Another argument for internal controls

I stumbled on this post on the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) life blog about implementing controls and Segregation of Duty (SoD). Although the post is quite old (19.05.2007), I felt it contained important points that I wanted to report on.

First of all the post gives another argumentation for the need for controls (for me, the need for policies can be justified in a similar way). The authors reports on experience with controls and SoD. He observes two problems in companies:

• An employee having too much responsibilities can be tempted to diminish the quality of his work, either by frauding the realization of his tasks because of improper supervision or by simply not being ready to deliver the performance that is expected from him. Not being able to discover and control these discrepancies is certainly a big leak in a company's internal procedures. This point related to SoD controls.
• The second problem according to [1] is that there is a inherent risk in companies, and that is of continuously forgetting about the most important things to do and concentrating on the most urgent things to do. He makes a parallel between our own lives and companies. We tend to give a higher priority to urging tasks that have to be done and neglect what is really important, although we know that it is. Example: I know that it is important to control the quality of the development of an application that is being developed in India by providing and testing adequate test data. the problem is that at the same time, I have to deliver reports to the management about project planning and expenses for development projects for the region. I will eventually forget about the first task and accept the delivered product because of no time to test it. The same thing happens to companies when it is about designing internal controls.

The author in [1] gives a simple tip to follow when proceeding to the design of SoD controls. For each risk-related task or activity, ask the question: "If I make an error in my work, will someone downstream of me detect it before it becomes a major issue for management and shareholders to read about?" ([1]). I like this formulation because it uncovers the underlying view on tasks as processes. Business processes are actually the place where you should start looking for your controls to be defined. They give you the necessary overview, perspective and documentation o your real activities.

so these are two points coming from the reality of the business. Although most companies starting to struggle with compliance management do so because of the legal pressure applied on them, taking such concerns int o account will eventually make its place, when companies understand the value they get out of internal controls because they allow them to actively manage risks and avoid unexpected failures of business processes.

Marwane El Kharbili.

[1] Explaining Segregation of Duties. SOX Life Blog Post. http://www.insidesarbanesoxley.com/soxlife/2007/05/explaining-segregation-of-duties.asp.

Some Tip Rules for International Travelers

Thanks to some well known TV broadcaster, I got some interesting information about Asian tipping habits. So I thought I would share this.

First of all the simplest are the Japanese, it is advised not to tip anyone, cause giving money could be perceived as an insult out there, so you'd better keep your money in your wallet. Now the two other "countries" are china and Hong-Kong (hope I didn't shock any Chinese government official :-)). In china, giving up to 3% in Restaurants is good, and for a taxi-fare, you don't need to give anything. Whereas in Hong-Kong you are expected to give 10% to 15% tip money in Restaurants, and to at least round-up your fare to the next dollar in taxis. Now for the rest, I know nothing more so I guess you'll have to check that out by yourself! :

Marwane El Kharbili.

Selection of Upcoming Conferences!

Once again, I will list here 3 conferences that I think are a no-miss for anyone wanting to stay ahead of the game. I included here the links to the programs so that you can have a quick idea about the content of the talks and make your decision for what is most relevant to you this year:

• The 2008 Semantic Technology Conference: May 18-20, San Jose California. Have a look at the program here. One sentence about this, so that you get an idea about the content. People like Deborah L. Mc Guinness and Elisa F. Kendall are holding the Ontology 101: An Introduction to Knowledge Representation, Ontology Development, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). One cool feature of the website, you can use a scheduler to make your own program and include it into your calendar. On the website you can also like me download the "Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 & Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities", a 30 pages report on an industrial strategy to make semantics a real life business.
  

• The International Business Rules Forum, October 26-30, 2008, BUENA VISTA Palace, Orlando, Florida. Note the interesting pre-conference tutorial program, which you can consult here. Examples are: "Developing a Business Process Architecture and Program of Change", by Roger Burlton (Founder Process Renewal Consulting Group Inc.), and "SOA and Business Rules - Building a Powerful, Flexible Application Platform", by Michael Krouze (Chief Technology Officer and Director of Management Consulting Services, Charter Solutions). Finally, you may not miss this, " Business Rules from A-Z: What You Need to Know", by none other than Ronald G. Ross (Principal & Executive Editor, Business Rule Solutions, LLC, and www.BRCommunity.com)

• Last but not least is the international wirtschaftsinformatik conference, this year under the motto: "Business Services: Concepts, technologies, Applications". This year's edition will take place in Vienna, from the 25-27 february 2009. So you've got quite some time to register. The linked page os in German.

So, hope this information will be useful to you.

Marwane El Kharbili.

What does iLOG do?

In this article by Simon holloway (Senior Analyst, Bloor research) on iLOG. I am not going to copy paste the post or try to analyze it, since there is nothing to analyze. Simon Holloway gives an overview on the activities of iLOG, which simply answers the question: "What is really the business of iLOG"? iLOG is a french company with headquarters in both France and the USA. iLOG is mostly known for their business rules management product JRules.

I appreciated the structured description of the various business iLOG is at the front of: operations research optimization, constraints programming, business rules management (with three tools, one for Java, one for C++ and one for .NET), and the one I didn't know about, which are visualization products. after the recent acquisition of another company, iLOG now have a set of supply chain management products. Simon Holloway notes that with such a line of products, iLOG have now a solution and not just a set of products as until now. Last point are the many industrial partnerships iLOG has, among others with Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. So iLOG with their 800 employees are up on quite some fronts.

Marwane El Kharbili.

You wanna talk to ramona?

If you want to test how well robots (or artificial intelligence agents if you think about a human robot when hearing the word robot) can have a normal discussion, then you can test it here. Ramona is a virtual person, and here, you can chat with her. I tested her ability to follow a normal conversation with and I have to say she does quite well.

Accoring to KuzweilAI.net (the hosts of Ramona), Ramona is the first live virtual performing and recording artist. You can learn more about her here.

I noticed that the discussion flows a lot better if you just answer her questions at the start till she has enough information about you. It's astonishing to see how much progress artificial intelligence has made. when are we going to have a pet imitation which is not dirty and to which you can talk (I am ironic of course)? Imagine virtual medical assistants which could talk to old people so that they do not feel alone! I can't wait for the future!

Marwane El Kharbili

Securiy Requirements Engineering PhD & PostDoc

I wanted to make some advertisement for a double vacancy at the department of computer and information science at the NTNU (Trondheim, Norway). One position is a PhD position and the second one is a Post-Doc position. Both positions are ensured for 3 years (August 2008 - July 2011) and comprehend work on a new project, the ReqSec project. The projects seeks to come up with a methodology and tools for security requirements engineering.

The topic of security engineering is ons that I am interested a lot into, and I believe that we are are far behind on security issues from a software engineering point of view. One of my probable future directions of research (which I had talked about with my professor even before starting my PhD) is security modeling for business process management. the motivation: Security requirements do not solely appear on the lowest layers of software development, many types of security concerns get their requirements and partial specifications from the business and strategic layers of an enterprise model.

The ITMEE faculty of the Trondheim university is a leading university in computer science of which I know from personal experience. Some of my classmates at the ENSIMAG in Grenoble, went to the university of Trondheim in the same year I went from Grenoble to Karlsruhe. Several research institutes in applied mathematics and computer science also exist in Trondheim, some of them private. I don't know much about Norway or Trondheim itself but I guess if you're into nordic charm and love mountains, forests, Fjords and the see you should be happy there. Like Morocco, Norway is a kingdom too.

N.B.: [IT @ NTNU] Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

Marwane El Kharbili.

An online community for BPEL

You can find it here. A community around BPEL hosted by the OASIS, sponsored by BEA and IBM.

On the site you will find a knowledge WIKI, Forums, News, Events, Products, Job Offers and Blogs.Documentation and white papers are there to be found too. I discovered the site accidentally because they put my Blog on their blogroll. I applied for an account and got the RSS feed on my feed burner (integrated in my Flock browser). For the moment I haven't found much on the website in terms of blogs but it is clearly a recent site and it needs time to mature and grow. I will make some advertisement for the site in my network and try to get some poeple working with BPEL to post on the site.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Ruleburst, Haley, and the business rules market

After having acquired US Business Rules vendors Haley (See this official Press release from the 14th of November 2007), Ruleburst have rebranded as Haley Limited (See corresponding Press release of the 10th of March 2008). Haley is a recognized business rules vendor in the united states. This confirms the strategic importance of growth in the US market by the Australian natural language business rules specialist.

Haley's flagship products (2 among several products by Haley) have both rebranded:

• Ruleburst Studio (a natural language based business rules management system that integrates with the office suite) as Haley Office Rules.
• HaleyAuthority (collaborative capture and management of business rules) rebrands as Haley Expert Rules.

Ruleburst now Haley has several partnerships with industrial partners such as Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Lagan. They are also research partner of the e-Government Lab of the Fraunhofer Fokus Institute (Institut für Offene Konnunikationssystems, Berlin) in Germany.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Smell my couscous

The next generation of phone devices is there! A device from NTT that allows you to send fragrances (which is a beautiful and classy name for complex odors, so some basic marketing there) is set for commercialization soon. It works this way: you compose the desired smell on your mobile phone or you use one of a set of pre-programmed smells, and then send these to a smell generation device that is nearby using the mobile phone's infrared port. You can also sent the smell by email. This could allow you to send smells to people around the world provided they have the necessary device. The price? Around 200 dollars (200.000 yen).
I can't wait to see the miniature version of all this so that I could send some free smells that last 10 seconds from my Facebook account :D



Marwane El Kharbili.

Google App Engine

I just wanted to drop a line here about the recent release of the Google App Engine. If you are curious to know what it is then have a look at the introduction to the application environment here. Google App Engine ist "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure", quote from the project's documentation home. The goal is the following: you as a user develop your application that should run on the Google App Engine runtime environment. For this you can use the development environment that is delivered by google for that purpose. For the moment it only supports Python but is destined to be extended to other programming/Scripting languages. I personnaly am a great fan of python, which I have bee using for 4 years now, and it's number 2 for after JAVA. But the language I would love to see is ruby, another language I am a big fan of. After the application has been developed you can run it on the net using the Google App Engine (from the appspot.com domain) or use Google Apps to serve the application from your own domain [source: project's documentation home]. Google App Engine provides you with a scalable infrastructure for your project to run:

• dynamic web serving,
  
• persistent storage with transactions, automatic scaling and load balancing (500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month [source: project's documentation home])
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
  
• and a local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer [source: project's documentation home].

So for lightweight web applications destined to serve a huge number of people, typically community applications like social bookmarking or community buzzing and such, Google App Engine is a quite advantageous offer, since it is free (paying versions with enhanced load and storage capabilities are expected) and offers you a quick solution to develop, test run and deploy your web apps for a huge number of people and without server management costs. But if you want to have a classical Portal or a complex web app, and you are a fan of Python like me, then don't miss out on Zope.

Finally I would like to put some attentions on sebastian's blog article, where he reports on attempts to use the GAE (Google App Engine) and draws some conclusions about the use of it from a practical point of view. Note that it is in German.

Marwane El Kharbili

Kai's PhD Blog from Sweden

Another link to a PhD blog here, after the one about Sebastian's. This one is by Kai, a friend of Sebastian. I don't know him personnally, but I have found his blog interesting. He does hos promotion at both the Blekinge Institute of Technology and Ericsson AB, so he's in an industrial PhD program too. He tackles questions of software engineering. so drop by and leave a nice comment :D

Marwane El Kharbili.

Have you got a PhD Blog too?

I had previously registered my blog on PhDWeblogs.net. The idea behind this is to make the blog accessible to people also doing a PhD or just simply having interest in research, who do not necessarily share the same interests I have in computer science and economics. Last week I stumbled upon this other website, which looks like way more accessible and better done: http://www.wissenschafts-cafe.net/. Apart from having an very appealing name, the site covers several disciplines and offers a number of services to bloggers. You can enter a description and a link to your blog, and make it accessible from the website to other people interested in what you are doing. I even got the hard bloggin' scientist sticker of the website's creator on my blog.

Have fun!

Marwane El Kharbili.