Mar 2007

Enterprise Architecture: SOA for Business
This talk aims to demonstrate that SOAs are real and currently being implemented in businesses introduce powerful, complete and standards-compliant tools available to develop SOA applications.

IT Management: From E-Government to M-Government?
This report by Professor Moon adds to the extension of e-government by focusing on the potential of m-government (the use of mobile technology) to improve and enhance government services. Professor Moon broadly defines m-government as "government's efforts to provide information and services to public employees, citizens, businesses, and nonprofit organizations through wireless communication networks and mobile devices such as pagers, PDAs, cellular phones, and their supporting systems." Through case studies of best practices in m-government and two surveys, Professor Moon demonstrates the potential of m-government to change the way the public sector delivers services. Professor Moon and his team of researchers at Texas A&M University find that mobile technologies can dramatically improve the delivery of emergency and public safety services, such as combating fires and natural disasters and enhancing public safety and homeland security.

Feb 2007

Mobile and Wireless: Tasting eRCP on Windows Mobile - Getting Started with Embedded Rich Client Platform Applications for Windows Mobile Devices
The article The Smell is Good! - First Taste of Embedded Rich Client Platform of this cluster samples the development of an embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) application for Windows Desktop.

Jan 2007

OO Software Devt: Writing Software Patterns
Renowed OO expert, Martin Fowler, talks about the importance of patterns, and how choosing and writing your own software pattern helps in design and development activities.

Microsoft.NET: .NET- Latest Trends and Practices
Microsoft .NET 2.0/3.0 presents a lot of exciting new features. This presentation aims at providing a quick overview on the various new features of .NET 2.0/3.0 with an in-depth technical discussion on these features supported by live demonstrations. The presentation will also analyse the architectural impact on these new features and provide best practices for architecting .NET based enterprise solutions.

Dec 2006

IT Management: The e-Government Handbook for Developing Countries
The World Bank had developed a handbook for e-government implementation catering for the needs in developing countries. This concise handbook is easy to read and very relevant for developing countries in planning and implementation of their e-government programs.

Web Services: SOA Governance the IBM Way
IBM Corporation has established the SOA Foundation that defines the Service-Oriented Architecture, set of offerings, practices and technologies from IBM's perspective. To learn more about this foundation, you can download the whitepaper found in the following link. It also provides a high-level description of the architecture with a focus on its lifecycle model, logical architecture, programming model, and physical architecture. It goes on to provide some insight to the roadmaps for becoming a SOA-enabled enterprise and the role of SOA Governance in making SOA operational in your enterprise.

Nov 2006

Linux: Cheap, secure solution for Internet banking
I would like to respond to Mr Wong Chun Chong's letter "Staggering number of computers infected with spyware" (ST Online Forum, Nov 14)

Mobile and Wireless: The Smell is Good! - First Taste of Embedded Rich Client Platform
The previous article 'Build Once, Embed Everywhere – Building Rich Clients for Embedded Devices the Eclipse Way' of this cluster explores the potential of building portable rich client applications for embedded devices using the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) of Eclipse. The first release of embedded Rich Client Platform (i.e. eRCP 1.0) has since been released on 21 September 2006.

Oct 2006

OO Software Devt: Agile Configuration Management for Large Organization
Nobody will argue the importance of finding better way to deliver product faster and more effectively into the market. Agile practices has been a key role. What are the benefits for agile development? Are there any tool in agile configuration management? Refer to the link for more details.

Web Services: PHP Web Services using REST
Developing Web Services has never been as easy! This article expounds the development of web services using the REST model. Although building web services using the more formal standards such as SOAP and WSDL is proposed by the W3C consortium, developers have found a much more practical and handy method to communicate information using the HTTP protocol in an interoperable way.

Java: Application Profiling
Application profiling is a crucial monitoring system in an application life cycle. This article explains the importance of profiling an application.

Sept 2006

IT Management: Critical Success Factors for selecting a Business Intelligence System
This white paper builds on that mandate by providing the specific business and architectural success factors to consider when selecting one EBIS to serve as the enterprise standard. Too often organizations select a standard BI technology primarily on the basis of their existing relationship with a vendor, or choose one of the departmental solutions currently in place. This paper provides a more objective and ultimately safer set of criteria.

Mobile and Wireless: Build Once, Embed Everywhere
This article explores the potential of building portable rich client applications for embedded devices using the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) of Eclipse. The intended portability is a notch above the Write-Once-Run-Everywhere paradigm of Java Micro Edition (JME). Note that eRCP is currently narrowly focused on GUI-intensive applications.

Linux: ODF Debate in ST Forum
The following is a collection of Straits Times Forum articles relating to ODF.

IT Management: Managing IT Legal Issues
Seminar Objective: To provide managers and developers a critical view of IT legal matters and how it affects their development and management approaches in creating and selling IT products and services.

Dot.Net: NETFramework
I was thinking of writing about something like developing games on XBox. Then there is this looming Vista about to release with some more updates: One important change is WinFX, now named appropriately as .NET Framework 3.0. It is currently in beta release and you can download here. If you have Windows XP SP2 (which is most likely), you can download and install the Runtime Components. If you are running Vista Client Beta 2+ or Longhorn Server (with AppServer Role), you already have it. It is schedule for release late 2006, which is very soon.

August 2006

Web Services: Describing Web Services - A Matter of Style
This article illustrates the importance of using style when delivering web services. The reader should have some basic knowledge of Web Services concepts.

Java: Query Optimization
This article tries to provide few heuristics in creating effective and optimized queries. The article lists suggestions on optimization that developers who have a fundamental knowledge of database design could consider.

Project Management: ITIL and Outsourcing
The IT Infrastructure Library is a series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management (ITSM). This framework defines how Service Management is applied within specific organisations. Being a framework, it is completely customisable for application within any type of business or organisation that has a reliance on IT infrastructure

July 2006

Mobile and Wireless: Secure Once, be Secured Everywhere
This article explores the potential of building secure applications for mobile wireless devices with built in Java platform termed Java Micro Edition (JME). The audience should have some basic knowledge on the Java programming language, and preferably JME and some basic security-cum-cryptography concepts.

IT Management: Singapore latest e-Government plan for the next ten years
Singapore launched a new ten-year infocomm masterplan on the 20 of June 2006 that will propel the nation into 2015 and beyond, with a line-up of activities and goals that spell benefits for the people, businesses and the global community. The vision is to turn the country into an Intelligent Nation and Global City, Powered by infocomm. The masterplan recommends the way forward for Singapore, into a future where infocomm will bring a sea change and become intrinsic in the way people live, learn, work and play.

OO Software Devt:Butler Group - Application Lifecycle Management: Aligning Software Development with Business Needs
Butler Group's vendor ranking and assessment model groups software suppliers into different categories. These are the vendors who engaged in the area of selling solutions in application lifecycle management. Among the leaders are IBM, who provides a suite of software development tool.

May2006

Web Services: Securing Web Services using JWSDP2
Although securing a Web application is to a great extent a proven and tested technology, securing Web Services is still in its infancy. A developer needs to put in a lot of effort to even just encrypt or sign a SOAP message. Sun Microsystems has been addressing this issue and has eased the developerÂ’s job in securing SOAP messages to a great extent. In this article, we will take a look at the new and easy way of encrypting and signing SOAP messages using the Java Web Services Developer Pack 2.0 (JWSDP 2.0).

Java: The Eclipse Rhythm
Java has become the de-facto standard language for developing cross-platform applications. The Eclipse Platform is designed for building integrated development environments (IDEs) that can be used to create applications as diverse as web sites, embedded Java programs, C++ programs, and Enterprise JavaBeans. This paper is a general technical introduction to the Eclipse Platform.

April 2006

Mobile and Wireless: Motivations to 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem
This article intends to introduce the main motivations behind 3G IP Multimedia Subsystem for a general IT audience.

Dot.Net: KeepInTouch
With Vista looming, change is definitely a constant in the world of .NET. I guess it has been 2 years since I wrote a posting on .NET Roadmap that charted out Visual Studio.NET in 2002, .NET framework 1.1 in 2003, .NET framework 2.0 in 2004, Visual Studio 2005 in 2005 and Longhorn in 2006. At that time, .NET was a welcoming change away from older Microsoft technology. Then, I wrote about Indigo and Microsoft Vista (renamed from Longhorn). There is lots of code names such as WinFX, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS and AERO. I guess all the changes are for the better with upgrades and new features galore.

IT Management: Leveraging on Shared Services
Shared services involves consolidating a company's dispersed support functions - information technology (IT), finance,logistics and general functions - into large service centres that can serve all of its business units in different parts of the world. Globally, more and more companies are adopting shared services as a means to deliver consistent service levels, lower operating costs and enhance productivity. This article by Singapore Economic Development Board highlights some of the key success factors for shared services and why some of the global companies have chosen Singapore to locate their shared services.

Project Management: Project Challenges-N-HospitalCase
The Five Biggest Challenges in Project Management for 2006 and the case of how a hospital gets its complex wireless hospital system implemented.

OO Software Devt:Testing Object-Oriented Program
In object-oriented Software Development, system is developed as a collection of objects and consists of object interactions. Proper testing techniques should be applied to testing OO systems in various level of software testing to promote productivity in software development lifecycle. The following article introduces OO testing methodologies how these methodologies can be applied in a Enterprise Unified Software Development Process.

March 2006

IT Management:Business Process Reengineering (BPR) Implementation in Public and Private sectors
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Survey objectives includes key characteristics in BPR projects,type of BPR projects undertaken,their costs and benefits,challenges faced during implementation and type of BPR software used in BPR.

Dot.Net:Implementing a COM Object in C# via COM/.NET Interop

COM is a truly excellent programming model for the development of integrating components based on interfaces. Some of the fundamental principles of COM have their roots in Object-Oriented Philosophies. It is a great platform for the realization of Object-Oriented Development and Deployment.

Web Services:Weaving Business Delegate Pattern in Web Services Applications

An enterprise application is often multi-tiered. The intentions behind partitioning applications into different tiers are to promote loose coupling, scalability and flexibility to change the implementation of each tier independently. Let us focus on the loose coupling and flexibility issues. It is not very easy to achieve loose coupling just by tiering the applications. Tiering facilitates loose coupling but a developer has to put in more effort in order to ensure that the two tiers are loosely coupled. Also, as the implementation technology of a tier changes, the developer has to ensure that the change has little impact on other tiers accessing the changed tier components. J2EE Core Pattern called Business Delegate shows us how to make the two tiers maximally “Open for Extension and Closed for Modification (OCP)”. That is, tiers that use Business Delegate pattern are able to deal with changes to the other tiers they interact with, with minimal changes to components belonging to their own tier.

Linux:Web User Interface

We view two open technologies which will impact the development paradigm of cross-platform web-based applications. XUL is an XML-based specification of an user-interface for a Mozilla/Firefox extension. It allows for a Web-based application to have a customised look-and-feel and take advantage of built-in UI widgets.

IT Management:Global e-Government Report 2005 by United Nations

In reaffirming the vision of a peaceful, prosperous and just world, leaders at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 outlined a vision of '...building a people-centred and inclusive information society, putting the potential of information and communication technologies at the service of development and addressing new challenges of the information society.

OO Software Devt:Increase Productivity - through integrated RUP approach

A useful case study allow us to explore how integrated RUP approach can help an organization to increase productivity.

Biz Process Mgmt:EA Seminar (Abridged Version)

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a blueprint that provides a holistic view of business functions, supporting data standards and ICT systems and services, regardless of the organizational structure and ownership of these functions and systems. It comprises of four elements, namely Business Architecture (BA), Information Architecture (IA), Solution Architecture (SA) or Application Architecture (AA), and Technical Architecture (TA).

Web Services:Thinking in SOA: the IBM perspective (2006-03-01)

In IBM's Systems Journal (Volume 44, Number 4, 2005) you can find many articles on service-oriented architecture and thinking. What impact does it have on your business and enterprise systems?

Java:Crouching Tiger 5.0 (JDK 1.5) and Hidden Dragon (JDK 1.5.1)!

True that there is a huge leap in features Tiger is providing as compared to its predecessor. Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition Release 1.5 (code name Tiger) has its major theme as ease of development. Apart from regular bug fixes this release has delivered 15 new component JSRs with over 100 significant updates. New features are targeted for better Scalability and performance plus comprehensive monitoring and management support. Swing toolkit enjoys a fresh new theme called Ocean. Dragonfly (or dragon, for short) was an interim code name for J2SE 5.1, which has been folded into Mustang (JDK 1.6), so is no longer a separate release.

IT Management:IT Leadership Seminar 2006

To improve the performance of their businesses, it is important for CIOs and senior IT leaders to build an agile IT organisation that possesses strong capabilities. Success of a business requires a good mix of leadership, technical, managerial and relationship capabilities. The role of CIOs today is inevitably changing due to two perspectives on IT. One is the continued disillusionment over expenditure on technology and the perceived irrelevancy of IT. The other is the renewed recognition of IT as a strategic resource and a key competitive differentiator. This dichotomy has brought CIOs to a crossroad. They can either accept a marginal role as chief technology mechanic or leverage their expertise to step into a completely new level of corporate leadership and be CEOs-in-waiting.

Project Management:Business Transformation Outsourcing
Outsourcing has long been regarded as a successful way for organizations to cut costs and focus on their core business while gaining access to world-class capabilities. While these drivers are still valid, and even compelling in many situations, they do not represent the full scope of the advantage to be gained by outsourcing. Enter Business Transformational Outsourcing (BTO) - an ambitious outsourcing strategy that aims to transform a process or function to achieve, along with improved performance and reduced costs, an enterprise-wide strategic advantage over your competitors.

Linux:Open Source License

As more commercial organisations start to use and benefit from Open source software, the question and related issues of licensing will often be raised and discussed.

Jan 2006

IT Security: Information Security Update Seminar

This seminar highlights the future challenges to information security and discusses some alarming trends that are observed. It provides insights on emerging initiatives by key industry vendors and how these will impact your organisation's strategy for addressing security issues. There is also a session on how LiveCDs can help security professionals perform security assessment and forensic investigations.

Dec 2005

Project Management: Managing Project Managers, Their Careers and Training

Increasingly, senior managements are becoming aware of the importance of an experienced Project Manager in the success of a project. In the Standish Group Report (2003), for example, it is the third most important factor in the success of a project based on current practices. Yet very often we are not sure how to manage Project Managers, manage their career and training so that the most senior Project Managers will go on to take on the most complex and large projects.

Biz Process Mgmt: BPM Suites Report

The BPTrends 2005 BPM Suites Report is the most comprehensive review of BPM Suites ever published. The Report includes an Introduction to the current BPM Suites Market, a Detailed Analysis of the specific features included in BPM Suites products, Reports on 18 of the leading BPM Suites and a Product Matrix that allows you to quickly and easily compare the features of the BPM Suites included in the Report.

OO software devt: What's new in UML 2.0?

The article highlights the new features in UML 2.0. It also introduce the rationale behind UML 2.0, and what could organization benefits from UML 2.0.

Oct 2005

IT Management: CIO 2.0

The changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in government-and why it matters to leaders in the public sector

Side Interests: E-Courseware Development, Deployment Operation at ISS

Many stakeholders are involved in the development of an e-learning courseware. Careful planning and management are essential components in the project. These attributes directly affect the development, quality and delivery of the courseware. The Institute of Systems Science (ISS) has completed 5 large e-learning courseware projects since 2001. This paper was presented at the 4th International Conference on e-Learning in Kuala Lumpur to share the knowledge and experience in e-learning courseware development, deployment and operation ISS have gained from these projects

Project Management: What is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and its impact to outsourcing?

Sarbanes-Oxley is a US law passed in 2002 to strengthen corporate governance and restore investor confidence. Sarbanes-Oxley law was passed in response to a number of major corporate and accounting scandals involving prominent companies in the United States that included Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom. These scandals resulted in a loss of public trust in accounting and reporting practices.

Microsoft.NET: Indigo

Do you know what is Microsoft Vista? It was previously named "Longhorn". According to MSDN, it "is a substantial advance in Windows, with significant innovations in the developer platform".

Enterprise_Integration: Enterprise Architecture: Alignment, Agility Business Value

Enterprise Architecture (EA) reflects the translation of the overall vision of an enterprise into the core of an organisation, resulting in incorporating its goals, strategies, tactics, policies, processes, and technology into everything it does. It is a guiding blueprint that weaves through the enterprise holding the organisation together as it grows and evolves into the future and spans organisational boundaries and disciplines. To optimise strategy execution, business and IT executives are increasingly turning to EA to provide a solid foundation.

Sept 2005

IT Management: BPR Experience in the Private and Public Sectors

This seminar aims to share the experience of private and public organisations undergoing BPR, from the perspective of project leaders. Speakers from government, healthcare and IT organisations will be sharing their BPR experiences and lessons learnt based on their past BPR projects. A presentation on the latest survey findings on the BPR implementation by ISS will help to highlight the motivations and challenges during BPR implementation. This seminar was held at ISS on 22nd September 2005.

Web Services: Incorporating Usability in Web Software Projects: Providing A Competitive Edge To Organisations

Usability today, is considered as the differentiating factor for successful development and implementation of knowledge management, financial and governance applications. It is only lately that companies have started realising the growing importance of incorporating usability while designing and developing IT systems to help them reduce both development costs and time, thus enhancing sales and consumer acceptance of the systems.

IT Management: Portfolio Management as an IT Governance Tool

IT portfolio management refers to the processes, practices and specific activities to perform continuous and consistent evaluation, prioritisation, budgeting, and selection of investments that provide the greatest value and contribution to the strategic interest of an organisation. Through portfolio management, an organisation can explicitly assess the tradeoffs among competing investment opportunities in terms of its benefits, costs, and risks. Investment decisions can then be made based on a better understanding of the gains or loss through the inclusion or exclusion of certain investments.

August 2005

Linux: Linux Security HOWTO

This document is a general overview of security issues that face the administrator of Linux systems. It covers general security philosophy and a number of specific examples of how to better secure your Linux system from intruders. Also included are pointers to security-related material and programs. Improvements, constructive criticism, additions and corrections are gratefully accepted. Please mail your feedback to both authors, with "Security HOWTO" in the subject.

Mobile and Wireless: Is Mobile Commerce (m-Commerce) a Failure in Singapore?

Mobile commerce refers to transactions using a wireless device and data connection that result in the transfer of value in exchange for information, services, or goods. Mobile commerce, facilitated generally by mobile phones, includes services such as banking, payment, and ticketing.

Web Services: Weaving Service Locator Pattern in Web Services Applications (Best Practices Series Part 1)

In building enterprise applications, location transparency is of utmost importance. Due to scalability and expandability considerations, we often need to move components from one physical machine to the other thereby changing its physical network address. This entails making changes to the client code that locates the software enterprise components. Hence most enterprise application frameworks and tools provide for a Naming and Directory Service. In J2EE, this service is provided via the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). Many Naming and Directory Services such as LDAP and CORBA Naming Service comply with the JNDI interface, making it easy for J2EE components to interface with these Naming and Directory Services.

OO software Devt: Delivering value in Systems Development

Applying technology for business is an obvious goal. However, CIOs, project directors / managers and software developers are all aware the importance of aligning software development with business values. This courselet examine aspects of delivering values during software development and introduce various stragies and techniques to achieve maximum returns in software development.

July 2005

IT management: Data Governance for Information Quality

Information has always been critical for businesses. Large corporations are facing growing sizes and increasingly complex databases. Data governance is therefore essential for today's highly competitive business environment.

IT Security: SSDLC - Secure Systems Development Life Cycle

Developing secure systems and applications is usually an afterthought for most organisations. Since security is not directly related to functional requirements, users do not focus on it and developers generally fail to put in.

June 2005

Biz Process Mgmt: BPTrends 2005 BPM Suites Report

The BPTrends 2005 BPM Suites Report is the most comprehensive review of BPM Suites ever published. The Report includes an Introduction to the current BPM Suites Market, a Detailed Analysis of the specific features included in BPM Suites products.

Java: Java and XML: Connecting researchers to Life Sciences data

Drug discovery, cancer research and genomic sciences seem light years away from e-commerce and pop music file sharing. Yet, there is common ground: life scientists need to access data from a myriad of Web sites, battle with diverse data formats.

Enterprise Architecture: Demystifying Enterprise Architectures

IT architecture is similar to civil architecture - it provides form to an IT system, much like civil architectures provide form to civil structures. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is no different as it defines the structure (or form).

May 2005

Mobile Wireless: Tracking & Identification Technologies - RFID, LBS and Biometrics

Over 120 attendees from public and private organisations turned up for the "Tracking & Identification Technologies" seminar at ISS on 11 March 2005. The seminar highlights three new technologies : Radio-Frequency Identification

Web services: Integrating enterprise applications using asynchronous Web services

Asynchronous operations are common in many scenarios with one or more of following characteristics: :: Transactions exchanging large amounts of data :: Transactions that are complex and require a fair amount of time.

Project Management: Software Testing Outsourcing

Testing is a very important activity in a project life cycle. The testing phase, which is mainly towards the end of the software development life cycle, is not always implemented as planned. Insufficient time, lack of skills.

OO software devt: Next-generation model-driven development

The lastest UML version, UML 2.0, supports model driven approach in software architectural design. These artiles explore how model drive approach helps us in software development and analyzes how various tools available in.

Dot.net: Microsoft security resources

Microsoft's reputation on security has not been good. However, they have tried hard to change this image and provided many resource on how to develop secure software. This article scan through some of the contents provided by Microsoft.

April 2005

IT Management: IT Governance - Practices, Opportunities and Challenges

Top performing enterprises succeed in obtaining value from IT by adopting and implementing effective IT governance practices to support their strategies and business processes. IT governance involves specifying the decision rights.

Side Interests: e-Courseware Development : To Outsource or Not?

Continuous training, knowledge and skills upgrading for the workforce is integral to any dynamic organisation. Courseware development is an art as well as a process that can be trained, managed and improved over time. Many organisations.

Linux: Email Insecurity

It is well-known that the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is proned to eavesdropping and spoof..

March 2005

OO software devt: Architecting application with patterns

How do we build a stable and robust application? A framework using design patterns can solve many problems and solidify an Object-Oriented application architecture. The framework will improve the extensibility of your applications.

Dot.net: Trustworthy Computing TUS

On 8th March, 2005, ISS and NICC organized a talk by Microsoft on Trustworthy Computing, here is my account of the talk. The speaker is Mr. Meng-Chow Kang, CISSP, CISA, Chief Security & Privacy Advisor for Microsoft Asia Pacific.

Java: Find that String: Unleash the power of Java Regular Expressions

An article introducing the Java Regular Expressions API (package java.util.regex) and showing the advantages of using Regular Expressions (RegEx) for your text processing needs.

Enterprise Integration: Zero Latency Integration using Event Services

This discusses the use of Event Services for Zero Latency Integration and how we can use JMS to implement such an Event Service for the J2EE platform.

Feb 2005

Web services: Get hooked on Web services but first, let's talk

If you have developed Web services using .NET or J2EE, you might have realised how simple and powerful this technology is. Exposing legacy functionality by developing a wrapper Web service - that's trivial. But most of the time.

IT Management: Building the Real-time Enterprise

The competitive pressures of today's economy - with the increased globalisation of companies and the growing sophistication of technology - it is no longer acceptable for businesses to make decisions based on week-old or month-old data.

Project Management: eSCM - eSourcing Capability Model

Organizations are spending millions, and some in fact billions of dollars outsourcing their information technology (IT) intensive business activities to external service providers. Recognizing that service providers face the challenge.