Category: Four pillars

Four Pillars: Preparing the Foundations: On opensource

As part of Foundation and Empire, I have already signalled that I wanted to look at the impact of opensource on the IT construction industry (something Doc Searls covered in detail a few years ago in Release 1; I hope to link to it sometime tomorrow).

Humour me and come along for a slight detour.

In a recent post, I tried to connect up TheManInTheDoorway with Ed Byrne and Hugh Macleod, emphasising the need to de-commoditise. And today I came across this in Aqualung. DefDiff or the Definition-Differentiation model.

Now the debate really intrigues me, and will influence how I write the Foundation and Empire piece. Because there’s something I don’t understand. That’s when I can learn something.

Why do we need a model that helps us throw away internally built components and replace them with externally sourced ones, as a means of moving from differentiation to commodity? Why should we worry about the “legacy” constraints of existing APIs and formats?

I’m not questioning the process. I’m questioning the need for a new model. I think we already have a valid model.

It’s called opensource. I have always believed that opensource should never be about deep differentiation, in fact that opensource works best when the problem being solved is shared by many. When the problem is a commodity.

Maybe it’s me that’s warped. I want to commoditise the problem. Then the solution must of course be commoditised.

Once people realise that opensource is the new outsource (yes I know I’ve said it before, but so what?) then this becomes easier to grasp. [An aside: Wouldn’t you just love to go to your boss and say you’ve outsourced 50,000 part-time jobs s/he never knew you had?]

Platform and device and UI/browser independence come as standard when you buy opensource. So you don’t worry about legacy conflict, provided you have the right principles in place in the first place.

You know, sometimes I think we can rewrite enterprise IT strategy to just one line:

Make it demonstrably easier to consume opensource day after day.

You get the ability to throw away the commoditised. You get to lower maintenance costs on the soon-to-be-commoditised. If someone else gets there first your costs of acquisition are lower. You can keep concentrating on that which differentiates you.

Which leads to an interesting corollary: Only keep the problems that are unique to you. That’s a whole new subject in itself.

More later. In the meantime, Malc, Ric, thanks for taking me somewhere else in my quest for the Foundations.

Opinions, comments and flames welcome. Almost requested.

Four Pillars: More on search

I was pretty upset at not being able to make PC Forum this year (conflicting priorities at work). Nevertheless I kept in touch with it by reading what I could in Release 1 and in Rafe  Needleman. [Esther: I’ll still try and make Flight School on my own time and money, it was great last year].

Take a look at this from Rafe. Google meets Technorati and Page You Made. To me this makes a fundamental point about the Four Pillars. They are nothing more than pillars, they are tomorrow’s infrastructure. But co-created and collaboratively-filtered dynamic adaptive infrastructure is hard to get your head around. So I’m building it piece by piece.

Continue reading “Four Pillars: More on search”

The downside of posting as often as I do

…is that people who update their aggregator subscriptions only once every three or four days (which is likely) get incoherent posts from me (which is less than desirable from my perspective). Apparently I can make this problem better or worse by changing settings my end. Thanks to Charlie Wood for setting me right on this. I have taken up the size of my feedfeeder to 50.

Four Pillars: Foundation Trilogy versus edgeperspectives pushpull

When I alerted people to my plans for a Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation approach to underpin the Four Pillars, I got a ping back from John Hagel reminding me about the work that he had done with JSB in this respect, following on from The Only Sustainable Edge. I was privileged to hear them speak about it at Supernova last year. And yes Kevin, I very much hope to be there this year.

You can find the reference to the relevant working papers here. Thanks John.

I took up John’s suggestion and had another look at the model they propose, to try and see what similarities and differences there are with my model.

Here’s what I think. The edgeperspectives model has seven layers grouped into three classes of layer, as listed below:

Infrastructure layers establish connections

and comprise (1) communications and logistics networks and (2) service grids

Performance fabric layers make existing resources more available

and comprise (3) technology enablers and (4) social networks

Creativity framework layers create new resources

and comprise (5) aggregation networks (6) process networks and (7) networks of creation

Okay, how does that look in the context of what I intended?

First, my Foundation piece. Largely covering Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder and whoever, bits and pipes and tin and wire. Consolidation, Virtualisation and Service Orientation against a backdrop of commoditisation. You could say that to all intents and purposes, this is the Hagel and Seely Brown Infrastructure Layers coupled with their Performance Fabric Layers. Yes there are differences, but they are not material, the idea was to submerge all the commodity bits into that Foundation.

For the sake of argument I am going to posit that the first 3 layers of the JH/JSB model are part of what I meant by Foundation, but for some reason (and I need to think about this, see my Empire notes) I explicitly did not want to see social networks in Foundation.

My Foundation and Empire piece in its real sense does not appear to be covered in the JH/JSB model, maybe I’ve missed it. The Empire piece was tongue-in-cheek and a critical aspect for me. The Empire is like any other Empire, some sort of faded elegance riding into the sunset. I try and place the opensource participants, the distros, the stacks and so on in context; show how they have moved the erstwhile vendors both up as well as down the stack, there was no middle any more; show how all this moved the software players even further up the stack, and how large-scale consulting got squeezed out as a result. And what the “in-house” IT department then had to do, from outsource to opensource.

But all that was the Empire piece. The Foundation in Foundation and Empire was authentication and permissioning and identity and security and trust. I want to bring out the interplay between this Foundation and the Empire, how we create our accidental walled gardens, the manipulated “customer choice” walled gardens and why we need to be careful. Reminds me of people taking lard as part of a calorie-controlled diet.

Second Foundation then builds this out, and explains why we need to design things that are independent of device and connect and sensitive to mobility and form factor, why we need platform independence and vendor-neutral stances, how the opensource movement and Generation M and community standards help us get there.

Still no social networks in my model.

Then I move on to Four Pillars, covering syndication, search, fulfilment and collaboration/conversation. My gut feel is that this is where I bring in the social networks that JH/JSB had at a prior layer, and this is also where my Four Pillars are broadly anomalous with their Creativity Framework Layers.

But that which is created and co-created as a result of the foundations and the pillars I placed floating atop the pillars, with the requisite Wren six inch gap. And again I don’t know how this matches with the JH/JSB model.

So there are similarities and there are differences. There are a few things stretched across the edges between layers and models. A few things introduced. Opensource ideas.

This is still early days, I’m happy to get all this trashed and reworked, but given John’s comment I thought I might as well try.

After all, if I can’t try co-creation on this subject I might as well pack up and go home.

More later. Or should I say And so to Bed.

When they were asked what they wanted, the people said �Uglier horses�!

Ugly sells? Take a look at this post from Commission Networks (I couldn’t be bothered trying to find out who the person was, the site was too ugly for me and I couldn’t find an “about”). But it made me think.

I wonder if the Henry Ford “faster horses” statements can be made to apply to design. Is it possible that ugly sites are more attractive to the generations before M, because that’s what they’re used to? Brought up on green-screens and blue-screens-of-death anything looks beautiful. That generation loves looking at Excel screens on a BlackBerry, remember?

I wonder if I can extend that supposition. If a site is NOT ugly and yet IS popular, can I assume that it is used by Generation M?

Just thinking.