On identiyfing services we might need in the future but don't now right now

Earlier this week I attended the Landelijk Architectuur Congres in Nieuwegein. Besides the noteworthy percentage of attendees with mustaches, grey hair and ties, a pleasant and friendly event.

In the afternoon of the first day of the event I did a lively talk on shaping service oriented projects using smart use cases. During the talk I recevied some very peculiar feedback! Bare with me.

I addressed the possibilities smart use cases offer to model and implement new and existing business processes in smart use case diagrams. Using this approach front end, workflow and services become first-level citizens in the smart use case model, allowing not only to estimate and plan service oriented project more precise, but also to build up a solid repositry of services that are needed (and present) at a organizational (or domain) level – as proven in recent projects. Good stuff I would say. It adds to simplying such projects, instead of adding complexity

Colored smart use cases
For example, the diagram below resulted from a recent project. In this case, it combines both front end (orange use cases), workflow (purple use cases, realized in SAP XI) and services from different back end systems (green, yellow and blue use cases).

Defining unknown services?
Much to my surprise an architect in audience started shaking his head heavily during my presentation. Obviously, he didn’t agree. When I got curious and asked him about his misdemeanour he stated: “this approach doesn’t work because it only identifies services that are needed now.”

Although I think the technique allows for much more, I responded with a quick “So?”. “This is not service orientation,” the architect followed up. “This is only enterprise application integration.” It still didn’t worry me. After all, what’s in a name? But then it suddenly came out. “This approach does not allow you to defining services that you might need in the future, say in five years, but that you don’t know of right now.”

YAGNI
WTF! Was this guy serious? Guess he was. Unbelievable! This architect obviously has never of the YAGNI principle. Let me clearify what I mean by that in this particular case:

• Over-generic. Many software projects have gone under trying it make the software so generic that it will fit any future purpose. This makes writing software – service oriented or otherwise – hard to write and impossible to test. In reality, research has proven that of this generic software only 10% is actually used in future extensions of the code. That’s 90% wasted effort.
• The world changes. Moreover, trying to identify stuff that you will need in five years is a waste of time anyway. There’s no decent way to come up with requirements for software over that period. Simply because the world changes at high pace. Just imagine that you would have designed a piece software five years ago, and now need to build that. You would have missed the world wide financial crises, banks bankrupting, social media, Twitter, cloud computing, mobile possibilities, and likely even service orientation. Let alone changed legislation and government policies.
• Endless sessions. And it gets worse. Just think of the endless workshops and sessions organizations will start to organize to obtain these future requirements you don’t know of right now. I can see the PowerPoints coming out of those sessions, best printed at A0 format, full or requirements that will never be realised. But hey, everything works on a PowerPoint slide.
• YAGNI. Personally, I would prefer to design for business processes that organizations need now or in the near future, and that need to be automated now and not in five years. Thus, you focus on things that you can decide upon, and that can actually be designed. Think YAGNI.

Entering the twilight zone
So where does that leave us? To be honest, I kind of lost my cool during the presentation – although other people interpreted my response to the architect in the audience as pretty relaxed and quite polite.

But this head-shaking archtect perfectly stated what bugs me about (enterprise) architecture all together. Of course, I respect the idea that enterprise architecture focuses on the long term, and on strategy. But to actually think idea that you can endlessly embark on money-eating journey into the unknown future – easpecially given the current economy – is just not my cup of tea. It’s like entering the Twilight Zone. This is exactly why many large projects fail even before the first line of code is actually written.

It’s about adding unknown complexity to projects that are hard enough to run even without us having to investigate possible use in five years. In contrary, we should strive to simplifying our projects. Exactly what I meant to do with modeling services in smart use cases.

I know I’m generalizing this a bit, but please, dear architects, let’s focus on reality and costs. Come down from your architectural cloud and be welcome to our twilight zone!

Sander Hoogendoorn
Principal Technology Officer

Read this post (with images) at www.sanderhoogendoorn.com

Posted by Sander Hoogendoorn on November 27, 2009

The perfect business application

Cost is becoming an ever increasing player on the market. Total cost, not just project cost. Time-to-market is good, but time-in-market is better, so to say

In the end, there are questions that need to be answered. 70% of those questions are asked after the go-live of a project, not during
A project might be successful but maintenance might turn out to be a disaster (or anything in that grey area in between). Fill in the blanks for a project and run, a build and test, a design and build
For the 30% of the questions that get asked during the project, the same principle applies: the farther down the chain these get asked, the more costly they are

So, how can costs be minimized? Well, just by making an existing application perfect, or by creating a perfect application
What makes an application perfect? Great ease-of-use, splendid user interaction, and availability

That is achieved by a humane (sic) approach, a fault-proof approach, and a resilient approach. The word approach is used, because there are several phases in which the timeline between beginning and end of an application can be divided. Design, build, test, run, use, maintain. The perfect application should be perfect during all those phases

• The humane approach is achieved by approaching the application as if it were our own, used only by ourselves
• The fault-proof approach is achieved by approaching the application as if it were everyone else's
• The resilient approach is achieved by approaching the application as if it were everyone's application, used everywhere

A perfect application can be measured from the end, backwards to the beginning

• Is it hard to maintain? Then the technical documentation is not complete enough, or the code is not legible enough. It is not fault-proof for the maintenance phase


• Is it hard to use? Then the presentation is not intuitive enough, at least not for the users that have to work with it. It is not humane for the use phase


• Is it hard to run? Then the technical operation is not easy enough, or too costly. It is not humane nor fault-proof nor resilient for the run phase


• Is it hard to test? Then the functional design is not clear enough, or the technical design is way off to the functional design. It is not fault-proof for the test phase


• Is it hard to build? Then the technical design is not clear enough, or the functional design not clear enough in order to draw a technical design. It is not fault-proof for the build phase


• Is it hard to design? Then the business specifications are not clear enough. It is not fault-proof for the design phase

Everything starts with the business specifications. They draw the lines for the business application that serves a business goal

It seems that the overall answer is easy: every question needs an elaborate and documented answer as soon as possible, and it all starts with the business design

• For every business rule, there is a business exception. Embed that into the business specifications, so the scope is clear


• In the functional design: for every business rule, there is a functional exception, and an appropriate user interaction message. Embed that into the functional design


• In the technical design: for every functional rule, there is a technical exception, and an appropriate user interaction message. Embed that into the technical design


• In the build: for every technical rule, there is a technical exception, and an appropriate user interaction message. Embed that into the build

Is this rocket science? Certainly not. Are details of this overlooked every now and then? They sure are
Is this a handy checklist? I sure hope so.

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can follow him via Twitter or join him on LinkedIn

Posted by Martijn Linssen on September 15, 2009

Look for changes elsewhere

There is currently a small ruckus in the in the blogosphere in Sweden around the low quality of blogs, around the herd mentality that often comes with a hot topic being discussed. The complaints are all too common, we hear them all the time, often put forward by representatives from so called old media that see their monopoly on organisation of information being challenged by, ohh my god, individuals! Equally often I hear people expressing fears that all communication in the future will be by IMs, by blogs, by wikis, by whatever webtool that is the current trend (or rather when traditional media picks up the trends). The problem is that the questions that often are asked and the subsequent responses are inherently wrong.

The major changes will not happen in the clash between different kinds of production and distribution models for media and information. There will traditional media (however changed from current model), there will be paper newspapers, and there will be many similarities to what the media landscape look today. The major changes will take place in areas that are affected by the new tools. Let me present an analogy from the car industry.

In the middle of the last century the car became standard for a big portion of the US households, the industry was thriving and the wings at the back of the cars became bigger by the minute. This was essentially a change in the transportation industry but people didn't stop walking, they didn't stop using the subway to go from downtown to uptown Manhattan, they didn't stop using the bike. Yes, there was a change in how much they used those means of transportation but they did not disappear, i.e. the structure of the way we communicated and commuted changed but old ways were still around. When futurist predicted the future the main ideas around transportation was in how transportation itself would change (flying cars, moving sidewalks, the ideas were infinite in numbers). However, the real change was outside the transportation business itself.

Think for a minute how the car changed the entire structure on how to build cities. There is no coincidence that it was in the US where malls located outside the cities first emerged, malls you have to take a car to. This is a concept that now is adopted in many other countries throughout the world. This has profoundly changed the way people live, the very essence on how we choose to organise our lives. Could a company like IKEA, the world's biggest furniture retail brand even exist without the car? Probably not in the shape we know it today.

Same thing goes for the phone. When introduced corporate managers and many alike considered the phone a waste of time. What would people do, chat all day and perform no work? Nota bene, this was in days before the rise of the call centres where people work with the sole purpose of chatting on the phone all day.

This is the approach we have to take when discussing how the new landscape of communication and value creation will affect our world. We have to take a step back and look on how these new technologies will change areas far away from the IT business itself because that is where the real impact will be felt. And the impact will be even greater than the impact of the car since IT today is interwoven in almost every part of life, no matter what we think of that. Going to a café, the music will probably be played of a computer filled with pirate MP3 songs, taking a trip in a car you are likely to be guided by data stored at some remote data centre in the Netherlands (if you use the TomTom that is), if you date regularly there is a good chance that at least some of the dates started out as an online flirt. IT is in the very fabric of life and the internet is only 5000 days old, imagine what will happen next!

If we constantly measure new phenomena against the old model we are very likely to miss the great opportunities that are out there to be captured in the future. However, even if we free ourselves from the constraints of the past we will make mistakes, we will make predictions that prove to be utterly incorrect but that is quite in order. Innovation and thinking new is a venture into the unknown and hence unpredictable but it is a path we have to walk if we want to have at least a chance to prosper tomorrow rather than thinking about those old glory days of yesterday.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on March 3, 2009

Leadership in tough times

The recent Leaders in London event brought together some great business leaders (e.g. Jack Welch & Muhammad Yunus) and inspired speakers (e.g. Rudy Giuliani & Carly Fiorina) to share their thoughts on the main topic du-jour for most CxOs, i.e. how to lead their organization through the current economic crises.

This two day event, chaired by author / business guru, Rene Carayol, succeeded in delivering immense value to attendees, (ranging from newly minted MBAs to seasoned CEOs), and included additional master-class days by business thought leaders like Dan Pink and Daniel Goleman. Key messages from my attendance on day two includes:

• The former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, emphasized that the role of leadership in times of crises was about motivating people, fostering & recognizing teamwork, and remaining visibly present and optimistic even during the toughest of times.
• Legendary CEO, Jack Welch, gave a moderated interview / Q&A session, (via satellite link), with his classic forthright opinion on a variety of topics e.g.: the current economic crisis (a breakdown in the financial industry); management theory (only pundits think new management models are the answer); and emerging markets like Nigeria (challenged young leaders to change the game). I could not resist asking if there were any applicable lessons to be learnt from the recording industry’s own crises. His answer: It was caused by technology innovation; therefore need to respond with innovation, in the business model.
• Richard Reed, Co-Founder of Innocent Drinks, described their journey from start-up to becoming a successful company with firm values of fun, sustainability and focus on doing one thing well.
• Inspirational leadership helped retired US Naval Commander, Captain Michael Abrashoff, to turn his ship from the worst to best performing ship in the US Pacific fleet. His mantra: give up control, achieve command.
• Prof. Vijay Govindarajan (Tuck Business School) stated that organizational strategies should be focused on creating “next practice”, and not adopting current best practice. Also that strategy architecture should address five key areas of: non-linear shifts, strategic intent, core competencies, growth playbook and new competencies
• According to Prof. Gary Hamel, (London Business School), management has stopped evolving and most companies now have more or less the same management models. His hierarchy of desirable management outcomes covers traditional qualities like: Obedience, Diligence and Intellect, as well as the emerging need to inspire Initiative, Creativity and Passion in employees.

Overall, this was one heck of an event, even if only for the quality of invited speakers, but the key message from most of the sessions I attended was about the critical value of inspiration and motivation as the best way for leaders to engage people into delivering above and beyond the call of duty, particularly in these most turbulent of times.

Posted by Jude Umeh on December 7, 2008

Lego IT - competitive advantage by assembly

Meeting clients and discussing their IT challenges and how they look at how IT can support competitive advantage is always interesting and enlightening. One common argument that often comes up is that the truly differentiating solutions, where a company builds an edge towards their competitors, need to be supported by internally developed IT systems that are unique. The view is that standard off-the-shelf packages can´t be used since competitors could then copy the solution and the competitive edge would be lost. I would like to state an alternative view on this!

Off the shelf systems with standard functionality can always be used for standard processes that are shared among all companies. This would include things like invoice handling, order handling and similar transactional processes that essentially are hygiene factors that are needed to run a company. These kind of services could also very well be outsourced to a service provider where the company access their needed information and data through a web interface. The main aspect on how to handle these type of services should be on cost containment.

Some core processes, where actual value is added should be developed by the company itself. One of the best examples of such a core process is Google's PageRank algorithm and the systems attached to it. Such a system and service can never be bought from an external supplier, it is in the absolute core of the value creation for Google.

Some other value adding processes could very well be bought as services from other parties. The common factor for such processes is that the value that IT provides to them is in HOW IT is used, not the actual services that are delivered by IT. 

One good example would be Threadless.com, a virtual t-shirt company. The basic logic behind Threadless is that members of the site design their own t-shirt, uploads it to the site (which essentially is a community site), other members of the site vote for their favourite design and the top votes get produced and sold through their website. This has turned out to be a quite profitable business. The value that they add is essentially that they connect designers and consumers of t-shirts, i.e. they are not using a specific proprietary IT service that create value by delivering a specific solution that can't be found somewhere else but it is in HOW they use IT for the purpose of connecting people. The value to the members of the site is not the actual functionality of the site (as long as some basic standards are met), the real value are the other members of the site! I don't know the exact architecture that Threadless uses but let us examine how another company could build a similar solution with standard off the shelf components. Remember, the value is not in the functionality but in HOW that functionality is deployed to connect people (i.e. how do we design a business model, how do we attract people to contribute, should we rewards top contributors and make it visible, can we write insanely funny texts for the webpage to make it fun to read)

• Infrastructure
• Use Amazon S3 and EC2 to provide storage and server capacity to run your application.
• Billing and logistics
• Use Amazon Fulfillment services for logistics and package delivery.
• Use Amazon Flexible payments services for payments and billing.
• Finance and HR
• Use Capgemini BPO solution for both F&A and HR.
• CRM
• Use Salesforce.com for possible CRM needs.
• Networking capabilities
• Use Ning to build and maintain social network.
• Communication and marketing
• Use Twitter, Facebook, Blogs etc to communicate and market you products.
• T-shirt sourcing
• Use American Apparel Wholesale t-shirt sourcing for clothes.
• Printing
• Use PrintMojo to outsource printing of designs.

I might have missed a few bots and bolts here and there but essentially these are the services that you need to run Threadless. You might want to write a few applications that do some fancy networking data mining and push it back into the application at the Ning platform. But all in all, if your true competitive advantage is in the product you produce (remember, the Threadless value is not the IT, nor the product but the connection of great designers and interested consumers) an off the shelf assembly like this might very well be a great differentiator compared to your competitors.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on December 5, 2008

Streaming love!

When I opened my email-box this morning I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly. Someone at Spotify had decided to send me an invite to their rather amazing music streaming service. This post I primarily about that I need to tell the world about that. Rest assured, the invite did not come with an agreement to mention them in every second post here, it came with no strings attached what so ever and I am no way affiliated with Spotify. Second to bragging this post is about the future of online music.

The very successful iTunes business model might be doomed. The iTunes/iPod package combination has been succesful because we, as customers, wanted to bring music on the go in unprecedented numbers. Sales of iPods led to sales of music in iTunes. It was convenient and the two entities fit together hand in glove. Even though only a few percent of each iPod is filled by legally downloaded MP3s through iTunes the model still worked. Due to the massive amount of users of the iPod (and a rather beneficial deal with the record labels) Apple could make a very nice business case of the model. Since each copy of a song costed them, well nothing to produce, critical mass in terms of downloads to cover costs for the infrastructure were soon reached.

Spotify and the streaming model is the next logical step. If marginal cost of providing a song to the listener approaches zero, why charge at all for each song? Sure, profit per song that is listened to by the consumer will drop significantly in a model as this this but by looking at that measure you miss the whole point. By changing model from price per song to a subscription model you can extend you market to people who would never download a song (either legally or illegally). Think about replacing the car radio with a Spotify-like application. Sell subscriptions to taxi drivers, commuters, truck drivers or just the common man. They might not be interested to download songs onto the limited space of their iPod and hook it up to the RCA-jack of the car stereo but with a streaming/subscription model a simple interface in the car would provide them will all the songs in the world at the flick of a switch without waiting for a download.

Spotify's next step is in creating an application that we can download to our cell phones. As if they haven't thought about that already. If they don´t do that it will be hard to truly challenge the iPod/iTunes-model since it is very much driven by the demand for on-the-go music. Even though Spotify might open completely new markets, a big portion of music is today consumed when walking and this must be taken seriously.

Let's see if they manage to get it on Apple App Store as well. Apple have a story of, well, not being benevolent with the space on App Store.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on December 2, 2008

Tech predictions 2009: Let’s socialise!”

2009 will be the year when use of social networking tools within companies will be the talk of the town. Yes, it has been around for a while but to be honest, nothing much has really happened apart from that Serena Software uses Facebook internally. So when our global heads of Capgemini Consulting visited Sweden office last week and started talking about the power of social networking only five minutes into the talk I felt that something had changed. For the better. Substantial growth is predicted [subscription only] in web 2.0 for the enterprise within the next five years. I believe the reasons are threefold.

• A generation of business users that always have seen internet as a tool for collaboration and has been eager to adopt new web 2.0 tools to increase their work are moving into positions where they actually has a say over investment decisions. And it is not “generation Y”ers I am talking about, rather young enthusiastic knowledge workers that are fed up with the way they interact within their business.
• The smaller niched vendors of this kind of software (e.g. Sixapart, Social text, Awareness, Jive Software) are growing stronger in the enterprise space while big players such as IBM and Microsoft are moving into the social/collaborative space with their internally focused platforms such as Sharepoint (or maybe even more Live Mesh) and Lotus Connections.
• The probable recession that we see on the horizon might trigger a new behavior amongst IT executives with slashed IT budgets. That massive ERP reinvestment might have to wait for another year and money can be spent on a more lightweight hosted SaaS solution for social interaction.

Next year will be the year when these factors coincide and when management truly understands the power of its employees and how they interact.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on November 17, 2008

The public sector openness

My first post here on the blog was titled "The disruptiveness of the open walled telecom garden" and now I venture into another topic concerning the benefits of being open. I suspect a pattern!

I want to discuss openness in the public sector. The area is highly interesting due to two main points.

• The public sector is not a profit hunting organisation - hence they should, from a "business" perspective, be quite ready to share their internal data and services with the public.
• The public sector is, by default, surrounded by many more restrictions than private companies which put an interesting twist on the openness, as in what can they share from an integrity point of view.

I will be rather blunt and ignore the second fact for this particular post. I am sure that there are tons of limitations from a legal and moral point of view on what you can share but I will choose to ignore that at this particular moment. Because the ideas of what you can do are still very interesting and valid.

What services should the public sector provide us with? Quite a large topic to cover in a blog post (and possibly quite controversial depending on your political alignment) so I will generalize quite broadly. They provide us with services that can be consumed, such as health care, cleaning the streets, schooling and some kind of social welfare system. However, the public sector also provides us with infrastructural services such as building roads, deploying sewer systems and even the platform for democratic elections. There is a fundamental difference between these services. The first category is, as stated previously, is consumption, while the other service is a kind of investment that does not fulfill its true value until someone creates a new service on top of it. A road becomes more valuable when a truck loaded with wine bottles goes from the winery to the store shelf. I want to focus on the latter category because this is where I think we really can take the public sector a giant leap forward. But the infrastructure I think of is not the roads and the bridges; it is the data that resides in our public sectors' massive server parks. Let me formulate an example:

Every morning you wake up because the truck that collects the trash cans in your area stops right below you bed room window. The real estate broker never told you about this and you believe that the price for this apartment should be at least 20% less than what you paid. Could this situation have been avoided? I would say yes. Suppose that the city where you live exposed the mapping data of all trash can collection points and truck routes through a standardized web API. Someone, I don't know who, would pick that data up and make a service from it. Possibly a real estate broker but anyone could do it and it would have a value for the citizens of that particular city. The reason that I compare such data to infrastructure is the fact that other parties than the public sector can build effective business upon it just as business since decades has flourished due to the fact that roads exists.

Let me give you another example. Most cities today provide a service where you can get directions in the public transport system. You tell the system where you are and where you want to go and it will come back to you with a suggestion for the best way of getting there. On public transport that is.

I say, maintain those services but also publish the data freely over an API. All routes, all stops, all interruptions, all such data. Think of the possibilities; someone could build a service which compares cab fare to public transport in terms of cost per saved minute if you take a cab instead. Different events could add a very simple transportation guide right in their own website or on their Facebook invitation. Another company could improve the public web service and add additional layers such as graphical representation of current state of public transport, i.e. delays or alternate routes. Someone could make a connection to Google Maps Street view and show the way to the closest bus stop going to the city centre. A fifth developer thinks of a great idea where they integrate GPS functionality in a modern cell phone to create a contest on how to go through the subway system as fast as possible. It gets tremendous traction amongst kids in high school creating the best marketing buzz for the subway in a long time. At the same time, all GPS data is collected to form the basis of improvement of bus and subway scheduling. And all this could be a reality because they decided to share data openly. This is not a fantasy; this is what occurs on a daily basis all over the world in different fashions.

Wesabe, an online money saving service, recommends cheaper stores in your particular area by combining millions of card and bank transactions with personalized comments on what has been bought. They are feeding of what banks and card companies usually just regard as a waste of server space and a source of compliance issues to create value. The same thing can be done with the vast amounts of data that you can find within the public sector.

What I have outlined here are just two examples of data that the public sector could share and where other people and companies could build additional services on top. The city or the government does not have to invent or fund all services by themselves. By sharing data they could invite the best entrepreneurs, the best innovators and the brightest minds to collaborate with them in creating the next wave of public services.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on October 28, 2008

Capgemini is french!

Capgemini has another blog that you might have read, The CTO-blog where the CTO community of Capgemini thinks the big thoughts and adress the broad topics. Recently they have started to discuss the concept of Technovision, a framework developed by Capgemini to understand what is going on within the wonderful world of IT.

To underline the fact that Capgemini is french, please take a look at this really inspiring clip of Capgemini board member Pierre Hessler when he speaks about Technovision. He is french, he has deep insights in what technology can do for business and he is a joy to listen to. If more people spoke as Mr Hessler there would be no gap between business and IT.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on October 1, 2008

The disruptiveness of the open walled telecom garden

In recent days (well actually months) I have spent many hours thinking about the impact of non-proprietary business models in the Telco business. Obviously the announcement of Google's operating system Android a year back fueled mine and many others thought on this topic even though other solutions existed before. The release of the "Google phone", G1 last week further intensified my thinking around this topic. I will not dwell deep into the somewhat spectacular features that the phone exhibits but it seems as if iPhone got a bit of a competitor here.

The interesting question is how this will affect the telco industry as a whole. Will it be possible to use a walled garden approach for operators if the open source model gains momentum or will customers inevitably vote with their feet and move to an environment where they can choose more freely which features they want in their phone?

Last year there was a massive outrage among content providers from Sweden when Telia Sonera, the primary operator in Sweden, launched their Surf Open initiative which basically stripped web pages from ads and replaced these with ads chosen and provided by Telia Sonera. If you were on a Telia plan you were in practice forced to use their solution to access web content. The role of the operator in this case was both that of a supplier of the "pipes" and which content that flowed in those pipes. This is a trend that can be seen among many operators; they want to earn more money by not only providing connectivity but also content.

In an open environment the Telia Sonera example would have been impossible. The browser that you use to access the web could be provided by whomever, the choice would not be limited to browsers approved by the operator but we could choose quite freely to find a browser that suit our specific need as long it adheres to common standards. Would we want our ISP to choose how we access the internet from our PC (AOL anyone)? The walled garden model might work just fine when there are no common standards and the one operator have a huge user base that it can leverage to make content providers develop for their specific standards. However, in a world where we, as users of information, are used to access all information when and how we want, the model might not work. Or better said, will not work.

One of the reasons that the walled garden model have survived in telco is due to the significant power that the operators have in the value chain where they essentially are the only way that manufacturers can get new handsets onto the market. Manufacturers create handsets and operators add the services that they think can differentiate them on the end user market. This gives the operators tremendous powers, both over manufacturers and the retail businesses and it has also been an efficient way of providing mobile telephony to billions of people. However, moving into a new era, where internet access will be as important to access as voice telephony, the model might not work as well.

If customers get used to install their own apps, access the internet as if they were at their home PC and replace basic applications as the contact list with something that is more fit for their own personal purpose and this opportunity is readily at hand, will they ever accept the walled garden of incumbent operators? I guess only time (and possibly Google) will tell.

Posted by Johan Bergelin on September 29, 2008

I just removed my office suite

I just removed my office suite since all traditional office suites are time absorbing monsters that reduce productivity to the max. That shouldn't be news for you, but here is a kind reminder. If you prefer to do less work in more time, please use an office suite that is able to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Please use them to create a document on your laptop and please use them to mail the document to your colleagues who can review it on their laptop making their changes in your document (off course with a 'Track-changes' functionality enabled) while working with their specific office suite and when they are finished, they mail your document with their changes to you so you can process their changes in your document. If you are lucky you will have some colleagues that will propose different changes on the same fragment, so you can mail them again, asking them to come to a consensus, wait for them, and than process the outcome of their little consensus in your nice document. This will look something like this:

 

Does this look a bit cumbersome? Yes it does! You are spending too much time on a sychronous commmunication and reworking documents containing changes of others. You are responsible for the master document and worst case, you might forget to process some change or you might even miss an email. I even let out all the issues you could have with different versions and types of office suites and different operating systems on which they are executed.

However there is light at the end of the tunnel, you could save humongous amount of time by using online services (SaaS) such as Google Docs, Zoho, Sliderocket, Gliffy and many others. Using these tools will enable you to be more effective in editing documents and collaborating with others. You can work synchronously with each other on a document and you do not have to have endless mailing sessions while reviewing each others documents. By being able to work synchonously you will save time, and your dependant on ones laptop where the master document is available. Besides that, it will save your licensing costs since most online solutions are free or require a small fee. And even better, you can edit your document always and from everywhere, the only thing you need to have is a browser and an internet connection. Using such tools will simplify above image to something like this:

 

Since you too want to save time here are some guides to uninstall the most common Office suites:

• Microsoft Office
• Open Office

Off course if you would like to spend your life doing less work in more time, be my guest, however I think you could to better things with your time. Let's increase our productivity!

Posted by Rick Mans on September 26, 2008

Semantics and balanced needs

In my first article, I outlined the challenge of semantics and interpretation of information presented to managers in 3 different situations. In this article, I will give examples of how information quality differs between various industries because of the challenge of agreeing the semantics of information.

However, before I start, I must mention a very interesting book called “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an ex-quant trader who writes on how “Black Swan” events always take us by surprise. His thesis is that, as individuals, and as a society, we forget how that it is the random, unforeseen evens that shape our world. He gives many examples, but the 9/11 attacks in New York are a very good one where, post the event, we rationalise that we expected the event and that given access to a little bit more information we would have been able to prevent it. This is relevant to my work because in business, the information to make decisions is typically there, if only we could find it.

My points are that:

1. With better knowledge, not of the data and information we have, but of what the data actually means, we would all be making better decisions;
2. To achieve this better knowledge, the interacting parties need to have similar (or balanced) desires in order to want to arrive at a semantic understanding of their shared data; and
3. This balanced need does not always happen in mature markets but having said that, certain events push mature markets into wanting to achieve that balance. Where this balance is missing, the ability to understand the meaning of information will remain challenging.

I would like to offer further details in the situations I described in my first article and show that if there is a balance in the need to share and understand information, then the next step is to agree the format and the semantics of the information to be shared.

Retail

In my first article, I suggested, in a homogenous retail environment, the wrinkles of information management had been smoothed out over many years to a level where errors were significantly less than in my other examples. The provenance of information was easy to establish, so the information could be trusted.

How come the retail example seems so much better than the other two? Is it due to the maturity of the retail market compared to the public sector? Surely the need for control in government has been around much longer than the level of control I suggest. Is the rate of change in retail less than in government?

Let’s look back at the history of Information Management in retail. The stakeholder map for retail is typically very complex; retailers of all sizes (supermarket chains to corner shops) all have to take goods from a plethora of suppliers. The larger retailers have driven the need for easy ways to talk up and down the chain - standards were essential and, more importantly, there was a will to standardise.

All parts of the retail chain understood the value of reaching agreement to the basic concepts of retailing such as EAN (Barcodes), sell by dates, invoicing terms etc. Standards, such as ARTS, go further but have not had, perhaps, the same impact as the basic things.

Financial Services

In financial services, the same pressure to standardise is in everyone’s interests up and down the value chain. SWIFT, and the FIX standard (and its successor FIXML) were created to avoid the chaos of manual trading and manual reconciliation. It would not be possible for the global markets to work at the speed they do if these standards were not in place.

Both the retailing and financial services worlds rely on all parties having a common understanding of what the information means so that a number in a FIXML trade is known to be a buy not a sell. You may say this is obvious, and yes it is, but it shows why getting to this level of understanding is beneficial. If only other industries could say the same.

So, if retail and financial services are in such good shape, how do other places fare?

Local Government

In my first article, I alluded to the challenge of Information Management in local government. The example I gave was central government asking local government for information on school absenteeism where families move between councils/schools and when figures are demanded per term and the information is collected per annum.

The parallel (or, more precisely, divergence) to my last example is based on need. In retail or financial services, each party has a need to standardise. The better the understanding of the environment, the smoother things work. I believe local government does not have a balanced need when compared to central government, so neither party will be able to agree how to communicate effectively.

This links back to the “Black Swans” book I referred to at the start of this article which referred to unusual events that are so far out of the ordinary, they take us by surprise. The Victoria Climbie case is a good example of a “Black Swan” event; we had all the information we needed except not in a form that could be easily understood.

The link back to my main point is that, after the event central government initiates a change that affects all local governments. Examples of this are i) incidents (such as Climbie or Soham); ii) Policy (school performance) iii) fiscal (reducing social security fraud) which typically require local government to perform a new task and report on in centrally. Therefore, the new task has not been standardised and the variation in the data/standards are compounded (e.g. the double counting in my first blog entry) to a point where the error rate starts to reduce our confidence in the data.

The question here is: Is the need balanced between central and local government as it is between banks in a financial transaction. Local government knows the demands from central government are likely to be targeted at the short term and another Black Swan is likely to change the focus and create new and different demands. As a local government manager, why waste effort on agreeing standards when the targets are always moving. Somehow, the needs of both sides of the transaction need to be equalised to make it work. Government departments have tried for many years to create this balance by trying to be clear what they want from local government. However, the resulting standards are typically so bland as to be near worthless. These standards indicate, for example local government should collect details of school absenteeism without saying whether it should be collected monthly, termly or annually and often don’t agree what it will be used for (because ultimately they may not know). Getting agreement to this is very difficult because stakeholders are likely to resist costly change.

Criminal Justice

Criminal justice and in particular Policing, where I am currently working, has its own challenges which are best illustrated using an example.

The murder of two young girls in Soham was a Black Swan event. Unforeseen, except we had, at one time, all the information to stop it. A number of police forces had information about Ian Huntley and yet there were no robust processes and standards in place to maintain and share that information.

The Police Service has a structure based on forces being autonomous units with, as one would expect, strong reasons to focus on their own patch. Managing their own information, and sharing it with other forces was seen, until Soham, as a back room activity done by the IT department.

Linking back to the rest of this article, what was happening was a demonstration of unbalanced need whereby the current operational challenges were taking primacy over managing what should be the lifeblood of the police service, information.

The Soham “Black Swan” event highlighted the importance of balancing the need and since then the Police Service has realised the benefit of this. This is as simple as the budget holders realising the benefit of spending money on better information management to avoid future Black Swans (and to avoid being the one who didn’t put their house in order) which is what the information management staff have been crying out for forever. Various initiatives are happening at force level to standardise how to manage information about criminal and suspects. At a National level, large programmes of work to share force information more effectively are underway.

Once this need had been balanced, and following the retail and financial examples, the police service has realised that standards for information are essential. It is not possible to have 40 different ways of defining the meaning of a date.

To this end, the police service have developed standards, similar to those in retail and financial services which are currently being rolled out to help with that challenge of information sharing.

Summary

I believe that the retail and financial services markets, even though they have their challenges, have shown that, with a balance need between parties, having agreed ways to define information is a good thing. The balanced need reduces the possibility of Black Swan events. However, with the credit crunch, perhaps the financial sector wishes it had fully understood the risk of underlying instruments.... another example of poorly understood data!!

Local Government seems a harder nut to crack. We do not have the ability to second guess the next Black Swan and its subsequent demand from central government. This indicates that having standards to share information will be very difficult to achieve, so to work in local government information management, perhaps means focusing on managing the imbalance rather than trying to create the balance.

In the police service, the balancing of the need is beginning to happen and the subsequent thoughts on how to agree what and how much to share information has started. There must be opportunities to achieve the same in the wider criminal justice arena.

So, in summary, I believe we will only achieve greater confidence in our information when we have balanced the need to share and use the information and, once we have achieved this, to agree the means by which we understand what we are sharing.

My subsequent articles will dwell on how we need to capitalise on a balanced need, and turn that in to a real deliverable by building and agreeing the means to share information.

Posted by Charles Hooper on September 14, 2008