Presence 2.0

Following a conversation with Avaya a few weeks ago, I just uploaded some notes on Presence 2.0 onto Slideshare. (You should be able to see this if you are viewing the blog directly, but it may not show up if you are viewing the feed, so you might have to click on the links.)

Presence 2.0 from Richard Veryard

Lessons from Zune

"Microsoft launches the Zune" reports Engadget this week.

There has been some discussion on the Internet (Kirk Biglione, Cory Doctorow, Bob Wyman, plus discussion on Digg) about the main feature apparently intended to differentiate the Zune from the iPod - the wireless share-with-a-friend feature.

• Is this feature compatible with copyright law, or with a Creative Commons licence?
• Is this feature compatible with a reasonably broad range of use-contexts?

Zune Insider (and Microsoft employee) Cesar Menendez reveals the thinking behind the design of this feature.

' "I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?" Good question. There currently isn't a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. . .'

Now I certainly don't want to join in the criticism of Microsoft based on one unguarded remark by a Microsoft employee, and I don't know whether the final Zune will work exactly as Cesar describes. What I do want to talk about here is the importance of differentiated behaviour.

What Microsoft's critics are demanding is that the copying/sharing function of the Zune ought to be differentiated according to several factors, including

• the original source (e.g. is this my own band recorded via old-fashioned microphones and mixed on my own computer, is it copied from a CD or downloaded from the internet)
• the presence of some copyright or creative commons licence
• the intentions of the copyright owner or licence-holder

What Cesar seems to be saying is that trusted information is not available to support this differentiation. Okay, something may be wrapped with a creative commons licence, but how do we know this can be trusted. Okay, you may have recorded this with your own microphone, but that doesn't prove you own the copyright. (Has your college lecturer given you permission to distribute his lectures?)

So why is this Microsoft's problem? If Microsoft has come up with a solution that suits most of the people most of the time, then everyone else can go hang. After all, it's not as if they got much better from Apple or Sony. (The Sony MiniDisc contained an early copy-prevention mechanism called SCMS, making the consumer-grade devices largely unsuitable for amateur music producers.)

Maybe it isn't Microsoft's problem. But there remains a significant value-deficit in some use-contexts. There might be a niche opportunity for some specialist provider, but this would presumably require some degree of interoperability. (Can the Zune receive material from third-party devices, or only from other Zunes?)

On this blog, and elsewhere, I have consistently supported differentiated (context-aware) services. I believe that differentiation is the right way (in an increasingly complex world) to deliver the greatest value to the greatest number of users, and I see loosely-coupled service architectures as the right way to configure differentiated services, to balance the (economic) needs of the provider with the (increasingly diverse) needs of the consumer.

In situations like these, differentiated service requires rich, reliable and ubiquitous data. In other words, network-centric.

Meanwhile, I take some comfort from Cesar's word "currently". There currently isn't a way - but let's hope they are working towards a sufficiently robust ontology, with decent (not just supplier-centric) trust, to support a fair degree of differentiation.

Some earlier posts about services and devices for recorded music:

• Shuffle (June 2005)
  
• Controlling Content (August 2005)
• Intrusion and Immersion (November 2005)

 

Service Competition

Seth Godin thinks there is a market for Calendar Aggregation.

"If each venue published their schedule as an RSS feed, it seems trivial to put this together. I know, I know, you're already working on it, but I wonder why no one has made the winner yet. This has 'natural monopoly' all over it."

This seems to highlight one of the problems of the service economy. There is a potentially valuable service. But its proper operation would require some investment in hardware and marketing. To justify this investment, you'd have to be convinced that this investment could be protected. But the service would be too easy to replicate, and there would be nothing to stop your users switching to rival services. So the opportunity falls in the crack between easy-and-cheap and expensive-and-difficult. 

At least the way Seth states it, this is not a Web 2.0 opportunity. Aggregation is merely a more sophisticated form of 'push' [see my post on The Return of Push] with no user-defined content or meaning. Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and others will pay serious money for good internet presence (think del.icio.us, flickr, myspace). But if all you do is build the best damn calendar aggregation website on the planet, you probably wouldn't own anything the big guys would ever want to buy. 

I had similar concerns last April about Luke's plan to aggregate logistics services. Luke has responded to my concerns here, and I wish him well, but it's not the kind of thing I'd like to invest in myself. 

I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but market opportunities often don't come to anything. The service economy doesn't always produce the services that people want - even when they are willing to pay for these services. This is a structural problem. It's why people in remote parts of some rich countries don't have access to decent services (think telecoms, cable, broadband) - because no supplier can justify the investment without getting a dominant market share and/or colluding with its competitors. Meanwhile people in the large cities are apparently spoiled for choice. 

Within large enterprises, structural problems like these are a matter for SOA governance. But the service economy is not confined within large enterprises, and these structural problems are pervasive. Simple answer in the next post. (Just kidding.)

 

Related posts: The Return of Push (July 2004), Straight-Through Processing (April 2005)

Coffee Shop

There are some interesting parallels - and important differences - between the businesses that emerged from the coffee shops of the past (see Wikipedia) and those that might emerge from the Wi-Fi enabled coffee shops of the present-day (discussed by Christopher Baus, Niall Kennedy, Om Malik, Stephen O'Grady and others).

What service does the modern coffee shop actually provide? Provide a place where you can fill yourself with caffeine, spend most of the day staring at a laptop, and perhaps meet some friends sometimes? (Apparently some coffee shops switch the broadband off from time, because this is the only way to force people to talk to each other.)

What service did Mr Lloyd provide in his famous coffee shop? Presence! People formed business relationships because they were in the same place at the same time - they didn't spend their whole time talking to people they already knew - let alone talking to people (via mobile phone or Skype) who weren't even there.

Mobile phone companies are surprisingly bad at presence. If I phone someone who happens to be in the same cafe, or the same train, the phone company would rather take my money for an unnecessary call, rather than give me the valuable information that the person I'm talking to is in the same cell. I have visions of technophiles Skyping one another across a crowded cafe, rather than having a proper conversation. Just like the worst kind of office.

But for those of us that aren't so good at striking up conversations with strangers, the technology of presence might help. Suppose the guy on the next table happens to know Stephen (detected via his address book) or reads Stephen's blog (detected by his subscribed feeds). Maybe that gives me an opening for a conversation I might not otherwise have had. I am sure I sit next to people on airplanes, never knowing what interests we have in common. Perhaps I should develop better conversation skills (or so my wife tells me) but in the meantime ...

Telecoms blogger Martin Geddes has been talking about the opportunities (as yet unrealized) from an understanding of conversation and presence, which I mentioned in my earlier post on Personalization and Presence. But these are also opportunities for the coffee shop. Forget LinkedIn, let's have EspressedIn.

Personalization and Presence

To continue the theme of context-aware services ...

In his post on Context-Awareness, Charlie Bess (EDS) has returned to Paul Miller's question - is this just advertising? Charlie has spend some time recently talking about attention management, and there is certainly some value in using context to target various forms of communication more accurately.

However there are many important forms of communication besides advertising. And there are other important forms of service provision, and many other ways in which services can be differentiated according to context.

Charlie himself has blogged about Personalization and Personal Experience. Neither of these are possible without the service providers having access to some elements of the customer's context.

And my favourite telecoms blogger, Martin Geddes, has just posted some great examples of context-awareness on the Telepocalypse blog. In Disappearing Telephony, he talks about the transient context (presence) of a conversation taking place within one's social network. And in They Told Me, he describes IVR systems that are capable of some interesting forms of personalization. Martin says that the IVR vendor TellMe aims to "optimise to meet user goals, not sub-tasks". I shall be very interested to see how this is done.

Collaboration and Context

In responding to my latest post on Context-Aware Services, Paul Miller reiterates the concept of Collaborative Context-Aware Services, so let me expand on the collaborative aspects.

I'm going to stick with the library example, but I think these concepts have a lot of relevance for many other kinds of service organization.

One of the most important aspect of context is purpose. In the case of a library, what is the reader's purpose for browsing, borrowing and reading a particular book at a particular time? Is this purpose entirely private to the individual reader, or does it emerge from some semi-public activity?

In the case of a university library, the presumption is that most library use is somehow related to the broader purposes and activities of the university - teaching and research. When a student borrows a book, there is probably a tutor or lecturer in the background providing seminar assignments and/or reading lists. There is generally some implicit collaboration, but this collaboration may not be visible to the library.

Let's suppose that in the first week of February, sixty students suddenly want to read Kant. The university library possesses twenty copies of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, so most of the students will have to wait or share. By the end of February, nobody wants to read Kant any more, and the twenty copies sit idle on the shelf until the same time the following year.

In a rational organization, the library would politely suggest to the philosophy lecturers that the teaching might possibly be reorganized, so that scarce library resources might be used more efficiently. Is it really necessary for all the students to read all the books in the same order? But universities are not rational organizations, and such a suggestion would probably be regarded as an outrageous invasion of academic independence.

We should not expect the library to dictate or constrain how philosophy should be taught to the undergraduates. But this is exactly what happens if there is a shortage of copies of Kant's Critique, since this shortage will have an inevitable effect on the learning outcomes of some of the students. However, if it is possible to negotiate an appropriate collaboration between the library and the teaching staff, then it may be possible to improve the learning outcomes of each student, as well as improving the economics of the library operation.

Since I don't wish to say anything unkind about the likelihood of effective collaboration in a university setting, let me talk about a town library instead. Even if we assume that most fiction is borrowed for the purposes of private enjoyment, a library generally contains large quantities of non-fiction material, which may be borrowed in some practical collaborative context.

Suppose thirty adult residents of Smartchester go into the Smartchester library and ask for elementary Ukranian phrase books. Would it not be reasonable for the Smartchester librarian to investigate the context in which so many people want to learn Ukranian at the same time? Are there perhaps some civic exchange visits planned for later in the year? Is a local travel agent offering a special deal, or is there an enterpreneur selling Ukranian property? How many of the people asking for Ukranian already speak Polish or Russian? Does it make sense for the library to acquire a large quantity of Ukranian phrase books, or is there a better way of satisfying the temporary demand (perhaps jointly with some other organization)?

In my previous post, I said I don't want libraries to sell nappies (or diapers). But I might be happy for the library to help organize language courses, because this seems a reasonable extension of the library's existing services.

---

From an analytical point of view, the problem starts with the false idea that an organization is a stand-alone enterprise, that can be described by a free-standing enterprise model. But a free-standing enterprise model of a library doesn't make complete sense, because there is no source of purpose or demand. These elements only come into the picture when we draw enterprise models that show the collaborative context. The crucial question for the service-oriented library is then the interoperability between the library, its users, and other organizations.

Context-Aware Services 3

Paul Miller replies to my second post on Context-Aware services, and asks if this just means advertising. That's a good question, because most of the examples look that way.

My view of context-aware services is that any aspect of a service may be differentiated according to context. The service I get from a supermarket is fairly simple, so perhaps there isn't much scope for variation. But each customer may get a different set of special offers, and this can be generated dynamically, according to the contents of the shopping basket or the path through the store. A customer with a known taste for raw eggs, or a history of returning stale products, may get a warning that a selected product is close to expiry. But is that all? If all we're talking about is commodity advertising, then there is possibly no difference between selling soap powder and lending books.

But I'm not particularly interested in libraries selling me nappies, because I don't think that's their job. I'm interested in ways that the library can serve me better (not just target me better) through an awareness of my context. This is intrinsic differentiation - in other words, differentiation that is relevant to the service in hand.

For example, my son has just done a school project on a mathematician of his choice. He chose Florence Nightingale (the inventor of the pie chart). If he had gone into a library for help, would he have been offered a scholarly history of the Crimean War or an academic thesis about mortality statistics and their graphical representation?

Can a computerized system offer anything approaching the sensitivity and common sense that we still expect from a human librarian? At one extreme, there are standardized search systems, which will give you exactly the same answer whether you are a schoolchild or a BBC researcher or an LSE postgraduate. At the other extreme, there may be inflexible classification systems that assume that a child is only interested in reading books that are designated suitable for that age group.

One of the most important aspects of context is how the service fits into what the consumer (the customer, the library reader) is trying to do. Do I have an essay or article or thesis to write, and when is it due? Am I reading Nietzsche because I am learning German, or because I am learning existentialism (or both)? Am I reading Bede because I am studying history or historians (or both)? Does it make sense to read Locke without also reading Hume? What stage of my learning have I reached? Do I need an edition with glossary, with scholarly notes, with English translation facing? What is my preferred style of learning, my preferred style of researching a topic? Surely questions like these are relevant to improving the service offered by a library to a particular reader?

Ultimately, context-awareness takes us down a path of embracing user diversity. Not just user semantics, but user pragmatics. How much of the reader's context can the library possibly deal with, and what other service providers might the library collaborate with? There are some seriously complex models here.

I see context-awareness as a very significant challenge - introducing modes of complexity that most organizations have never dealt with before - but with the potential reward of offering massive improvements to the experienced quality of service.

Context-Aware Services 2

Paul Miller (Talis) has posted another interesting example of context-aware services.

Take an RSS-driven application in a shop. Take an RFID tagged item of shopping in your basket or trolley. Add the two together, along with a little data off the store loyalty card in your pocket. Mix, and have the screen (at the checkout) remind you that the last time you bought that product, you also bought a bottle of Chardonnay, and it's on offer at the moment one aisle to your left. And because it's all built on open standards, the same application can target your phone, your computer, and more.

Of course, this raises a lot of the architectural issues raised in my previous post, including privacy. (I might not want the person behind me to know about my Chardonnay habit.) Paul asks whether the retail sector debates this stuff intensely, or whether it just goes ahead and does it. I suspect the latter.

Where this stuff gets interesting is when the process becomes truly open and collaborative. Does the supermarket have exclusive control over the messages that are displayed on its screens, or do we start to see something more radical? To what extent does technological openness entail business openness?

Context-Aware Services

Barry Briggs (Microsoft) and Ali Arsanjani (IBM) have both offered interesting improvements on the standard example of location-based services

• your phone that rings when you walk past a restaurant
• AND it is lunchtime
• AND this restaurant has submitted the highest bid for the marketing opportunity
  

But context can get much more personalized than this.

Of course my cellphone knows my current location and the generic time "near lunchtime". (Aside to Ali: I never said it didn't.) But there's a lot of other relevant stuff my cellphone could usefully know. For example, it may know what time I usually have lunch and what I had for lunch yesterday (easy if it links to the way I paid for that lunch); it may know which friends or colleagues I'm with (thanks Bluetooth); and it may know that I've just got off a plane from Hong Kong (affecting both my body clock and my food preferences).

And of course my cellphone has detailed knowledge of my social network. Like a discreet servant, it overhears the word "lunch" in a conversation with my brother-in-law and makes a contextually relevant suggestion.

Context-awareness is not fixed - we should always be open to learning (and exploiting) new fragments of context. When designing context-aware services, we generally try to decouple the context-awareness from the underlying capability, in order to maintain adaptability and openness. (This follows the architectural principle of putting elements with a different pace of change into separate layers.)

Once you arrive in the restaurant, what happens to the context that was used to tempt you inside? Perhaps the waiter or the cook also have some access to this context, which helps them match the experience to your expectations - for example, whether you are in a hurry, whether it's a special occasion, or whatever. (This is another reason for decoupling the context - it may then be reused by other services.)

What about privacy? You might want the waiter to know it's your birthday, but not how old you are. This means we must decouple context from identity, and also decompose context into an appropriate level of granularity. My phone publishes only those aspects of context that I permit; and the restaurant subscribes only to those aspects of context to which it can meaningfully respond.

So this simple example has a lot of architectural implications for SOA.

Technorati Tags: context presence SOA service-oriented

SOA 2.0 Reaction

Not surprisingly, my proposal for SOA 2.0 has received a mixed reaction. So far I have received email from Iona, Microsoft (x3) and SAP, and I have detected relevant bloggery from John Hagel and Bill Eisenhauer. Simon Bisson offers an alternative proposal: Computing 5.0.

Let's start with the criticism first. (Some of this is drawn from emails, but I won't attribute specific remarks to specific people because I don't have permission.)

• Questions about the central importance of SOA. If you regard SOA as merely a (technical) means to a (business) end, then making a technological fetish of SOA 2.0 maybe doesn't make much sense. Some ongoing reservations about the nature of Architecture.

• Distaste for anything called 2.0. Mark Nottingham (BEA) chortles quietly in his blog.

• Suggestions that what I'm calling SOA 2.0 is already contained within SOA - this is what SOA is all about anyway. (See my earlier post on Ambiguity.)

I agree that there are some problems with calling anything 2.0, and I certainly don't agree with all the Web 2.0 hype. One of the main problems is the apparent implication than SOA 2.0 is some kind of product, a stepwise improvement on some other product called SOA 1.0. But the distinction I'm trying to make is not between two kinds of technological product but between two kinds of technological practice. SOA 1.0 represents a limiting (and to my mind relatively uninteresting) way of using SOA, while SOA 2.0 represents a bigger vision of what SOA makes possible.

Even if SOA is merely a means to an end, I have a strong preference for SOA 2.0, and I think I can construct ethical/social as well as economic/technological arguments for this preference. I don't have a naive belief that technology magically makes people's lives better, but I am cautiously optimistic about the potential for using SOA in ways that positively benefit people and organizations and improve the user experience. I have articulated one aspect of this in my post on Self-Service.

One of the problems of describing evolution is that the steps often seem artificial - the historian's problem of converting a continuous narrative into separate chapters / episodes. So of course SOA 2.0 may seem artificial. When I describe a management roadmap or maturity model for achieving the full potential of SOA, I can describe several smaller steps. But although such models are useful for planning and managing, they are not so good for communicating the vision.

So here is my appeal to SOA experts - vendors, users, consultants and industry analysts. Let us acknowledge that there is a great deal of useful technical work going on, but admit that much of this work lacks the elements that make SOA genuinely worthwhile and exciting.

So what are these elements? Here are some of the echoes from the emails I have received. (Obviously this doesn't represent a complete set of anything,)

• Yin/Yang - service consumption/service delivery, inside/outside 

• Collaborative - user-centric, federated identity, federated data 

• Pervasive - service-oriented, pervasive workflow 

• Presence - integrated user experience, operationally aware

• Out of Control, Emergent - uncontrolled reuse (in other words, reuse that is not constrained by the preconceptions of the provider, permitting hacking)

• Accountable - model-based, trustworthy

Network-Centric Presence

Since Microsoft acquired Groove, and especially following some mysterious hints from ex-Groover and network-centric blogger Michael Helfrich, I've been wondering what Michael was up to. His latest blog posting on Network-Centric Products reveals that he is now with Jabber.

At first sight, Jabber appears to be merely selling a set of technical communication products for Enterprise Instant Messaging. There is a lot of technical material available via the Jabber Software Foundation. See also this Jabber Presence world map.

But now I am aware of Michael's involvement in Jabber, so this prompts me to take a closer interest in new opportunities created by the technology of presence. Jabber defines presence as "the rich suite of changing characteristics that describe the state of a user, device, or application".

I see this notion of presence as highly relevant to service-oriented architecture (SOA). In my work with the CBDI Forum, I have talked a lot about Differentiated Service - services whose operating characteristics vary according to a range of context indicators. I have argued that this is a key principle for achieving the SOA goal of network-centric adaptability.

Michael will be present (presenting? establishing a presence?) at the 4th Annual Government Symposium on Information Sharing and Homeland Security and his blog focuses on asymmetry and network-centricity in mitigating security threats.

As I have written in this blog and elsewhere, I see asymmetry and network-centricity as key issues for business strategy and business/IT alignment, and I think the commercial world can learn a lot from some of the latest military thinking. I look forward to seeing how Michael's next-generation product can be used to support business SOA (business-oriented architecture? architecture-oriented business?).

Technorati Tags asymmetry Jabber network-centric SOA service-oriented

Nothing Causes Action

In a posting entitled Alice in Wonderland, Hugo Rodger-Brown discussed the difficulties within BizTalk of having an alert triggered by the non-arrival of a message. He explains how he has to turn BizTalk inside out to cope with this.

Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago that Nothing can be a cause. "The letter which you do not write can get an angry reply, and the income tax form which you do not fill in can trigger the Inland Revenue boys into energetic action." (I quoted this in my 1992 book in Information Modelling.)

So the non-arrival of a message may convey significant information. (As Bateson puts it, it is "a difference that makes a difference".) Exception actions may be triggered by positive messages or negative ones. In a perfect world, there may sometimes be pure symmetry between the presence of a message saying X and the absence of a message saying not-X.

Example: If my wife is delayed, I may need to collect the children from school. Does it matter whether my action is triggered by a phone call saying she's been delayed, or is inhibited by a phone call saying she's on time – as long as we agree which way round it is?

But what if there is a problem with her mobile phone – perhaps she is out of range or out of battery? A system that relies on positive messages is more robust than one that relies on the absence of messages – although they may be logically, functionally equivalent.

Many business processes rely, at least in part, on unreliable communications (email, voicemail, fax, leaving messages with whoever answers the phone). Business processes generally build in practical safeguards against faulty communication – acknowledging, confirming, chasing, expediting, recorded delivery. These safeguards complicate the workflow – but they are generally thought necessary for business-critical systems.

Will technology one day give us communication that is reliable enough to abandon these complicated safeguards? I don't think so. But we may perhaps look to technology to support these safeguards more efficiently and consistently. This already happens in the world of safety-critical, fault-tolerant and real-time systems, which are generally based on positive messages.

Update (July 2005)

Over on the Usable Security blog, Ka-Ping Yee talks about the Simon Says problem.

A Simon Says problem occurs when the safe course of action requires the user to respond to the absence of a stimulus. ... The “Simon Says” game and login-spoofing attacks both exploit an especially severe form of the Simon Says problem, in which the user is expected to respond to the absence of something with the absence of an action. Such a situation is doubly troublesome for humans.

Technorati Tags: Bateson Biztalk message-oriented security service-oriented