in 2000), Chair of NSERC Grant Selection Committee 334 (Communications, Computers & Components Engineering) and he is currently sitting on the NSERC Global Partnerships Program (GPX) Selection Committee for the ISTC. Within IBM, Perelgut provides oversight for all linkages between the company and academia including research collaborations, recruiting, sales and technical skills exchange. In that role, he was part of another NSERC Leo Derikx Synergy Award in 2006. As well, he manages research projects relating to Services Sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME).

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/lyons.pdf

In this presentation, we look at the following question: How do service science theories and practices differ when the "business" domain of the service system is a not-for-profit or community organization such as a library, museum, or health-care facility, for example? Most work to date assumes the services business is a profit-making entity. The different questions that arise when existing and emerging service theories, policies, delivery mechanisms, management approaches, and modeling tools are applied to non-profit service systems will bring insight to the SESMiC themes and provide novel case studies to the consortium research program. We also suggest that service innovations and methods designed for not-for-profit service systems will enhance for-profit service businesses. Service professionals are knowledge-intensive workers and are the critical resources of services businesses. In order to be successful, service businesses must manage and optimize their people resources while providing services necessary for them to do their jobs effectively (collaboration services, training and educational services, information-access services, etc.). We propose that services theories, models, and systems enhanced for non-profit service organizations will also enhance service businesses to more effectively bring services to their knowledge workforce.

Kelly Lyons is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. She was most recently the Program Director of the IBM Toronto Lab Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS). She has a Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Computing and Information Science. Through her management and technical roles at IBM, Kelly has collaborated on research projects in the areas of data management, collaboration, distance education, privacy, social computing, and services science. Her current research interests include services science, social computing, data management, and business intelligence. She has co-authored a number of papers, served on program committees for conferences, given many keynote and invited presentations, and co-chaired several workshops. She is on the Board of Management of the Centre for Communication and Information Technology (CCIT), a division of OCE, Inc, an IBM Faculty Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University and at York University. She is very interested in promoting Women in Technology initiatives and has given several presentations to young people and teachers on this topic.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/crawhall.pdf

Dr. Robert Crawhall has been President and CEO of the National Capital Institute of Telecommunications since 2001. In this capacity he is ED of the Ontario Research Network in Electronic Commerce, a five and a half year program funded by the Province of Ontario at $12M and with a total value of over $40M. This program is focused almost exclusively on service sector innovation including e-Health ($2M), identity theft and network security ($2.5M), retail sales and financial services. Industrial partners include IBM, the major banks, Nortel and variety of SMEs. Robert is concurrently Adjunct Professor and Executive-in-Residence at the Telfer School of Management where he is developing a research program in broadband economy. In this role he is also the principal author of the CANARIE Network-Enabled Platform proposal for building the middleware for a dynamic, real-time service oriented architecture to support human-centric research in the Arts in partnership with IBM, The Ontario College of Art and Design, Emily Carr, the faculties of Management, Arts and Engineering at the University of Ottawa and several leading US and European universities. Prior to joining the NCIT Robert spent fifteen years at BNR and Nortel including roles as Director of Disruptive Network Technologies and Advanced Technology Strategic Planning. He holds a Ph.D. in Electromagnetic Compatibility from the University of Ottawa, a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from McGill University and a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering also from McGill.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/maglio.pdf

A service system is a configuration of resources (including people, technology, information, and so on) connected to other systems by value propositions. A service system's job is to make use of its own resources and the resources of others to improve itself and to improve others. We can consider individuals, groups, organizations, firms, and governments to be service systems if they can take action, apply resources, and work with other systems in mutually beneficial ways. So service systems are complex systems that interact with other complex systems, making modeling and prediction difficult. Gathering data on service systems is also difficult. In this talk, I will discuss some examples of service systems and some modeling approaches. But I will offer problems than solutions.

Paul P. Maglio is senior manager of Service Systems Research at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. His group encompasses social, cognitive, computer and business sciences, and aims at creating a foundation for basic and applied research in how people work and create value --- both mechanisms of individual and group behavior as well as processes, practices, and technologies developed to support specific business goals, particularly in service businesses. Since joining IBM Research in 1995, Maglio has worked on programmable Web intermediaries, attentive user interfaces, multi-modal human-computer interaction and human aspects of autonomic computing. He holds thirteen patents and has published more than 80 scientific papers in various areas of computer science and cognitive science. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California at San Diego.

slides - http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ssrg/kieliszewski.pdf

Industrialized countries around the world are experiencing major economic shifts and opportunity into services. The services sector has evolved from a low-skill, labor-based position to one where high-skill professional services, particularly business-to-business services, are a leading driver of innovation, accelerated business globalization, and economic disruption. This rapid shift, however, due to the complex and inter-disciplinary nature of service system design, deployment, support and evolution, has resulted in a gap between the practice, definition and science of service systems. This talk will summarize the movement in higher education to support this economic shift, the evolution of a variety of Service, Science, Management and Engineering (SSME) programs with a focus on how computer science centered programs are participating in the evolution of the service economy.

Cheryl Kieliszewski has been with IBM since November 2000, having most recently joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 2005 and having previously worked in the IBM Systems and Technology Group. She is currently a Research Staff Member reporting as Technical Assistant to Mark Dean, IBM Fellow and V.P. of Almaden Research Center. Her research focuses on understanding the impact of work practices on technological and organizational design to inform the human-system relationship definition within service systems. Cheryl has over 10 years of research and applied human factors engineering experience investigating human behavior and expectations and the implication of these on technology design and implementation. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in Industrial and Systems Engineering with an emphasis in Human Factors Engineering.