School of Information Technologies

We propose a novel market-based approach for dynamic composite service selection based on combinatorial auctions. The combinatorial auction model that we developed allows us to incorporate service providers' and requesters' preferences in the service selection process. From the providers' perspective, the combinatorial formulation allows them to express their preferences for offering combinations of services, or bundles. Moreover, the combinatorial model has the potential to lower the overall cost to the service requester as a result of providers offering discounts for service bundles. The proposed model also enables the service requester to express their preferences for the types of bundles by defining constraints over the configuration of the composite service provisioning, and data-cohesion of the bundles. We have mapped the problem to an Integer Linear Programming formulation and performed a number of experiments to evaluate the proposed model. In addition to demonstrating the relevance and applicability of combinatorial auction models for service selection, our experiments show that the cost of the composite service provisioning decreases with having more bidders in the auction; offering more crowded bundles is more profitable for service providers; and achieving high cohesion is more expensive than low cohesion for service requesters.

Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) represent a radical departure from traditional monolithic, tightly bound, customized applications with proprietary interfaces. Their range however is limited as yet by the very structure and standardization which support their interoperability. While they are able to support heterogeneity of technical components, their ability to support complex business interactions has yet to mature. This poster summarizes research in progress which asks how the Web Services model might be extended to account for services of greate rhuman and organisational complexity. The research proposes a taxonomy IT services to provide a common frame of reference for the extension of the Web Services model and the transition to a service oriented view of IT.

Service level agreements (SLAs) constitute some of the most important instruments for representing and managing IT-centric services performance and value. However, achieving realistic and effective SLAs can be elusive. The problem is relatively underresearched and normative descriptions of what should be represented, monitored and measured in SLAs tend not to correspond with key events that unfold during the course of the production of services over time. We argue that designing SLAs, or related instruments, that accurately and usefully reflect services as they are enacted can be served by a deeper understanding of the practice of ITcentric services. Based on an ethnographic study of interactions between a large global IT-centric services provider and a global financial services company, this paper presents an approach to researching the problem and some preliminary results which document and analyse dimensions of the service engagement that are under-represented in formal representations but are value-enabling. The study is framed using the relational theory of contract .

Service level agreements (SLAs) for complex IT-intensive business-to-business (CITI-B2B) services are high-level representations of services to be enacted, with predominantly quantifiable performance targets. Inevitably, there is a gap between this representation and the nuanced practices of enactment adapting to emergent conditions over time. Overarching terms in the master agreement anticipate this gap; however, the nature of practices that manage that gap is not well understood. This study aims to develop a deeper understanding of these everyday practices to identify potential areas for improving value realisation in SLA enactment. We conducted a long-term ethnographic study of the enactment of an SLA by a global IT provider and global financial services company, framed by relational theory of contract. Our analysis showed the gap was bridged by a cycle of enactment in which emergent condi-tions triggered relational interactions among participants, culminating in decisions to adapt the terms of the SLA in pursuit of value realisation. Further, our analysis showed that this cycle is enabled by informal mechanisms of learning, negotiating, and adapting that we refer to collectively as relational capability, which is amenable to representation. Exploiting this capability and the information pro-duced during the cycle of enactment could enable the transformation of SLAs as evolving learning in-struments.
Keywords: Outsourcing, service level agreements, cycle of enactment, relational capability, ethnogra-phy

The concept of decision support systems has been proposed as an approach to providing flexible, computer-based support for relatively complex decision problems. In this paper, we report on the design and development of a prototype decision support system -Promotion Evaluation, Tracking and Planning System -built for a large, multinational consumer goods manufacturing and marketing company operating in Australia and New Zealand. We provide an analysis of the marketing environment and the role of promotions which leads to the identification of the critical decisions that needed to be supported. The diverse data needs, the suitable models to analyse the data, and the appropriate software tools to prototype the system are outlined. The components and the implementation of the prototype are described. The limitations of the prototype and suggestions for further refinement are dealt with in conclusion.

The provision of computer support for collaborative work is a central concern for Information Systems (IS) research and practice. In this paper we present the details of an information flow study undertaken in the household division of a large European design and manufacturing company (Delta) with the goal of eliciting and refining the user requirements for designing a computer system to facilitate the collaborative work of new product design teams. These requirements form the basis for the design and development of a Web-based LIRÉ (Living Repository) prototype system, the functionalities, features, and rationale of which are discussed. A re-implemented production version based on the prototype using commercially available software is currently in use by the New Product Development group at Delta. We also present the results of the evaluation of LIRÉ by the users at Delta and our observations on enhancing the sophistication and usefulness of this class of systems.

This paper examines the web services model in the context of models of a broader set of information technology (IT) services. It compares and contrasts the web services model with these models and proposes an approach to describing and classifying IT services on the basis of the complexity (as reflected in the structure and uncertainty) of the wider range of services. It also explores some critical implications of such a taxonomy, including a discussion of issues relating to managing and contracting for IT services which need to be comprehensively addressed in the service-oriented computing paradigm.

New employees in an organisation typically undergo a period of relatively intense training when they commence their employment. Often the quantity of information imparted is too large for the newcomers to assimilate during the short training period. Moreover, much of the information may not be relevant until months or even years after the initial training period, by which time it has long been forgotten. We propose to address these problems by creating a smart personal assistant which delivers training documents to its user in a just-in-time manner. The proposed system uses workflow technology to drive the delivery of documents in a timely manner based on organisational processes through which the user is working. User-modelling is incorporated into the system to ensure that redundant or previously known information is not delivered, thereby reducing the problem of information overload. Finally, tutoring strategies are used to prioritise the available documents based on their present relevance and importance. documents. There are many support learning documents, including the policy documents of the institution, and our own school and there are examples of ways to complete sub-tasks. It is very appealing to tap into a workflow for a process like this so that it supports, not only the normal management of the documents and approval processes, but also that it should support learning about those processes. This should be in good time as well as just-in-time.

The complex relationships between information technology (IT) investments and business value have been the focus of intensive research in recent years. There appears to be a discernible trend toward a more nuanced view in which the differential effects of the various categories of IT capital such as hardware, software, and their interactions with organizational factors are systematically investigated. As well, there is emerging evidence of accelerating investments in software and a shift greater towards "softwarization" in which value addition is linked to combining flexible software with increasingly commoditized hardware.

This paper updates the research progress in investigating the relationships between information technology (IT) investments and productivity in Australia. Based on the production function approach, two empirical tests using two different Australian datasets were performed. The first test focuses on productivity attributable to IT capital equipment at the aggregate level under the neoclassical economic theory. The second test focuses on the relationship between productivity gain and effectiveness of IT use at the firm level under the endogenous growth theory. The preliminary findings suggest that Australia has benefited from rapidly declining prices of IT equipment which has led to massive substitution of other types of capital inputs. There is also evidence to suggest that Australian firms have used IT effectively to improve productivity.

In this paper we use a large firm-level dataset to extend previous studies by augmenting the endogenous growth accounting framework with a data mining technique to analyze the complex relationships between the use of IT and organizational practices. There is emerging evidence of recent emphasis on organizational factors and a greater shift towards ''IT complementarities" in which value addition is linked to combining complementary organizational practices with IT investments. Our findings indicate that the set of interrelated organizational practices that complement positively to IT use is different from the set of practices hindering IT use. The presence of clustering among organizational practices clearly implies that some combinations of practices make it difficult to precisely empirical examine. We have found that our technique was able to show some organizational factors may have different pathways to affect organizational performance and such organizational practices have often been overlooked but can play a weak yet non-trivial role in production and organizational processes.

The role of data mining is to search "the space of candidate hypotheses" to offer solutions, whereas the role of statistics is to validate the hypotheses offered by the data-mining process. In this paper we propose Association Rules Networks (ARNs) as a structure for synthesizing, pruning, and analyzing a collection of association rules to construct candidate hypotheses. From a knowledge discovery perspective, ARNs allow for a goal-centric, context-driven analysis of the output of association rules algorithms. From a mathematical perspective, ARNs are instances of backward-directed hypergraphs. Using two extensive case studies, we show how ARNs and statistical theory can be combined to generate and test hypotheses. 

In this paper we propose an adaptive local pruning method for association rules. Our method exploits the exact mapping between a certain class of association rules, namely those whose consequents are singletons and backward directed hypergraphs. The hypergraph which represents the association rules is called an Association Rules Network(ARN). We propose two operations on this network for pruning rules, prove several properties of the ARN and apply the results of our approach to two popular data sets.