Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Service and products are increasingly provided through ecosystems in which diverse organizations collaborate and share data. These ecosystems must streamline processes and reduce costs while improving delivery and quality for domains like healthcare and smart cities. Performance management in such ecosystems is challenging because each organization maintains its own information systems. Collecting, integrating and reporting performance management data is complicated by the need for regulatory compliance. As well, performance management must be agile to inform each organization in time to react while service delivery is occurring and it must evolve to meet changing needs. Our long term objective is to develop a tool supported Methodology for providing collaborative performance management (CPM) that enables continuous, dynamic sharing of data while ensuring regulatory compliance. Our research hypothesis is that a cloud-computing architecture provides the necessary infrastructure and supports flexible integration of tools for CPM. We build on past results for single organizations and extend them to address performance management in data-intensive ecosystems where diverse organizations collaborate. Our short term objectives are: Architecture Develop a cloud hosted, service oriented architecture with APIs for integrating and transforming data from diverse organization into performance management reporting services for the entire ecosystem. Ontology Develop an ontology of concepts (organizations, actors, processes, tasks, data models, data maps, indicators, reports) to define transformation of organization-specific business process and data models into performance management models for the entire ecosystem. Governance Develop a declarative, rule-based notation which captures data sharing agreements, consent forms, and policies to enforce regulatory compliance, control data processing, and manage access of organizations and users. Tools Develop Ontology-based and Governance-configured prototypes of CPM Tools (architecture services and client applications) using APIs defined by the CPM Architecture. We will perform five case studies with industry and government partners to build CPM systems for the healthcare domain (traumatic brain injury rehabilitation, at home care transitions, health maintenance) and the smart city domain (energy and traffic management) that validate our CPM Methodology.The research will create a rich environment for training of highly qualified professionals for both students and research collaborators. The potential impact on Canadian society is to improve competitiveness and provide quality of life benefits in domains that are valued by Canadians.