Contributions in Merlin

In enterprise applications, the software architecture is often neglected. The reason therefore is that there are neither the right means nor the concepts to integrate architectural considerations in today’s design process. These improper architectured systems often can not ful?l their non- functional requirements. To solve these problems, this thesis provides a new approach to model real applications. Therefore it supplies a Component Toolbox, consisting of architectural patterns and implementation related components which are tuned to model the system in a comprehensive manner. This helps to accelerate and ease the design process as well as to improve the architectural quality of the system.

This thesis is divided into two main sections. The theoretical section explains the current Human Resources (HR) landscape within UBS and future developments concerning the strategy of HR specifically in relation to IT. The practical section shows a concrete example from the HR department, where a core process, the reference request, has been reengineered to an automated e-solution. The theoretical section of this thesis answers the question: can a decentralised HR organisation become a centralised one. A key objective of UBS HR is to achieve a worldwide hiring, employee evaluation and further education structure, with a shared IT system and infrastructure platform throughout the world. The benefits of this approach are that firstly it could lead to significant cost reductions and secondly could simplify any move toward an HR-outsourcing strategy. The practical section of this thesis explains how the new electronic reference request process works and how standardised processes are driven by the PegaRules application, a business process managment application from PegaSystems. It addresses the main issues and challenges (security, communication) facing the reengineering of the reference request process as well as an overview of possible solutions. The result is in an overall concept for dealing with the Human Resource related business processes together with an IT solution for the defined examples and the analysis of the problems specifically related to the Web.

A growing amount of digital multimedia content is being created by users and being traded through web platforms. As a consequence, mass products are being more and more displaced by niche-products. This is the foundation for the formation of the so called Long Tail. In this thesis existing “Long Tail interfaces” are being analyzed to get requirements for a new user centered method of resolution. The focus lies with the support of explorative retrieval strategies in combination with adequate mechanisms of social, collaborative informationstructuring. Part of this is an interactive tag browser, which allows the user to search and view videos simultaneously, a blog and e-mail function and a dynamic group function based on a buddy list. Especially the possibility to search and watch simultaneously was very appreciated by the users. It makes it possible to do a dynamic search by consolidating information through the integrated tag browser. It allows a catenation of keywords to be added or removed which enlarges respectively reduces the amount of results.

In the last few years the travel industry has changed. The traditional travel agencies face new competition from internet-distributors and a variety of offers for online travel planning. Hence they have to find new opportunities to increase the attractiveness of their distribution model. In this work, opportunities for the ”Travel agency of the Future” are examined, based on the analysis of the environment and requirements of travel advisory. Based on the requirements analysis a consulting-design and a system-design for an optimized process are built. Thereby the focus lies on the concept of User Experience & Information Designaiming at the support of advisory activities through the presentation of multimedia travel information aspiring a closer cooperation between clients and travel agents. Finally, the knowledge gained will be integrated into the implementation of a prototype, which in turn will be tested in a practical application test. The obtained test data is analysed and presented.

In today’s business environment, corporations are drowning in the information they have collected over the years. Whether caused by incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, or simply inaccessible data, the management and provisioning of accurate and consistent enterprise data is acomplex and time-consuming task. Fast and easy access to up-to-date master data is a necessary precondition in today’s knowledge-centric business environment. In a rapidly changing knowledge environment, the question arises how IT departments can adopt new forms of information architecture in order to fulfill business needs. The main contribution of the diploma thesis at hand is a new architectural approach that simplifies access to accurate and up-to-date master data by using the concept of ontology in order to build a corporate data language. Ontology is an enabler for a consistent and holistic view of enterprise master data that can be accessed and searched by means of a single interface. The proposed architecture has been successfully implemented and tested with an exploartive prototype in the master data environment of the world’s largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, but is not limited to this specific context.

A number of design principles deal with dependencies and interrelations of software modules. They all strive for tight cohesion within, and loose coupling between modules. In the objectoriented paradigm the goal of loose coupling is mirrored at package and class level. Dependencies, for instance, stem from class inheritance, subtyping, method calls, and attribute accesses. The maintainability of object-oriented systems is affected by dependencies. It is therefore important to identify the inherent design to avoid breaking of existing design rules or to make necessary corrections for future changes. Revere engineering helps to understand software systems by analyzing the source code and creating representations at a higher level of abstraction. Visualization plays an important role in reverse engineering and allows to quickly gain an overview of a large system. Since the revision history of a software system also contains important information about its evolution, including data from versioning systems is valuable. In this thesis we developed a tool for visualizing Java class dependencies and changes. Our approach is based on existing visualization techniques and uses hierarchical graphs to represent the structure of the system. For visualizing dependencies and expressing the strength of coupling, the polymetric view principle is adopted. The focus of our work was on browsing and navigating dependency relationships. Most of the existing visualization approaches initially load a visual representation of the whole system and provide browsing facilities to focus on the demanded issues. We support this top-down strategy to software analysis as well by providing powerful filter facilities. Those filter techniques help to break down a cluttered image of a large system and to focus on the relevant parts. In addition, we support a bottom-up approach to reverse engineering. We provide a navigation technique that lets the user create a visualization of the portions she is interested in. We allow to start with a visualization of a small part and let the user incrementally expand it through adding dependent elements. By allowing to focus on the portions of interest, our approach is scalable and can be used to address specific questions in the mass of underlying information.

An overview of the current Swiss IT-outsourcing market as perceived by the outsourcing companies will be presented in this thesis. Furthermore principles of a knowledge transfer method in IT outsourcing projects, developed at the University of Zurich, will be verified empirically. For this purpose a survey of Swiss companies with ITO projects in the past several years was conducted, using a questionnaire developed in collaboration with an outsourcing consulting company. 104 CIOs, IT- and Outsourcing managers were invited to participate, with participation being possible in written form as well as by online platform. The evaluation of 45 returned questionnaires provided several interesting insights, for example that companies are coping better and better with the outsourcing of IT, that different sourcing strategies are more promising depending on the contract volume and that innovations are not as actively pursued as they should be. Statistically significant conclusions with regard to the principles of the knowledge transfer method were not possible due to the low number of samples. Nevertheless, the answers indicate that the knowledge transfer requires different approaches with regard to each outsourcing project to be successful.

Ad hoc tasks emerge from unforeseen events. Such an event could be a fire disaster or simpler a boss who urgently needs a presentation for his customers. Ad hoc tasks arrive unexpected for the affected persons. They have a high enough priority for not being postponed and the workload of the tasks is so big that it can't be carried out by a single person. The work needs a great deal of process designing and facilitation. Ad hoc tasks must be supported technologically. A perfect tool supports group communications, awareness and scheduling. It furthermore offers a shared workspace and a facility to design a work process. A specific groupware tool is called ""Groupy"" and it is described and evolved in this diploma thesis. There lies a high learning potential in these ad hoc tasks. A person participating in a learning arrangement consisting of several tasks, which have an increasing complexity, is able to learn a lot about group work, facilitation and process designing. This kind of learning arrangement was developed, tested and improved in this diploma thesis.

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Service Level Agreements (SLA) are needed to allow business interactions to rely on Internet services. Service Level Objectives (SLO) specify the committed performance level of a service. Thus, SLA compliance auditing aims at verifying these commitments. Since SLOs for various application services and end-to-end performance definitions vary largely, automated auditing of SLA compliances poses the challenge to an auditing framework. Moreover, end-to-end performance data are potentially large for a provider with many customers. Therefore, this paper presents a scalable and highly reusable auditing framework and a prototype, termed AURIC (Auditing Framework for Internet Services), whose components can be distributed across different domains.