Russell A. Eisenstat, Nathaniel Foote, Jay R. Galbraith, Danny Miller
Corporate organization's future lies in the ability to work across business units. Opportunity-based organizational design may help you succeed. Economic logic is driving two clear organizational trends. The need to be entrepreneurial and responsive to markets favors agile and focused companies. However, an unprecedented $3.4 trillion in corporate mergers and acquisitions around the world during 1999 is powerful testimony to the benefits of scale and scope. [1] Corporations are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice size and breadth for market responsiveness or vice versa; companies are now organizing to realize the benefits of both. IBM, for example, seeks to foster the entrepreneurial spirit of their employees by encouraging people in their lower reaches to show initiative. And companies such as British Petroleum, having disaggregated themselves into focused units, don't hesitate to grow larger through acquisitions. Nevertheless, many companies are still struggling to create entrepreneurial focus and to leverage and integrate their far-flung resources at the same time. One of the most important benefits of scale and scope is the ability to give employees privileged access to a wide range of resources throughout an organization. A global entity like Citigroup, for instance, boasts a considerable array of resources--including people, knowledge, products, and even relationships with outside partners--residing in functional, product, industry, and geographic units. But integrating such resources to serve a corporate client about to do business in, say, Thailand would inevitably require far more lateral work across hierarchical lines than traditional management precepts and designs envision. Using opportunity-based design Some companies do, however, seem to be getting it right. Rather than viewing the corporation as a portfolio of business units, their managers regard it as a portfolio of resources and of opportunities to create value. This opportunity-based design perspective gives these companies the flexibility to bring the most useful resources to bear on the most promising opportunities. But the resulting organization is more complex and poses new managerial challenges (exhibit). We have studied some two dozen companies that have adopted an opportunity-based design. Many of their managers, often working deep within operating units, discover opportunities in key global accounts, tightly defined market segments, or tailored product solutions. To exploit such opportunities, these entrepreneurs, regardless of their positions in the corporation, are authorized to mobilize whatever resources they need, such as product experts to create an integrated solution or functional and industry specialists, from a variety of countries, to serve a key global account. Opportunity-based design helps established companies emulate the market responsiveness of start-ups without sacrificing the advantages of scale and scope. Consider ABB, an engineering company long known for its decentralized structure, in which dozens of quasi-autonomous businesses are loosely linked to a wafer-thin corporate center. Increasingly, both the sourcing and the scope of ABB's projects around the world have cut across these units. Oslo's new airport was one such project. In 1994 the government of Norway suddenly gave the go-ahead for this long-mooted scheme. ABB's country manager immediately appointed an airport project leader, who persuaded all of ABB's more than 20 businesses in the country to work under his aegis. Together, these businesses and their external networks offered the complete set of resources needed for the project. Because the project leader--the owner--was empowered to coordinate these resources, and because the heads of ABB business units and functions--the resource owners--were willing to dedicate them to an opportunity that others had identified, ABB won 70 airport contracts, with a total worth of more than $300 million. …
This paper presents a new password authentication and key agreement protocol called AMP in a provable manner. The intrinsic problem with password authentication is a password, associated with each user, has low entropy so that (1) the password is hard to transmit securely over an insecure channel and (2) the password file is hard to protect. Our solution to this complex problem is the amplified password proof idea along with the amplified password file. A party commits the high entropy information and amplifies her password with that information in the amplified password proof. She never shows any information except that she knows it for her proof. Our amplified password proof idea is similar to the zero-knowledge proof in that sense. A server stores amplified verifiers in the amplified password file that is secure against a server file compromise and a dictionary attack. AMP mainly provides the passwordverifier based authentication and the Diffie-Hellman based key agreement, securely and efficiently. AMP is simple and actually the most efficient protocol among the related protocols.
Both U.S. states and Canadian provinces have moved to enhance educational choice within their educational systems in order to improve educational productivity. In spite of this similarity of purpose and means, the two nations are taking very different approaches. Most Canadian provinces have moved to full provincial financing of schools and to the allocation of school choice based on group rights assigned to French-speaking and English-speaking citizens. In contrast, U.S. states have decentralized authority via charter schools, vouchers or tax deductions, thereby enhancing individual rights. Both nations also have adopted federal and state/provincial assessment systems. Eventually, we may be able to assess the educational, financial and political success of two distinctive models, one driven by centralized institutions and the other by markets.
Following Dwork, Naor, and Sahai (30th STOC, 1998), we consider concurrent execution of protocols in a semi-synchronized network. Specifically, we assume that each party holds a local clock such that a constant bound on the relative rates of these clocks is a-priori known, and consider protocols that employ time-driven operations (i.e., time-out in-coming messages and delay out-going messages). We show that the constant-round zero-knowledge proof for NP of Goldreich and Kahan (Jour. of Crypto., 1996) preserves its security when polynomially-many independent copies are executed concurrently under the above timing model. We stress that our main result establishes zero-knowledge of interactive proofs, whereas the results of Dwork et. al. are either for zero-knowledge arguments or for a weak notion of zero-knowledge (called ffl-knowledge) proofs. Our analysis identifies two extreme schedulings of concurrent executions under the above timing model: the first is the case of parallel execution of polynomially-many copies, and the second is of concurrent execution of polynomially-many copies such the number of copies that are simultaneously active at any time is bounded by a constant (i.e., bounded simultaneity). Dealing with each of these extreme cases is of independent interest, and the general result (regarding concurrent executions under the timing model) is obtained by combining the two treatments.
The note focuses on the leading role of \n local level institutions (LLIs) in Burkina Faso, in rural \n decentralization, and poverty eradication, to enhance \n equitable prosperity. It is based on the study undertaken by \n the National Decentralization Commission in Burkina Faso, \n which draws on case studies in Sanmatenga, Sissili, Houet, \n and Yatenga, and, presents sociological evidence that \n certain high-performing LLIs contribute to equitable \n economic development. Economic findings support this, \n showing that both lower inequality levels, and lower poverty \n levels, are linked to a high degree of internal village \n organization. Contextually, LLIs surround, connect, and \n manage communities, incorporating many different kinds of \n indigenous organizations, and functions. Three categories of \n institutions active at the local level are identified: value \n institutions, which focus on activating, and maintaining the \n stability of local governance, and values of the society; \n production institutions, focused on accessing resources from \n the national government, so as to increase productivity; \n and, service-asset management institutions, which integrate \n productivity, and growth values, focused on managing, and \n expanding local assets for sustainable development. External \n aid will need to map these LLIs to guide pro-poor \n investment, and financing of community driven development, \n and encourage local governments to formalize participation.
Jan 1, 2001·8th World Congress on Intelligent Transport SystemsITS America, ITS Australia, ERTICO (Intelligent Transport Systems and Services - Europe)
The Telecommunications Advancement Organization of Japan (TAO) has put the concept of the Smart Gateway (SG) forward as a way of realizing safety and comfort for the drivers of Japan. The system will provide a variety of information, such as multimedia information that doesn't require a guarantee of transmission within a particular period, and cruising assistance information that does require a guarantee of transmission within a particular period, for driver's safety. The roadside system that is a component of the SG is discussed here. There are two requirements for this system: the first is step-by-step construction, because implementing it all at once would be both difficult and expensive. The second is an urgent-message guarantee that ensures the delivery of emergency information such as cruising-assistance information, etc., to drivers in real time. An autonomous decentralized system (ADS) will be used to meet the first requirement. A highly reliable Quality of Service (HQoS) control method that dynamically determines the priority level of data in response to drivers' needs and then supplies information, is proposed to meet the latter requirement. The architecture of this roadside system, and the HQoS control method based on ADS concepts, is discussed in this paper.
A new electronic cash scheme based on zero knowledge proof is proposed Unlike the other proposed schemes,our electronic cash scheme is not based on any specific scheme Thus we have provided an approach to construct electronic cash with any blind signature scheme or zero knowledge proof system The security of our scheme is proved based on some cryptographic assumptions
Boaz Barak, Oded Goldreich, S. Goldwasser, Yehuda Lindell
Resettably-sound proofs and arguments maintain soundness even when the prover can reset the verifier to use the same random coins in repeated executions of the protocol. We show that resettably-sound zero-knowledge arguments for NP exist if collision-free hash functions exist. In contrast, resettably-sound zero-knowledge proofs are possible only for languages in P/poly. We present two applications of resettably-sound zero-knowledge arguments. First, we construct resettable zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge for NP, using a natural relaxation of the definition of arguments (and proofs) of knowledge. We note that, under the standard definition of proof of knowledge, it is impossible to obtain resettable zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge for languages outside BPP. Second, we construct a constant-round resettable zero-knowledge argument for NP in the public-key model, under the assumption that collision-free hash functions exist. This improves upon the sub-exponential hardness assumption required by previous constructions. We emphasize that our results use non-black-box zero-knowledge simulations. Indeed, we show that some of the results are impossible to achieve using black-box simulations. In particular, only languages in BPP have resettably-sound arguments that are zero-knowledge with respect to black-box simulation.
Alfredo De Santis, Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Rafail Ostrovsky, Giuseppe Persiano · 5 authors
. Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge (NIZK), introduced by Blum, Feldman, and Micali in 1988, is a fundamental cryptographic primitive which has attracted considerable attention in the last decade and has been used throughout modern cryptography in several essential ways. For example, NIZK plays a central role in building provably secure public-key cryptosystems based on general complexity-theoretic assumptions that achieve security against chosen ciphertext attacks. In essence, in a multi-party setting, given a fixed common random string of polynomial size which is visible to all parties, NIZK allows an arbitrary polynomial number of Provers to send messages to polynomially many Verifiers, where each message constitutes an NIZK proof for an arbitrary polynomial-size NP statement. In this paper, we take a closer look at NIZK in the multi-party setting. First, we consider non-malleable NIZK, and generalizing and substantially strengthening the results of Sahai, we give the first construction of NIZK which remains non-malleable after polynomially-many NIZK proofs. Second, we turn to the definition of standard NIZK itself, and propose a strengthening of it. In particular, one of the concerns in the technical definition of NIZK (as well as non-malleable NIZK) is that the so-called "simulator" of the Zero-Knowledge property is allowed to pick a different "common random string" from the one that Provers must actually use to prove NIZK statements in real executions. In this paper, we propose a new definition for NIZK that eliminates this shortcoming, and where Provers and the simulator use the same common random string. Furthermore, we show that both standard and non-malleable NIZK (as well as NIZK Proofs of Knowledge) can be constructed achieving this stronger definition. We call...
Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Soon Ae Chun, Pietro Mazzoleni
Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. Execution of inter-organiz-ational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. Moreover, in such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the systems are inherently distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous in nature. In this paper, we propose an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. We argue that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. We propose a Chinese wall security model for the decentralized workflow environment to resolve such problems, and a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.
A family $(S_t)$ of sets is $p$-bounded Diophantine if $S_t$ has a representing $p$-bounded polynomial $R_{S,t}$, s.t.~$x\\in S_t \\iff (\\exists y)[R_{S}(x;y)=0]$. We say that $(S_t)$ is unbounded Diophantine if additionally, $R_{S,t}$ is a fixed $t$-independent polynomial. We show that $p$-bounded (resp., unbounded) Diophantine set has a polynomial-size (resp., constant-size) statistical zero-knowledge proof system that a committed tuple $x$ belongs to $S$. We describe efficient SZK proof systems for several cryptographically interesting sets. Finally, we show how to prove in SZK that an encrypted number belongs to $S$.
Jason M. Patlis, Fullbright Senior Scholar, Rokhmin Dahuri, Maurice Knight
This paper describes the mechanics of establishing a voluntary, incentive-based integrated coastal management program in Indonesia that is consistent with the newly established laws relating to decentralization. It first offers a close analysis of those laws, specifically Act No. 22/1999 and its implementing Regulation No. 25/2000 regarding management authorities, and Act No. 25/1999 and its implementing Regulation 104/2000 regarding financial relations and financial management. The paper then discusses why these new laws increase the need for a vertically and horizontally integrated coastal resource management (ICRM) program in Indonesia. Lastly, the paper describes how a program can be developed under decentralization. The paper proposes a voluntary program in which the central government establishes standards and guidelines for developing provincial and district ICRM programs. In addition to developing standards, the central government would also put in place specific programs providing incentives available to provinces and districts that prepare a ICRM plans in accordance with these standards and guidelines. After coordination with relevant village and provincial governments, the districts, through the provincial government, would submit their plan for approval by the central government. Upon approval, the central government would provide technical and financial assistance, and as additional incentive, would commit to adhering to the regional plan itself. The paper further identifies sources of discretionary funding available to the central government to use for financing such a program.
Since the mid-1980s, China has made substantial progress in the reform of the financing of education, including the establishment of a decentralized and diversified system of financing and the mobilization of additional resources for the education sector. In compulsory education, however, significant challenges remain; they include, in particular, the financial difficulties of poor and rural areas as well as large and widening disparities in per-student spending across areas. Intergovernmental grants from central and provincial levels could be used to address these challenges but their use in China has so far been very limited. This paper argues for the establishment of a regularized and substantial scheme of intergovernmental grants in the financing of compulsory education and highlights some of the issues to be explored in the future. The analysis draws upon information on educational financing in China and examines the potential relevance of the experience of other large decentralized systems in the use of intergovernmental grants.
Geochemistry and Geochronology of Asian Mineral Deposits
An alternative to centralized top‐down city governance is a multi‐level bottom‐up structure based on small neighborhood contractual communities. This paper analyzes the voting rules and public finances of decentralized, contractual urban governance and the likely outcome of such a constitutional structure, substantially reduced transfer seeking or rent seeking. Tax and service substitution, with lower‐level funding and services substituting for higher‐level public finance, is the general process by which the governance would devolve. Land rent is the most feasible source of such decentralized public finance, and local communities could also engage in local currency and credit services. Some empirical examples demonstrate the implementation of some of these governance structures.
Uganda has been engaged for a number of years in an ambitious programme of political and financial decentralization involving significantly expanded expenditure and service delivery responsibilities for local governments in what are now forty‐five districts. Fiscal decentralization has involved allocation of block grants from the centre to complement increased local tax revenue‐raising efforts by districts and municipalities. This article is concerned with the financial side of decentralization and in particular with an examination of district government efforts to raise revenue with the tax instruments which have been assigned to them. These are found to be deficient in a number of ways and their tax raising potential not to be commensurate with the responsibilities being devolved. Achievement of the decentralization aims laid down, therefore, must depend either on the identification of new or modified methods of raising revenue locally, or increased commitment to transfer of financial resources from the centre, or both.