Virtual Organizations Management

This paper discusses how the Virtual Organisation (VO) concept can be used for managing dynamic security associations in collaborative Grid applications and for complex resource provisioning. The paper contains both research part and discusses further development of the popular VO management software the VO Membership Service (VOMS). The paper provides an overview of current practices in VO management in major Grid projects including operational procedures and the supporting security middleware. The paper identifies open issues and basic requirements to the VO security functionality and services and suggests possible directions of further research and development. The proposed conceptual VO model and VO management framework provide a basis for consistent VO services definition and development to support different VO operational models. The paper intends to provide a framework for common understanding of the VO concept among Grid community and collaborative community and industry. The paper is based on experiences gained from the major Grid based and Grid oriented projects in collaborative applications and complex resource provisioning.

Virtual Organizations (VOs) are dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources. VOs are widely accepted in grid and other distributed computing environments. Previous VO research produces several separate tools to provide part of the functionality including user registration, user mapping, authentication, authorization, and VO management. However, none of the work covers all the functionality or focuses on non-functional properties. This paper formally defines virtual organization in terms of three functional requirements and four non-functional properties. The functional requirements are user management, resource management, and VO management. The non-functional properties are decentralization, flexibility, simplicity, and efficiency. The problem is formulated as designing a VO architecture to satisfy the functional requirements and achieve the non-functional properties at the same time. This paper presents a layered architecture with GNode abstraction to construct Agora, an implementation of VOs. In Agora architecture, all the entities including users, resources, and agoras are abstracted as GNodes. A naming layer is constructed to manage these GNodes. At the top, there is a logic layer implementing all Agora functionality based on GNode and managing the physical layer resources. The Agora architecture has been implemented in the Vega Grid Operating System. Agora is deployed in the China National Grid and other grid platforms with more than 27 sites and 19 applications. The evaluations through real applications, high performance computing VO scenarios, and micro benchmarks show that the Agora architecture provides complete VO functionality, while achieving decentralization, flexibility, simplicity, and efficiency.

A Virtual Organization (VO) in the Grid is a collection of users and distributed resources, in which resources are shared by users. VOs are dynamically created for some goals and then disappear after the goals are achieved. Conventional Grid architectures have been proposed for a single or static VO environment. In this paper, we propose a ticket-based Grid services architecture to support the dynamic VO environment. Tickets contain information and delegated rights of resource providers, VO managers, and users. By using these tickets, the proposed architecture supports various services in the dynamic VO environment, such as VO management, fine-grained authorization, resource information, and resource management.

In the actual market conditions, where it is essential to rapidly respond to business opportunities that might emerge, the concept of virtual organisation (VO) appears particularly well suited. The possibility of rapidly forming a VO to respond to a business or collaboration opportunity gives companies an expression of agility and survival mechanisms in the face of market turbulence. Nevertheless, in the process of VO creation, the negotiation among partners is essential. It is of extreme importance to have an environment where all potential partners can come together and negotiate the necessary topics towards an agreement to regulate the consortium behaviour. Through this environment it should be possible to conduct and manage the VO negotiation process, reach agreements and commitments among partners, enclose necessary documentation, specify partners’ rights and duties, etc. To accomplish such environment, a negotiation wizard is proposed. An illustrative scenario of an agreement negotiation in a multicultural context is presented showing the applicability of the wizard.

Grid-based collaborative simulation system for vehicle crashworthiness

The organizational concept of virtual Web organizations encompasses three organizational elements, namely the relatively stable virtual Web platform from which dynamic virtual corporations derive. Virtual corporations are interorganizational adhocracies that are configured temporally of independent companies in order to serve a particular purpose, such as joint R&D, product development, and production. The third element of this organizational construct is the management organization that initiates and maintains the virtual Web platform as well as forms and facilitates the operation of dynamic virtual corporations. Since the organizational concept of virtual Web organizations is hardly researched this chapter aims to provide readers with a better understanding of the organizational concept of virtual Web organizations and in particular of how such an organizational construct is managed. Based on empirical research the author developed a competence-based management model of virtual Web management organizations. This competence-based view of virtual Web management organizations presents an overview of a set of common sub-competencies underlying the three virtual Web management’s main competencies of initiating and maintaining virtual Web platforms and forming dynamic virtual corporations. Furthermore, the developed competence-based management model describes the content of the individual sub-competencies and it explains the purpose, the interrelateness and the temporal dimensions of the virtual Web management’s sub-competencies.

Despite grids' popularity, virtual organizations (VOs) have yet to become a commodity technology in modern computing environments due to the complexity of managing them and difficulty of assuring user and VO isolation. Here, the authors describe the VO management approach taken by XtreemOS, a new grid operating system with native support for VOs that supports a wide range of computing resources, from clusters to mobiles. They also discuss the requirements for the VO model and management within XtreemOS and introduce an expandable VO model and a system architecture that supports it.

Grid technologies support collaborative e-Research typified by multiple institutions and resources seamlessly shared to tackle common research problems. The rules for collaboration and resource sharing are commonly achieved through establishment and management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources by collaborators are defined and enforced by sites involved in the collaboration. The expression and enforcement of these rules is made through access control systems where roles/privileges are defined and associated with individuals as digitally signed attribute certificates which collaborating sites then use to authorizeaccess to resources. Key to this approach is that the roles are assigned to the right individuals in the VO; the attribute certificates are only presented to the appropriate resources in the VO; it is transparent to the end user researchers, and finally that it is manageable for resource providers and administrators in the collaboration. In this paper, we present a security model and implementation improving the overall usability and security of resources used in Grid-based e-Research collaborations through exploitation of the Internet2 Shibboleth technology. This is explored in the context of a major new security focused project at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow in the nanoCMOS electronics domain.

This chapter endeavours to clarify some of the concepts related to the virtual organisation and to move away from the definition of a “virtual organisation” as one with few or no tangible assets, existing in virtual space created through information communication technologies (ICT) (Warner & Witzel, 2004). The authors focus on the concept of an organisation, which is “virtually organised,” employing ICT for the majority of its communication, asset management, knowledge management and customer resource management, across a network of customers, suppliers and employees (Venkatraman & Henderson, 1998). The authors consider the concepts of virtual organisations and virtual organising and develop an instrument that can be used to evaluate organisational readiness to exploit virtual networks. The instrument can be used initially to measure the value of virtual models to the organisation and then reapplied to measure the extent to which these values are actually embraced.

The concept of the virtual organization (VO) has engendered great interest in the literature, yet there is still little common understanding of the concept, as evidenced by the multitude of labels applied to VOs. In this article, we focus on a "Weberian-ideal-type" definition of the interorganizational VO, posited in our earlier work (Kasper-Fuehrer and Ashkanasy 2001). We argue, however, that this definition left unanswered critical questions relating to the nature and effects of interorganizational VOs. We answer these questions here by explicating the terms in the definition and deriving ten corollaries, or "natural consequences" of our definition. The corollaries posit that interorganizational VOs are temporary in nature, are network organizations, are independent, and are based on swift trust. We suggest further that interorganizational VOs enable small to medium enterprises to exploit market opportunities, and enable VO member organizations to create a value-adding partnership. We also identify information and communication technology (ICT) as the essential enabler of VOs. Finally, we argue that interorganizational VOs act as a single organizational unit and that they therefore constitute a uniquely distinguishable organizational form. We conclude with suggestions for further research, including trust, organizational behavior, transaction economics, virtual HRM, and business strategy.

Grids are generally known as infrastructure for high performance computing. However, the original idea behind grid computing was to support collaborative problem solving in virtual organizations (VO). A challenge for collaboration infrastructures is to support dynamic VOs that collaborate on the design, production and maintenance of products that are described in complex structured product model databases. Such VOs are typical for industries with long supply chains like automotive, shipbuilding and aerospace. Per-haps the most complex dynamically changing VOs and are in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). Semantic interoperability of software and information systems belonging to members of the VO is es-sential for efficient collaboration within the VO. We believe that the current state of the art - the Web Services paradigm, is too fragile and tangled for efficient collaboration in AEC. Grids provide the robustness but need to be made aware of the business concepts that the VO is addressing. The grid itself needs to commit to the product's and process's ontology thereby evolving into an ontology committed semantic grid. To do so there is a need for the generic business-object-aware extensions to grid middleware, implemented in a way that would allow grids to commit to an arbitrary ontology. These extensions are propagated to toolkits that allow hard-ware and software to be integrated into the grid. This is expected to be done in a European Project called in-teliGrid. This paper presents its baseline, hypothesis and expected results. The project's impact is expected to be wide; it will create knowledge, infrastructure and toolkits that will allow for a broad transition of the indus-try towards semantic, model based, ontology committed collaboration using the grid, rather than the Web, as the infrastructure, thus enabling the grid to become a mainstream collaboration paradigm.

ON THE MANAGEMENT OF COLLABORATIVE SME NETWORKS

“Internet” is an instance of a virtual and networked organization. We understand the meanings of virtual and network, however, in a broader sense than the specific meaning of information and computer technology (ICT). This chapter, in fact, is based on the interplay between such specific and general meaning associations. As a result of this interplay with the concepts of virtual and networked organizations and technologies, some emerging issues about Internet, as well as “NVOs” will be brought up. Our comments on these issues will hopefully draw attention to certain aspects of the Internet as one important example of the networked and virtual organizations. Some of these aspects would normally be considered as less related to scientific studies or knowledge than to other studies, or bodies of knowledge. For instance, some resources that we incorporate into our discussion are considered (social) science fiction.

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

We examine the evolution of one NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure organization, the TeraGrid, into its successor organization, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) via a case study methodology with two different frames of reference: virtual organization literature and public management networks theory. Our aim in examining these two projects is to situate the study of cyberinfrastructure in support of basic science in both the virtual organization and public management networks literature. We find that our cases confirm the utility of hierarchy when dealing with complexity and that expert use of ICT for governance tasks improves network capacity, especially when time-tested technologies are available in the environment. These ICT resources can be used for monitoring of both service delivery functions as well as network health. We also note that the establishment of common inter-organizational standards facilitates interoperability between organizations, allowing sustainability and modularity of network members.