A design for business intelligence service in demand driven supply chain management

This paper discusses the problems inherent within traditional supply chain management's forecast and inventory management processes arising when tackling demand driven supply chain. A demand driven supply chain management architecture developed by Orchestr8 Ltd., U.K. is described to demonstrate its advantages over traditional supply chain management. Within this architecture, a metrics reporting system is designed by adopting business intelligence technology that supports users for decision making and planning supply activities over supply chain health.

Towards a life-event oriented G2C e-service provision: the NoBLE Framework

One of the primary features of modern government-to-citizen (G2C) service provision is the ability to offer a citizen-centric view of the e-government portal. Life-event approach is one of the most widely adopted paradigms supporting the idea of solving a complex event in a citizen’s life through a single service provision. Several studies have used this approach to design e-government portals. However, they were limited in terms of use and scalability. There were no mechanisms that show how to specify a life-event for structuring public e-services, or how to systematically match life-events with these services taking into consideration the citizen needs. We introduce the NOrm-Based Life-Event (NoBLE) framework for G2C e-service provision with a set of mechanisms as a guide for designing active life-event oriented e-government portals.

Aligned platinum nanowire networks from surface-oriented lipid cubic phase templates

Mesoporous metal structures featuring a bicontinuous cubic morphology have a wide range of potential applications and novel opto-electronic properties, often orientation-dependent. We describe the production of nanostructured metal films 1–2 microns thick featuring 3D-periodic ‘single diamond’ morphology that show high out-of-plane alignment, with the (111) plane oriented parallel to the substrate. These are produced by electrodeposition of platinum through a lipid cubic phase (QII) template. Further investigation into the mechanism for the orientation revealed the surprising result that the QII template, which is tens of microns thick, is polydomain with no overall orientation. When thicker platinum films are grown, they also show increased orientational disorder. These results suggest that polydomain QII samples display a region of uniaxial orientation at the lipid/substrate interface up to approximately 2.8 ± 0.3 μm away from the solid surface. Our approach gives previously unavailable information on the arrangement of cubic phases at solid interfaces, which is important for many applications of QII phases. Most significantly, we have produced a previously unreported class of oriented nanomaterial, with potential applications including metamaterials and lithographic masks.

Scalable model-based configuration management of security services in complex enterprise networks

Security administrators face the challenge of designing, deploying and maintaining a variety of configuration files related to security systems, especially in large-scale networks. These files have heterogeneous syntaxes and follow differing semantic concepts. Nevertheless, they are interdependent due to security services having to cooperate and their configuration to be consistent with each other, so that global security policies are completely and correctly enforced. To tackle this problem, our approach supports a comfortable definition of an abstract high-level security policy and provides an automated derivation of the desired configuration files. It is an extension of policy-based management and policy hierarchies, combining model-based management (MBM) with system modularization. MBM employs an object-oriented model of the managed system to obtain the details needed for automated policy refinement. The modularization into abstract subsystems (ASs) segment the system-and the model-into units which more closely encapsulate related system components and provide focused abstract views. As a result, scalability is achieved and even comprehensive IT systems can be modelled in a unified manner. The associated tool MoBaSeC (Model-Based-Service-Configuration) supports interactive graphical modelling, automated model analysis and policy refinement with the derivation of configuration files. We describe the MBM and AS approaches, outline the tool functions and exemplify their applications and results obtained. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Self-Service Business Intelligence verktyg – möjligheter ochbegränsningar : En jämförelse av teorier om Self-Service Business Intelligence verktyg och praktiska resultat av verktyget PowerPivot

Inom Business Intelligence har begreppet Self-Service Business Intelligence (Self-Service BI) vuxit fram. Self-Service BI omfattar verktyg vilka möjliggör för slutanvändare att göra analyser och skapa rapporter utan teknisk support. Ett av dessa verktyg är Microsoft PowerPivot.På Transportstyrelsens Järnvägsavdelning finns behov av ett Self-Service BI-verktyg. Vi fick i uppdrag av Sogeti att undersöka om PowerPivot var ett lämpligt verktyg för Transportstyrelsen. Målet med uppsatsen har varit att testa vilka tekniska möjligheter och begränsningar PowerPivot har samt huruvida PowerPivot är användbart för Transportstyrelsen.För att få en djupare förståelse för Self-Service BI har vi kartlagt vilka möjligheter och begränsningar med Self-Service BI-verktyg som finns beskrivna i litteraturen. Vi har sedan jämfört dessa med våra testresultat vilket har varit syftet med uppsatsen.Resultatet av testerna har visat att Transportstyrelsens Järnvägsavdelning initialt behöver teknisk support för att använda PowerPivot. Testerna har även visat att vissa av Transportstyrelsens krav inte kan uppfyllas. Detta minskar användbarheten för Transportstyrelsen.Vidare har vi kommit fram till att Self-Service BI inte alltid är enkelt att använda för slutanvändare utan teknisk support. Resultatet visar även att det krävs en BI-infrastruktur för att enkelt skapa rapporter med god kvalitet och högsta möjliga korrekthet.