A Decision Analysis Framework for Prioritizing a Portfolio of ICT Infrastructure Projects

The inadequacy of traditional quantitative cost–benefit analysis for evaluating information and communications technologies (ICT) infrastructure investments have led researchers to suggest real options (ROs) analysis for valuating ICT projects. However, ROs models are strictly quantitative and often, ICT investments may contain qualitative factors that cannot be quantified in monetary terms. In addition, ROs analysis results in some factors that can be treated more efficiently when taken qualitatively. This paper combines ROs and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) into a common decision analysis framework, providing an integrated multiobjective, multicriteria model called ROAHP for prioritizing a portfolio of interdependent ICT investments. The proposed model is applied to an ICT case study showing how it can be formulated and solved.      

Digital Cities: Towards an integrated decision support methodology

This paper deals with the problem of the low ICT adoption rate by many cities or urban regions. The consequences of the poor ICT environment in these authorities may be summarized into (i) the cutback of local business competitiveness, (ii) the incapability of attracting new business investments, (iii) the poor service of citizens needs (living in the local area or abroad – a foreign country or another city, namely emigrants), (iv) the poor service of visitors that have or want to have transactions in the local area. The main shortcomings of local authorities refer to lack of capabilities and expertise, negligence of local needs and urban characteristics, absence of ICT adoption models to local needs, ignorance of development and exploitation models etc. These regions need support so as to select the most appropriate ICT best practices, integrated them into their strategic plans and implement them with success. This procedure is particularly complex, since many factors and restrictions have to be considered. The overall objective of this paper is to illustrate the Digital City concept and to propose an integrated methodology for Digital City development that will act in a supportive way for the regions or cities that have low rates in ICT penetration and try to adopt ICT best practices into their core functions and services.     

Strategic e-Business Decision Analysis Using the Analytic Network Process

The rapid global deployment of electronic business (e-business) and information systems has required managers to make decisions that seek to balance technical factors with strategic business goals. This research utilizes the analytic network process (ANP) to provide insight into optimum-seeking decision processes by managers, as investments are made to utilize e-commerce technologies. The nonlinear network approach of ANP was used to study the "systems with feedback" where the e-commerce strategy may both dominate and be dominated, directly and indirectly, by the business-level strategy. This study analyzes e-business decisions in organizations, based on management heuristics and perceptions of expected contributions of e-commerce strategies, as well as the business-level strategies. The ANP research methodology process is employed since it is well suited for the study of a multi-attribute decision problem to explore qualitative and quantitative preferences of top managers in independent, nondiversified firms involved in e-business. ANP is used to model decision complexities involved in integrating e-commerce innovation into the overall strategic planning of firms. Optimal e-business strategies are chosen by using systems-with-feedback, where interdependencies between four virtual e-commerce domains and two generic business level strategies are explored. This study obtained significant results and identified several important avenues for further research. Implications for theory and research are discussed.     

A risk-driven security analysis method and modelling language

The BT Security Research Centre has defined and continues to develop a modelling language and method for representing and analysing ICT security requirements. The language is used to create a model that serves as a medium for communication between consultant and customer, a guide in making decisions, and the basis of a specification for implementing a solution. Three sub-models deal with business and technical requirements of the ICT system; threats, vulnerability and risks; and security measures and processes. The modelling process is iterative, with decisions being driven by optimisation of business value, trading off risk against cost. This paper focuses on aspects of the method dealing with assessment of risk and analysis of requirements for operational risk management.     

Custom Network Design and Pricing Tools

Selling national and international data networking solutions (WAN and LAN) is an essential part of the BT solutions business. In this highly competitive sector the technology is evolving fast and consequently there are frequent enhancements of the product and service offerings. With this goes a tendency to increase the complexity of the pricing and discount schemes as competitors jostle to differentiate their products in the market-place.The BT data network sales organisation has to keep up with all these market changes. To assist with this, BT has invested heavily in a range of bespoke sales tools to support mass customisation of this range of solutions, in order to help improve their turnover, market reach and win rate. One of these tools is an application called SPEED (system pricing and end-to-end design) which is used at the consultative selling and design stages. SPEED is installed on the portable computers used by the account management teams. It aims to incorporate the 'mind of the expert designer'—best practice design principles and a compendium of the latest product and service offerings with up-to-date tariff and discount structures. It enables customers' requirements to be modelled and priced both accurately and quickly.SPEED provides a considerable advantage to the sales force in terms of reduced sales cycle, flexibility and accuracy of response to the customer. It also eliminates errors and omissions in the design and order-entry processes.This paper will focus on how SPEED delivers real business value to the customer and to BT.     

Current reliability issues and future technologies for systems on silicon – processes, circuits, chip architecture, and design

The progress of silicon technology is opening the era of “systems on silicon” in which a large-scale memory, a CPU, and other logic macros will be integrated on a single chip. These kinds of chips, called system LSIs, have an especially promising future in mobile and multimedia applications but face inherent technical problems related to the reliability of ultrathin oxide film, conflict in the processing of different components, increased gate and subthreshold leakage currents, memory bottlenecks, and design complexity. This paper reviews the system LSIs and then introduces related technologies in processing, circuits, chip architecture, and design. It also discusses the influence of the system LSIs on business strategies.     

Model-driven systems development and integration environment

Telecommunications operators are undergoing massive transformations in order to metamorphose themselves into the ICT world and compete with agile, lean IT organisations. The main challenges facing telecommunications operators, such as BT, are to reduce costs and increase agility in deploying software systems for provisioning ICT services. Despite using reusable capabilities and COTS packages, the major source of increased cost lies in the heavy integration tax we incur for integrating diverse systems implemented on diverse platforms and middleware, with heterogeneous data and process models. This paper looks at cost implications of lengthy and often manual migration to-and-from systems and platforms, and shows the clear business benefits of model-driven development (MDD) as defined by the Object Management Group (OMG). It is clearly demonstrated that model-driven development has matured into a practical, industrialised, scalable and evolvable technology, culminating from decades of R&D on specification and design languages, executable formalisms and domainspecific languages and language transformations.     

Visionen für den Telekom-Markt in Österreich

In a European comparison, liberalization in Austria has given the small country a wide range of providers and brought hard competition to the telecom operators. Today information technology and telecommunications have long been an inseparable unity, and globally the ICT branch has become a key factor in guaranteeing high quality standards for Austria as a place to do business. In this scenario we need political incentives for infrastructure investments and national solidarity for broadband by politics, industry and research, to be able to keep step with the speed of international development.     

Proper Framework for the Application of Power Management Algorithms

A power aware system can reduce its energy dissipation by dynamically powering off during idle periods and powering on again upon a new service request arrival. We minimize the dissipated energy, by selecting the optimal waiting interval before powering off, under consideration of the expected time of the next arrival. This approach has been already proposed in the past, using the idle times distribution, rather than the interarrival periods captured at the moment of service completion. Algorithms proposed in the literature utilize the history of idle periods or assume a vanishing service time. There has been no clear proposition on how service time affects the time instance of our power off decision; rather, whenever service time has been significant, a “blurred” image of the system’s characteristic and a corresponding approximated optimal policy occurred. We clearly show analytically and experimentally that the idle times distribution should not be used as a primary design input, since it is the product of two separate inputs; the interarrival times and the service times. We give insight to our problem, using a mechanical equivalent established at the moment of service completion of all pending requests and show through analytical examples how service time affects our power-off decision. We explain the paradox of being advantageous to wait for intervals more than the shutdown threshold (which is a system characteristic) and show how the introduction of idle period lengths instead of interarrival periods “blurs” the input distribution, leading to non-optimal decisions. Our contribution is to define and solve the proper problem, solely relying on the interarrival distribution. Further, we examine the problem under the framework of competitive analysis. We show how the interarrival distribution that maximizes the competitive ratio, being an exponential distribution, intervenes with power management; it renders the optimization procedure worthless through its “memoryless property”. Exponential interarrivals, irrespective of the service time pattern, are the marginal case where we cannot obtain energy gains. In all other cases the framework we promote ensures considerable advantages compared to other approaches in the literature. Moreover, it leads to a self contained module, implementable in software or hardware, which is based on an iterative formula and thus reduces power management calculations significantly. Here we exploit all operational features of the problem in proposing an implementation which spreads computations over the whole of the waiting period. We extensively compare our results numerically both against claimed expectations and against previous proposals. The outcome fully supports our framework as the one most appropriate for the application of power management.Part of this work has been supported by the EU IST-2001-34157 project PACKWOMAN (Power Aware Communication for Wireless Optimised Personal Area Networks).     

Being proactive — analytics for predicting customer actions

Customers should be at the heart of most businesses, and in particular service providers such as BT. In order to serve our customers better, we regularly introduce reliable processes and procedures to improve interaction with our customers, which is known as customer relationship management. Typically, organisations collect and keep large volumes of customer data as part of their processes. Analysis of this data by business users often leads to discovery of valuable patterns and trends that otherwise would go unnoticed and that can lead to prioritisation of decisions on future investments. Current tools available to business users are limited to visualisation and reporting of data. What is needed is modelling customer behaviours to be able to build future scenarios. More advanced tools and techniques have been available for a number of years but have not been developed for the business community due to the level of expertise required to use them. In this paper we present a number of tools and techniques developed for business users to perform advanced analysis on customer data. The tools can be used to perform sensitivity analysis, what-if analysis and impact analysis, all of which are aimed at prediction and simulation of future customer actions. The paper also covers application of the tools to real customer data and reports on some of the results obtained.     

Intelligent Business Analytics — A Tool to Build Decision-Support Systems for eBusinesses

An important principle in managing any business is ‘What can't be measured, can't be managed’. The complexity of businesses today means that in order to measure business performance one needs to perform considerable analysis of data gathered in vast quantities on a regular basis. Therefore data analysis is at the heart of decision making in all business applications. There is, however, a significant degree of manual intervention in preparing, presenting and analysing business data. Recent advances in intelligent software technology have produced a number of novel techniques to model the human decision-making process. Data analysis tools have in the past been used by businesses mainly as a reactive tool. The pace of change and increased competition means that those businesses that can turn data into information and then into action quickly will have a better chance to survive and out-manoeuvre their rivals. This requires a fundamental change in the way data is used in the enterprise, from a reactive manner to a proactive one. The implications of recent changes can be significant on the level of skilled resources required as well as the cost of such operations. Intelligent software can play an important role in automating the analysis process and up-skill the business users. In this paper we will describe the intelligent business analytics (IBA) platform and two applications developed using it. The paper will focus on soft computing as an emerging technology suitable for incorporation into business analytics applications to model hidden patterns in data and to explain such patterns automatically. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A model-based approach to trust, security and assurance

BT and HP research labs have been studying the use of modelling as a way to make managing the security of complex ICT systems tractable. From among the wide range of security management problems, this paper focuses on assurance, i.e. demonstrating that risks are appropriately managed. Recent regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley make effective levels of assurance mandatory, so the subject is highly topical. This paper describes some of the results from the BT and HP research programmes in the context of ICT services. The approaches are highly complementary and potential benefits accrue from applying them in combination. The paper ends with a discussion of the challenges of assurance in collaborative business contexts and how the modelling techniques can be extended to address them. HP     

Thermal Modeling and Device Noise Properties of Three-Dimensional–SOI Technology

Thermal test structures and ring oscillators (ROs) are fabricated in 0.18-$ muhbox{m}$ three-dimensional (3-D)–SOI technology. Measurements and electrothermal simulations show that thermal and parasitic effects due to 3-D packaging have a significant impact on circuit performance. A physical thermal model is parameterized to provide better prediction of circuit performance in 3-D technologies. Electrothermal simulations using the thermal model show good agreement with measurement data; the model is applicable for different circuits designed in the 3-D–SOI technology. By studying the phase noise of ROs, the device noise properties of 3-D–SOI technology are also characterized and compared with conventional bulk CMOS technology.      

What's in the Middle?

Enterprise Middleware has the power to help you quickly develop, deploy and manage critical on-line transaction processing and client/server applications to take advantage more easily of new business opportunities and to manage, change or extend your business — but first you need to know what to look for in the increasingly diverse range of technology products. This paper discusses the issues that a programme in BT should consider when selecting middleware products to deploy with BT systems. The paper draws upon the experiences gained within the Client/Server Evolution Laboratory (CSLab), part of in Ipswich Software Engineering Centre's (ISEC's) Systems and Software Strategy Unit, with particular emphasis on the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Distributed Computing Environment and Java.     

Broadband access: comparing alternatives

Capital investments by network providers to develop broadband access for the information superhighway have inherent risks. Nevertheless, potential rewards to telephone companies, cable TV companies, and others for serving the end consumer in an expanding information economy make such investments a business imperative. This article focuses on the incumbent terrestrial access providers, the telephone local exchange carriers (LECs) and cable multiple system operators (MSOs). First, it cites the business environment and the information highway services that are driving local telephone and cable companies to invest in broadband access, as evolving technology and relaxing regulation enable the convergence of these two industries. Broadband access technologies are then reviewed and evolutionary paths from the respective embedded bases are considered, with respect to both today's choices and the long-term vision. The two choices for broadband access are loosely termed hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) and switched digital video (SDV). The thrust of this article is to explain why these two alternatives overshadow all others and to highlight the decision factors facing network providers in choosing between them     

Clipped noisy images: Heteroskedastic modeling and practical denoising

We study the denoising of signals from clipped noisy observations, such as digital images of an under- or over-exposed scene. From a precise mathematical formulation and analysis of the problem, we derive a set of homomorphic transformations that enable the use of existing denoising algorithms for non-clipped data (including arbitrary denoising filters for additive independent and identically distributed, i.i.d., Gaussian noise). Our results have general applicability and can be “plugged” into current filtering implementations, to enable a more accurate and better processing of clipped data. Experiments with synthetic images and with real raw data from charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor show the feasibility and accuracy of the approach.     

Semiconductor device reliability vs process quality

This paper describes a method for defining a quantitative model relating “quality” expressed in terms of parameter distributions and “reliability” expressed in terms of failure rates. This model makes it possible to generate a more realistic failure rate estimate for semiconductor devices. With this model, failure rate predictions based on conventional life test data and on process parameter distributions, can be defined.     

On Computing General Position Views of Data in Three Dimensions

Several degeneracies in spatial data can be removed (without perturbing the input) by a global rigid transformation of the input. Such degeneracies are called extrinsic degeneracies. The removal of extrinsic degeneracies is referred to as “computing a general-position view” in the graphics and visualization community, which may be described as a view that minimizes loss of information due to degeneracies. In this paper, we address a general approach for removing extrinsic degeneracies by suitably transforming the input. Such an approach has received little attention in the computational geometry literature on computing in the presence of degeneracies. Existing methods for removing degeneracies in computational geometry can be classified as either approximation or perturbation methods. These methods give the implementer two rather unsatisfactory choices: find an approximate solution to the original problem given, or find an exact solution to an approximation of the original problem. In contrast to these approaches, if the problem at hand requires the removal of extrinsic degeneracies only, our approach allows an exact solution to the original problem even when the input is in fact degenerate. Once the solution is obtained on the transformed nondegenerate input, it can be transformed back trivially to yield the solution to the original problem. We consider several nondegeneracy assumptions that are typically made in the literature, propose algorithms for performing the pre- and postprocessing steps that remove these degeneracies, analyze their complexity, and, for some of these problems, give lower bounds on their worst-case complexity. We also give algorithms for computing a most robust general-position view, i.e., a view that allows the most “jitter” without reintroducing degeneracies. The assumptions considered here include: (1) no two points in the plane have the same x-coordinate, (2) no two points in space lie on a vertical line, (3) no two points in space have the same coordinates, (4) no three points in space lie on a vertical plane, and (5) no two line segments lie on a vertical plane. Incorporating our algorithms with those in the literature that make these nondegeneracy assumptions, allows those algorithms to work even when the degeneracies are present, albeit at the cost of increased complexity. We propose low-degree polynomial-time solutions for the decision, computation, and optimization versions of all these problems. For the optimization version of problem (5) we give an O(n⁴) time algorithm, reducing the previous best running time of O(n⁶ log n).     

A Study on the Identification of Cutting‐Edge ICT‐Based Converging Technologies

It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify promising technologies due to the influx of new technologies and the high level of complexity involved in many of these technologies. Identifying promising information and communications technology (ICT)‐based converging technologies holds the key to finding new sources of economic growth and forward momentum. The goal of this study is to identify cutting‐edge ICT‐based converging technologies by examining the latest trends in the US patent market. Analyzing the US patent market, the most competitive of such markets in the world, can yield certain clues about which of the ICT‐based converging technologies may be the next revolutionary technologies. For a classification of these technologies, this study follows the International Patent Classification system. As for ICT, there are 58 related fields at the subclass level and 831 fields at the main‐group level. For emerging and converging technologies, there are 75 at the main‐group level. From these technologies, a final selection for cutting‐edge ICT‐based converging technologies is made using a composite index reflecting the converging coefficient, emerging coefficient, and technology impact index.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Information Systems Planning Integration

Successful utilization of the firm's information technology (IT) investments continues to be a difficult but important task for senior business and information systems managers. This paper focuses on one potentially important determinant of IT investment outcomes-integration of business and IT planning. Integration is examined using three kinds of participation: business managers' participation in IT planning, IT managers' participation in business planning, and top managers' participation in IT resource allocation. Based on considerations of knowledge sharing and commitment, a theoretical model linking these three aspects to three potential consequences-quality of IT plans, IT project problems, and IT-based organization performance-and two antecedents-top managers' perception of IT importance and environmental heterogeneity-is developed. The model is tested using data collected through a survey of 274 chief information officer (CIO) respondents. Results of structural equation modeling analysis support 12 of the 15 hypotheses. Surprisingly, top managers' participation in resource allocation had a stronger association with IT-based organizational performance than either quality of IT plans or the absence of IT project problems. This implies that the role of IT planning and alignment might be weakened when investments reflect top managements' selection. Implications of the study for practice and future research are examined.