Interview: Ron S. Kenett, Ph.D. is Chairman and CEO of the KPA Group and KPA Ltd., Research Professor at the University of Turin, Italy and International Professor Associate at the Center for Research in Risk Engineering, NYU-Poly, New York, USA.
How would you present the collaborative project?
Free open source software (OSS) is increasingly being integrated in commercial software packages and large software projects. Some estimates indicate that by 2016 the prevalence of OSS will exceed 95% in commercial applications. The adoption of OSS poses unique challenges in adoption and deployment decisions. RISCOSS is about advancing the state of the art in risk management of OSS components, in a wide range of applications, from telecommunication products to government IT systems and general software platforms.
What is your role in the project?
KPA is leading the risk management and analytics parts of RISCOSS. We have extensive experience in operational risks, part of it was developed in the FP6 MUSING project where semantic unstructured data was combined with quantitative data to generate advanced risk management methods (Kenett and Raanan, 2010). We are also positioned as a technical transfer, translational partner, bridging the gap between academia and industry. This comes from experience gained in 20 years of hand’s on projects with small, medium and global companies like hp, Intel, Amdocs and the Israel Aerospace Industries.
What key innovation do you bring or help to develop?
Risk management can be addressed at an intuitive level, qualitative level or quantitative level. Advances in risk management need to be quantitative and analytical, and this is where we try to focus in RISCOSS. We believe in managing risks with data, both in the planning and the monitoring phase (see Kenett, 2011). As an example, we plan to track and model blogs and chats of OSS communities with association rules and social network analysis in order to get early warnings on possible branching in the evolution of a specific OSS. Managing the OSS communities is one of the special aspects of OSS that needs to be adressed with proper tools and algorithms.
During your professional missions in various countries and organizations, did you notice large differences in term of risk and cost evaluations?
The variability in the maturity of risk management practices is very wide, within individual cultures. Some organisations adopt only what the regulators mandates, for example in financial or pharmaceutical companies. Some companies consider effective risk management as opening up competitive opportunities and dedicate resources and management attention to achieve this. RISCOSS will undoubtedly raise the awareness to the need of proper risk management of OSS. It will hopefully provide usefull capabilities to organizations at various levels of maturity, from the very basic to advanced ecosystems where decisions are evidence based and rely on data.
How do you organize your participation in RISCOSS?
The mission of KPA is to generate insights from analytics to help its customers improve their competitive position. We have been in existence for over 20 years and combine experts in a range of disciplines from cloud hosting technologies to economics, statistics, industrial and computer engineering. In RISCOSS, we currently have involved a team of 5 experts that contribute various areas of expertise related to risk management and analytics. The top level quality of the RISCOSS partners and the challenges posed by the project create a unique opportunity for learning and innovation. We look forward to this collaborative effort that will expand our offerings in the area of risk management. Specifically, we are already in contact with representatives of the Israel government portal who are increasingly considering OSS adoptions.
A word on Ron S. Kenett, Chairman and CEO of the KPA Group and KPA Ltd.
 | Ron S. Kenett, Ph.D. is Chairman and CEO of the KPA Group and KPA Ltd., Research Professor at the University of Turin, Italy and International Professor Associate at the Center for Research in Risk Engineering, NYU-Poly, New York, USA. He has over 25 years of experience in restructuring and improving the competitive position of organizations by integrating statistical methods, process analysis, supporting technologies and modern human resource management systems. He has authored and co-authored 10 books and over 160 papers in scientific publications and has been editor in chief and associate edior of journals published in Taiwan, the US, the UK and Italy. Professor Kenett is Editor in Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, current president of the Israeli Statistical Association (ISA) and past president of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). He is the 2013 Greenfield Medalist of the Royal Statistical Society. He has been a program committee member and chairman of various conferences such as COMPSAC, KDIR, SoE4EE, IRMA, CMSoEA and EDOC.
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