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Challenges in Moving from Documents to Information Web for Services

Rakesh Mohan, Biplav Srivastava*, Pietro Mazzoleni, Richard Goodwin

IBM Research

IIWeb-09 July 11, 2009

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© 2009 IBM Corporation

Outline

Background– Services

– Documentation in Services

– Information and Collaboration

– Services Domain of Interest: Packaged Application

Web-enabled Trend: Document-centric v/s Object-centric tools

Challenges– Creating an object-centric model

– Model guided content creation

– Publishing object-centric information into documents

– Online and offline updates

– Harvesting legacy content

– Integrating Information

Conclusion

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Background: Services, As Understood by Characteristics

Co - Production – The customer participates in the process of production and delivery of a

service. This implies that the service output also depends upon the customer's inputs.

Heterogeneity– The customer is involved in the process and each customer has his or her own

requirements. – The service delivery is not a standardized process and each service provider

(employee) has his or her way of achieving the same outcome Intangibility

– The output of services is intangible and may or may not have tangible components. This causes the service to be felt or experienced but not touched by the customer.

Perishability– Services are produced and consumed at the same time. This causes the

services to be perishable i.e. they cannot be inventoried.

Slide source: Inder Thukral

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Example: Documentation in Services

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Patient

Insurance

Pharmacy

Doctor’s Office

Medical History

Prescription

Medical Claims,Prescription

Drug Claims,Prescription

Bills, Policy Updates

Problem: Hand-offs between role-players are inefficient and failure-prone

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Services Domain of Interest: Packaged Application Packaged Application

– Off-the-shelf software to manage common business functions like accounting, payment and receivables, order management, customer management; or industry-specific functions like clinical trial (pharmaceutical), drilling (mining, oil & gas)

– Businesses buy these software and then engage service providers to tailor them

– Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a specific class of packaged applications

Market size (according to AMR Research [AMR 2008])– The total market size for ERP software is currently $34.4B. SAP leads with 42 %, followed by Oracle (23%), The

Sage Group (7%), Microsoft Dynamics (4%), and others.

– Spending on services including consulting, integration and support for Oracle, SAP, and other business application vendors, called packaged enterprise application services, was $103B for 2007, and expected to reach $174B by 2012.

– IBM is a prominent service provider for SAP and Oracle.

Typical service projects involve hundreds of business processes involving hundreds of consultants working for 1-2 years creating thousands of documents created by Office Productivity tools

New Approach being Introduced in IBM– Move from document-centric to information-web

– Reuse information within a project, eventually across projects

Problem: Hand-offs between hundreds of role-players are inefficient and failure-prone

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Information and Collaboration

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Problem Theme: Streamline hand-offs among stakeholders

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Example of PA Document: PDD

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Example of Object-centric Information Web

8Object-Centric Representation of Process Information for SAP Implementation Illustrated with Content

from SAP’s Solution Composer and Solution Manager Tools

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Document-centric v/s Object-centric toolsDocument-centric

Pros– Work Products can be created independent of any

governance restrictions, as needed.

– Documents can be physically stored and use to document agreements.

– Documents can be passed-around to anyone who has access to the software compatible with document format

– There is no need for special tools to collect and distribute information

Cons– Information available to an individual can get stale and

out-of-synch with the latest information available to the project.

– Documents cannot be consumed easily. For example, formatting can be changed, ad-hoc objects inserted

– Licenses for commercial word processors and format inter-operability are lingering issues, and the chosen technology varies with client preferences

– Intrinsic relations among information in the documents need to be independently (and manually) maintained by the users.

Object-centric

Pros– Up-to-date information available to everybody (“single

view of truth”)

– Document can be viewed as snapshot of a view on a sub-graph of the information web, at a given time. It can be created on-demand in any format.

– Instead of physical documents, links to objects can be shared. Intrinsic relations among information in the documents can be maintained in common repositories shared by all users.

Cons– When documents are published for objects, they cannot

be easily updated and then reflected back on the objects. This is because the objects may have been updated to a different state by the time changes from the document are completed

– Objects cannot be altered freely, by design. The inter-relationships and constraints among the objects need to be always consistent and they restrict the type of changes that a user can do.

– New tools, not familiar to users, are needed to collect and distribute information.

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Solution Template

Activities of the role-players have to be structured

Commitments/agreements during the hand-off have to be persisted over time and verifiable

System has to support evolution as changes happen over time

Other desiderata specific to problem setting

– Asset reuse

– Cloud-based availability

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Challenges

Creating an object-centric model– Perennial problem in acquiring the well-accepted model

– Unique to problem: • No single Oracle –multiple experts for different areas• Current model editing tools lack ontological expressivity, are single-user, hamper collaboration

Model guided content creation– Limited tools exist to create editors (e.g., Eclipse) but do not support links across objects

Publishing object-centric information into documents– Documents are snapshots of information web, and restrict new changes to be always on object

representation

– Version control

– Degree of granularity for publishing needs to be controlled

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Challenges

Online and offline updates– Practical issue: information web not available to everyone and at all times due to a

number of reasons: security access, cost, maturity of technology or regulatory processes. E.g., customer approvals, government filings.

– Maintaining coherence

Harvesting legacy content– Migrating content in documents to pre-populate objects

– Readying for reuse: desensitization, standardization

Integrating Information– Enabled within a project or across seamlessly in information web due to model-

based tags

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Our Solution Choices

Creating an object-centric model => Guidelines for model given to SMEs; a negotiated model provided by experts and maintained by them

Model guided content creation => A web-based tool with most UI capabilities generated from the model

Publishing object-centric information into documents => Publishing easily targetable to different file formats

Online and offline updates => No offline changes allowed

Harvesting legacy content => IBM Content Harvester

Integrating Information => Within project (saved in Jazz model repository) and across projects (in Rational’s Asset Manager product)

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Conclusion

Analyzed a pressing problem in services: hand-offs between role-players

– Inefficient and failure-prone in many services industries

– Accentuated in packaged applications when role-players are in hundreds, projects run into years and cost millions.

Identified root-cause to document-centric information management

Identified specific challenges in creating information web

Discussed solution choices for a specific setting

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