Month: September 2006

I haven’t really thought this through, but then why blog about certainties? That’s how you get dogmatic.
My first thoughts about this date back to Google Maps and Google Earth. All I was doing then was luxuriating in the sheer power of the visualisation tools, and beginning to think that I wanted something similar for enterprise architecture.

This wasn’t some massive theoretical exercise for enterprise architectures in general. I wanted to use tools like those stated above very specifically. Use them to visualise (and make visual for others) the systems and applications architecture for a specific enterprise.

Over the last year or so, these thoughts have grown wild and sprouted all over the place. I liked what I saw in people tagging things on Google Earth. I became fascinated with what was happening in Second Life, and in virtual worlds in general.

Always believing that virtual worlds were about learning, about teaching, about applying what was learnt. About finding better ways of doing things.
I began to see the entire applications and infrastructure landscape for a given enterprise as a location on Second Life.  I began to see similar locations for competitors and for collaborators, for the market participants and the supply chain partners. Then I saw locations for those things that were truly commoditised, so commoditised that they could be represented as (guess what?) common land on Second Life. Common land with no fencing, no barriers, nothing in the way.

• [An aside. I just love the etymology of “by hook or by crook”. The phrase does not really translate to “by fair means or foul”, it should be rendered as “by legal means only”. The origin of the phrase relates to access to firewood on common land. You could legitimately chop down (for firewood) any branches of a tree (on common land) which you could pull down using a shepherd’s hook or crook.]

Where was I? Oh yes, Second Life and its use in enterprises, to visualise, monitor, manage, repair and sustain the enterprise applications landscape.

I was still missing something, something that needed to look like an Instant Messaging “channel” within the enterprise, where people could discuss applications issues, and from where they could, if needed, “teleport” themselves to the application in question.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw this. BlogHUD. Take a look, see what you think. And let me know. Ideas are for free where I come from. If you want to do something about it, go ahead. Just let me know someday.
In the meantime I shall continue dreaming.

….Forum, that is. Not any more.
Esther confirms what the market has been whispering.

I hadn’t been able too make that many PC Forums, despite having booked for quite a few. It wasn’t just a conference, it was a rite of passage for the industry. So farewell PC Forum; and a big thank you from me to Esther and the team.

Some of you may have seen Chris Messina’s recent post about conferences and gender diversity; others may have followed the hullabaloo about Office 2.0 in a similar context. Now I don’t believe that it was ever done from a viewpoint of political correctness or anything as orchestrated as that, but it’s worth taking a look at the speaker lists at past PC Forums. I think it’s a worthwhile soft indicator as to how things changed over the years, in terms of real diversity in all kinds of things: age, culture, gender, discipline, perspective, you-name-it.

One thing I will be doing next year is attending Flight School, especially now that I know the dates (June 21 and 22). I’ve been lucky enough to make the first two. Why? I don’t know how to fly. I don’t make enough money to rent a plane, much less buy one. In fact I don’t even know how to drive. So why would I go to Flight School?

Simple. Passenger aviation shares a number of characteristics with other markets, characteristics that make it a very interesting petri dish:

• A fundamentally bankrupt business model
• A model architected on hub and spoke rather than distributed
• An oligopolistic market
• The potential for significant impact on environmental issues
• Regulatory overflows and conflicts all over the place
• State interventions and protections all over the place
• Pretend-competition as a result
• Outdated concepts of information technology and its value
• Tired and frustrated customers held to ransom

The list is the same for many other industry segments or markets. Financial services. Telecommunications. Healthcare. Aspects of welfare and education. Even government.

But there is hope, as we learn more about P2P models, more effective forms of communications, more affordable infrastructures, safer ways of doing things, better ways of doing things.

There is hope, as we find that this time around, everyone is involved. Almost everyone. As with any other market the elephant that isn’t in the room is the incumbent.

There is hope, as we find that this time around, issues are global, as are their solutions.

So I will be at Flight School. To learn about many markets.

Records of customer “past” behaviour appear to hold some value. If this was not the case, why would anyone spend money “mining” the information?

Records of future customer intention appear to hold some value. If this was not the case, why would anyone spend money on “market research”?

Identity is for sure a personal thing. If this was not the case, why would we speak of identity theft?

Privacy and confidentiality are very deeply rooted in trust. Trust that is conferred, sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, by the individual. Who has a personal identity.
Modern web applications create value out of customer information. Granted, some of the value comes from the aggregation. Some of the value comes from the connections. But some of the value still comes from individual customer history and preferences and intentions and activity.
So.

How long before this value gets converted into a price? How long before this value can be traded? How long before individuals trade their information?
David Bowie only sold his back catalogue.

Maybe one day Generation M will be trading their back- and front- catalogues.

As we look deeper into identity and privacy and confidentiality and value creation from customer behaviour (both past and present) we may need to think about this as well.

Sometimes “Follow the money” is a good way to find solutions to difficult problems.

Just a thought.

Let me take a random list of events, some current, some not-so-current:

• Jason Fortuny and his nefarious Craigslist “experiment”
• Second Life being hacked
• Alarms about Bebo and MySpace
• Pushback against Facebook facilities
• Leaking of Google searches
• Confidential records being leaked accidentally
• “Pretexting” to hack into confidential records
• Embarrassing e-mail leaks

Lots of leaks. Lots of leaks that affect Web 2.0 companies. Lots of worried people. What is it they have in common? [No, please do not start a conspiracy theory for all this; if you feel like that, then please take your Grassy Knoll and park it in the Mare Tranquillitatis….]

Trust. Yes, again, it’s all about trust.

People are comfortable with sharing all kinds of things, via social networking sites, via Flickr, via blogs, via last.fm, via LibraryThing, whatever. They go further, they share feed lists using OPML, share sites they visit via StumbleUpon, the list goes on and on.

So what’s the big deal? Why do people get so upset with the leaks mentioned above? It’s not as simple as “people don’t mind good things coming out, they don’t like bad things coming out”. For example, “Black” credit information has been shared for much longer than “white”. So what is it?
Trust.

It appears to me that sharing of digital information takes place when four trust questions are answered correctly:

• Did the person or group tell you that the information was being collected?
• Did you agree to it being collected?
• Did they promise you not to share it with others?
• Do you have recourse if they fail to keep that promise?

The questions and answer need not be explicit, but they must, at the very least, be tacitly agreed.

This trust, even if based on tacit agreements, is very specific. It is between a person and a group. That group may be a group consisting of one person. A small community. A firm. Whatever.

Which brings me to my musing. Two questions:
If information is power, and personal information has value, then you can aggregate this information to get greater value. Can such aggregated information reach monopoly levels, become an antitrust issue? Can we start expecting antitrust rulings based on “information power share”?

This information, with all its power, gains that power at least partially as a result of a tacit agreement between the information donor and the information aggregator. How does this affect M&A? Take a hypothetical example. Say I’m comfortable with sharing purchase patterns with Company A but not with Company B. So I have an agreement with Company A but not with B. Then B tries to buy A. Do I get my information back? What happens?

If we take this to its logical conclusion, then take a look at government departments. We share information with them, allow them to collect it and store it and do various unspeakable things to it, on a tacit agreement. No unauthorised sharing. Which is why people like EFF and ACLU are so up in arms with what happens with, say, medical and psychiatric records.

I can see only one way out. But I want to see what others think.

There’s a fascinating article by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the latest New Scientist. Yes, of course it’s hidden behind a paywall, what did you expect? Here’s the stub.

I quote from the article:

• Locking up products with patents is an unfair and ineffective way to reward innovation.
• There is a growing sentiment that something is wrong with the system governing intellectual property.
• Recent years have seen a strengthening of IP rights…..The changes have been promoted especially by the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries, and by some in the software industry….
• …[some] patents take what was previously in the public domain and “privatise” it — what IP lawyers called the new “enclosure movement”.

And finally:

• In any system, someone has to pay for research. In the current system, those unfortunate enough to have the disease are forced to pay the price, whether they are rich or poor. And that means the very poor in the developing world are condemned to death.

I think we need something different. Whether it’s a new form of tax, a voluntary donation or a prize, or even all three, we have to stop this madness. It is unenforceable, wastes resources, gives IT a bad name because of all the unintended consequences of putting in poorly-thought-out DRM. And in some cases it is immoral.