As IT systems grow bigger and complex, they are comprised of many resources supplied by various vendors. Also, the Internet accelerates inter-enterprise business transactions and IT systems are connected each other. Consequently enterprise application systems are becoming a kind of large business process across multiple vendors. This transformation will also bring new type of complexity and difficulties to enterprise IT system management. Having awareness of these issues, IBM and Fujitsu have been collaborating on standardization effort for various areas of autonomic computing technologies. Autonomic computing and open standard interface are an effective approach to deal with these challenges. The initial areas of collaboration are common event format and interface for action to manage IT resources. hi this presentation, we show how an autonomic manager can solve these issues with using an open standard, WSDM (Web Service Distributed Management). We demonstrate the autonomic manager that behaves based on defined policy, continuously monitors systems, handles events and takes actions through WSDM interface in Multi-vendor IT Systems.

To define a hypermedia system's ease of use from the user's point of view, we propose three evaluation metrics: an interface shallowness metric, a downward compactness metric, and a downward navigability metric. These express both the cognitive load on users and the structural complexity of the hypermedia contents. We conducted a field study at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in Osaka, Japan, to evaluate our hypermedia system and to assess the suitability of our hypermedia metrics from the viewpoint of visiting members of the public. After developing a spreadsheet-type authoring system named HyperEX, we built prototype systems for use by members of the public visiting a special exhibition held at the museum. Questionnaires, interviews, automatic recording of users' navigation operations, and statistical analysis of 449 tested users yielded the following results. First, the suitability of the metrics was found to be satisfactory, indicating that they are useful for developing hypermedia systems. Second, there is a strong relationship between a system's enjoyability and its usability. Transparency and the friendliness of the user interface are the key issues in enjoyability. Finally, the quality of the video strongly affects the overall system evaluation. Video quality is determined by optimum selection of scenes, the length of the video, and appropriate audio-visual expression of the content. This video quality may become the most important issue in developing hypermedia for museum education.