2017. No. 2 (40)

Tatiana K. Kravchenko - Professor, Head of Department of Business Analytics, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation 
E-mail: tkravchenko@hse.ru

Sergey N. Bruskin - Associate Professor, Department of Business Analytics, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation 
E-mail: sbruskin@hse.ru

      Requirements prioritization is performed by business analysts in order to analyze stated requirements and to define the required capabilities of a potential solution that will fulfill stakeholder needs. During the analysis, the business analyst transforms needs and informal concerns of stakeholders into formal solution requirements which describe the behavior of solution components in sufficient detail. Furthermore, requirements analysis may be performed to develop models of the current state of an organization. These models can be used in order to validate the solution scope with business and stakeholders, to analyze the current state of an organization to identify opportunities for improvement, or to assist stakeholders in understanding that current state.
      The requirements prioritization task includes the following elements. First, these are business cases which state key goals and measures of success for a project or organization. Priorities should be aligned with those goals and objectives. Business needs can be used as an alternative to the business case if no business case has been defined. Second, the prioritization requires that these requirements have been stated by stakeholders. Third, the list of stakeholders, annotated with their levels of authority and influence, is used to determine which stakeholders need to participate in prioritization.
      As a result, the several techniques and recommendations stated in the BABOK® Guide have been applied for requirements prioritization in a case study of a conventional commercial bank. The business needs of the organization have been identified. The main problems of the communication management process have been formulated. Underlying sources of the problem have been illustrated on a fishbone diagram (also known as an Ishikawa or cause-and-effect diagram). The list of stakeholders and the requirements have been made. The MoSCoW technique has been applied in order to identify four groups of requirements, which differ from each other by the impact the results of their implementation have on the solution of the identified problems. The list of prioritized requirements should be used on the next stages of the project. It may be useful for the project manager when planning works on the solution implementation. The results of this work should also help the stakeholders develop a common point of view on the strategic goals of the project. 

Alexander N. Biryukov - Associate Professor, Department of Business Informatics, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation
Address: 49, Leningradskiy Prospect, Moscow, 125993, Russian Federation  
E-mail: anbiryukov@fa.ru

      This paper describes a new approach to strategic management in IT departments as compared with the existing approach, traditionally based on the development of an IT strategy aligned with the enterprise’s business strategy. The proposed method assumes gaining greater trust from the business to be the principal goal of an IT department. Meanwhile, all the other goals are treated as implications of the trust, because none of them can be achieved if the IT department is not considered a trusted partner by the business management. Trust in the IT department is an aggregate of individual trust exhibited by its customers, some of which are interrelated and mutually affect their opinions. To obtain maximal personal trust, the IT department should apply an individual approach to each of its customers. In terms of IT Service Management (ITSM), this means that an individual Service Level Agreement (SLA) should be designed and used with respect to each customer. As a result, the IT Department will be able to gain the maximal integral trust. The IT Department can benefit from the acquired trust for different purposes. For example, the IT Department can use the increasing customer trust to justify modifications of SLA conditions so as to reduce IT costs without affecting the customer. Another way is using the integral trust to guarantee support of the corporate management when the IT Department starts some innovative undertaking in its own field. In the conclusion, it is shown that the problem of maximizing integral trust is not easier than the well-known knapsack problem. 

Yuri A. Zelenkov - Adviser to the Chief Designer, NPO Saturn  
Address: 163, Lenin Ave., Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Region, 152903, Russian Federation
E-mail: yuri.zelenkov@gmail.com

      This article proposes a methodology for analyzing an organization management system and selecting the most relevant strategy to enhance its information efficiency. Information efficiency is determined through the amount of information that is required to ensure the coordination and motivation processes. We discuss four organizational design strategies aimed at improving information efficiency. Two of them are associated with a reduction of the amount of information required for management: creation of buffers (stocks of raw materials, work in progress and surplus resources) and system decomposition into independent operating units. Two other strategies are aimed at increasing the organization capabilities to process information, i.e. develop information systems and create a context facilitating information exchange.
      It is shown that the strategy of creating buffers leads to inefficiency, but it spontaneously occurs under conditions of the lack of information. The implementation of other strategies requires the organization’s efforts. The policy of measuring the information efficiency of the organization is discussed, and since at present it is hardly possible to develop a single method, it is recommended that one use benchmarking.
      Estimates of the information volumes which are being handled by high-technology machine-building enterprises in Russia and abroad are provided. It is demonstrated that due to underdevelopment of the technological infrastructure domestic enterprises are forced to process overly great amounts of data, which leads to information overload and, as a consequence, creation of buffers at all production stages. The result is an overall inefficiency of the enterprise as compared to similar foreign enterprises, and this gap cannot be overcome only by creation of enterprise information systems. In this regard, we present an example of production system decomposition which enables one to reduce the amounts of management information.

Alexander P. Afanas’ev - Head of Laboratory of Distributed Computational Systems, Institute for Information Transmission Problems RAS; Professor, Head of Department of High-performance Computations of Institute for Information Transmission Problems RAS, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 19, build.1, Bolshoy Karetny Per., Moscow, 127051, Russian Federation
E-mail: apa@isa.ru

Sergei M. Dzyuba - Professor, Department of Information Systems, Tver State Technical University  
Address: 22, Afanasiy Nikitin Embankment, Tver, 170026, Russian Federation
E-mail: sdzyuba@mail.ru

Irina I. Emelyanova - Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Systems, Tver State Technical University  
Address: 22, Afanasiy Nikitin Embankment, Tver, 170026, Russian Federation
E-mail: emelyanova-123@yandex.ru

      We present a method for investigating solutions of systems of ordinary differential equations with polynomial right-hand side. Similar systems are of long-term interest for applications, because many process models have different physical, biological and economical natures described by these systems. The standard methods of numerical analysis are usually applied obtaining system solutions with the polynomial right-hand side, disregarding the specific form of the right-hand side. We suggest a different method starting from the fact that the right side of the equation appears to be a multidimensional polynomial. The relative simplicity of the right-hand side of the system under consideration made it possible to construct by this method approximate analytic solutions in the form of functions not only of time but of the initial conditions as well. In contrast to the majority of known methods, the latter made it possible in many cases to directly trace the systematic computational error. The implementation of the method is based on the construction of a discrete dynamical system along the solutions of the original system with subsequent use of the generalized Horner’s Scheme. The computation peculiarity of Horner’s Scheme lies in the fact that in many cases the scheme allows us to reduce the number of machine operations required for computation of the polynomial in comparison with the ordinary computation process. The second peculiarity of the generalized Horner’s Scheme lies in the fact that there is a good decomposition of computation process that allows us to make calculations in parallel on independent nodes. According to computational experiments, this enables us to reduce computation time hugely even in the simplest cases while retaining required accuracy.

The research was supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation (project No. 16-11-10352). 

Denis S. Kokorev - Doctoral Student, Laboratory of Distributed Computational Systems, Institute for Information Transmission Problems RAS    
Address: 19, build.1, Bolshoy Karetny Per., Moscow, 127051, Russian Federation
E-mail: korvin-d@yandex.ru

      The article discusses the problem of finding a polyhedron given shape inside another nonconvex polyhedron. This problem is a particular case of the 18th Hilbert problem, third part. It has a practical application in computer simulation of three-dimensional objects, moving autonomous robots, and the jewelry industry. The author uses this mathematical problem to find the facets of gemstones in uncut stones.
      The article offers a method for finding inscribed polyhedrons based on the reduction of the problem to a nonlinear programming problem and its solutions using ready-made software. The basic idea is that it is easy to describe this problem in terms of non-linear programming.  Internal polyhedron volume is an objective function. Restrictions include the preservation of the combinatorial structure, one polyhedron standing inside another one, convexity, plus additional constraints necessary for practical purposes.
      The article describes two implementations of the algorithm: a client-server application and a local application. Their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. The algorithm is described not only in a mathematical point of view; some of its practical characteristics are also demonstrated. Compared to the previous article, the author has added a method that allows for solving the nonconvex case of a problem. This is a significant step forward from a mathematical point of view. In addition, it allows us to use the algorithm at all stages of gem cutting. The end of the article describes current evaluations of the effectiveness and running time, including on weak processors, and it offers plans for further development of the algorithm.

This research was supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation (project No. 16-11-10352

Sergei A. Fomin - Operator, Laboratory of Research Center, Civil Defense Academy EMERCOM of Russia
Address: Novogorsk district, Khimki, Moscow region, 141435, Russian Federation
E-mail: sergio-dna@yandex.ru

Roman L. Belousov - Research Associate, Research Center, Civil Defense Academy EMERCOM of Russia
Address: Novogorsk district, Khimki, Moscow region, 141435, Russian Federation
E-mail: romabel-87@mail.ru

      In the paper, we examine a task of detecting text messages that borrow similar meaning or relate to the same event. The noticeable feature of the task at hand is that the considered text messages are short, about 40 words per message on average. To solve this task, we design an algorithm that is based on the vector space model, meaning that every text is mapped to a point in high-dimensional space. Text-to-vector transforming is done using the TF-IDF measure. It should be noted that even for small cases with a volume of about 800 messages the dimension of the vector space can exceed 2,000 components, and on the average the dimension is about 8,500 components. To reduce the dimension of space, the method of principal components is used. The application of this method allows us to rationally reduce the dimensionality of space and leave about 3 percent of the components from their original number.
      In this reduced vector space, we use agglomerative hierarchical clustering in accordance with the Lance–Williams algorithm. The actual cluster merge is done using the closest linkage algorithm. We stop merging clusters when the distance between two nearest clusters exceeds some threshold value r that is given to the algorithm as a parameter.
      We conduct an experiment on the dataset of 135,000 news messages parsed from news aggregator feeds. During the experiment, we build the regression model for the r algorithm parameter value that allows us to predict the value of this parameter that gives good clustering results.
      The designed algorithm scores high in quality metrics indicating its sufficient ability to classify a pair of messages as being duplicates or not, as well as the ability to find out whole groups of duplicate messages.

Alexander A. Gorbunov - Lecturer, Department of Information Systems and Digital Infrastructure Management, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation
E-mail: agorbunov@hse.ru

Eugeni A. Isaev - Professor, Head of Department of Information Systems and Digital Infrastructure Management, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation
E-mail: eisaev@hse.ru

Alexander F. Morgunov - Associate Professor, Head of Department of Information Systems and Digital Infrastructure Management. National Research University Higher School of Economics
Address: 20, Myasnitskaya Street, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation
E-mail: amorgunov@hse.ru

      In universities and technical colleges with relevant IT qualifications in one semester multiple streams, courses and specializations can use software products for training purposes. IT services of universities should deal with the challenge of creating the infrastructure of educational applications that can support the educational process. We note that the number of specializations which study information technology are growing every year (for example, in HSE there are disciplines-minors, which can enroll students coming from any field). Also in the recent years, online courses have started to become popular. If the load is not planned ahead taking into account future trends, the power of even the most high-tech infrastructure will be insufficient. Calculation of the corresponding load on the infrastructure must be made in the planning process of the disciplines, so that we can reserve appropriate facilities, and thus organize an effective learning process.
      Software developers use a variety of benchmarking tools that are complex and do not provide the necessary information for the participants of educational process planning.
      This article discusses the construction of a simulation model that supports the educational process planning. The simulation is carried out using the capabilities of the tool AnyLogic 7. The aim of this work is to develop a simulation model designed to estimate the load on the information system used in the educational process. In addition, besides the description of the model, the article presents the results of calculations used for various options of the information system (private cloud or on a server at the university). The simulation results were confirmed by data obtained during practical classes at the university. This model gives us the opportunity to plan the educational process in order to achieve uniformity of the load on the services. If necessary, the model allows us to make a decision about the location of the educational information system: on servers of the university or in a private cloud.

Igor V. Ilyin - Professor, Director of Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University
Address: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian Federation
E-mail: ivi2475@gmail.com

Anastasiia A. Grigoreva - Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University
Address: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian Federation
E-mail: grigoreva_spb@list.ru

Igor M. Zapivakhin - Consultant on Integration, SOLMIKS Consulting LLC; Master Student, Graduate School of Business Technologies, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University
Address: 29, Polytechnicheskaya Street, St. Petersburg, 195251, Russian Federation
E-mail: igorzapivakhin@gmail.com

      The agile project management approach has been considered to be one of the most popular approaches for developing IT solutions. Use of this approach allows us to change the requirements at any stage of the IT project, and one of the twelve principles of Agile Manifesto, – “Simplicity”, – promotes the use of a minimum amount of project documentation. One of the disadvantages limiting the implementation in such resource-intensive projects as Information Systems Projects (ISP) is the risk of exceeding budgets and time limits. Therefore it is highly important to develop such a tool that will contribute in discussion and approval process with the customer before changes are started so as to minimize the possibilities of changes at further stages of the project.
      This article investigates the possibility of applying holistic methods of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order to support solutions design during an Information System Project, in particular, in the form of documentation at the stage before implementation planning. The main aim of our research is to develop a tool that will help the customer to understand the planned changes and will contribute in that their influence on the already existing EA is taken into account. This article first reviews standards of IT project management in the context of recommendations for “conceptual project” outcomes.  Next, the results of interviews conducted with IT consultants are presented. The proposed Architectural Solution (AS) is a document that completes the stage of design and coordinating IT changes. It is based on the application of methods and models from the field of EA. We believe this solution may be a sufficient document for coordinating projects that are conducted under agile philosophy.