Making the World More Open and Connected

Last year, Facebook changed its mission statement, from "Making The World More Open And Connected" to "Bringing The World Closer Together".

As I said in September 2005, interoperability is not just a technical question but a sociotechnical question (involving people, processes and organizations). (Some of us were writing about "open and connected" before Facebook existed.) But geeks often start with the technical interface, or what is sometimes called an API.

For many years, Facebook had an API that allowed developers to snoop on friends' data: this was shut down in April 2015. As Constine reported at the time, this was not just because the API was "kind of shady" but also to "deny developers the ability to build apps ... that could compete with Facebook’s own products". Sandy Paralikas (himself a former Facebook executive) made a similar point (as reported by Paul Lewis): Facebook executives were nervous about the commercial value of data being passed to other companies, and worried that the large app developers could be building their own social graphs.

In other words, the decision was not motivated by concern for user privacy but by the preservation of Facebook's hegemony.

When Tim Berners-Lee first talked about the Giant Global Graph in 2007, it seemed such a good idea. When Facebook launched the Open Graph in 2010, this was billed as "a taste of the future where everything can be more personalized". Like!

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Philip Boxer and Richard Veryard, Taking Governance to the Edge (Microsoft Architecture Journal, August 2006)

Josh Constine, Facebook Is Shutting Down Its API For Giving Your Friends’ Data To Apps (TechCrunch, 28 April 2015)

Josh Constine and Frederic Lardinois, Everything Facebook Launched At f8 And Why (TechCrunch, 2 May 2014)

John Lanchester, You Are the Product (London Review of Books, 17 August 2017)

Paul Lewis, 'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine (Guardian, 20 March 2018)

Caroline McCarthy, Facebook F8: One graph to rule them all (CNet, 21 April 2010)

Sandy Parakilas, We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself (New York Times, 19 November 2017)

Wikipedia: Giant Global Graph, Open API,


Related Posts SOA Stupidity (September 2005), Social Networking as Reuse (November 2007), Security is Downstream from Strategy (March 2018), Connectivity Hunger (June 2018)

Right to Repair

One of the interesting dynamics of the service economy lies in the dialectic opposition between open and proprietary. I have mentioned some useful conceptual models in previous posts: Amin and Cohendet have proposed a model that classifies capabilities/services according to the dimensions of knowledge intensity and trust; meanwhile, Max Boisot's iSpace model traces the dynamics of knowledge from proprietary to open.

In my post on the New Economics of Manufacturing (Nov 2015), I described some of the economic forces behind the shift away from manufacturing products (including spare parts) and towards services.

Instead of trying to sell you overpriced tyres, the car manufacturer must make sure that only its accredited partners have the software to balance the wheels properly. In other words, not just architecting the product or even the process, but architecting the whole ecosystem.

But consumers (and regulators) are fighting back. Car owners in the USA have already won the right to repair, and now the farmers of Nebraska are now fighting a similar battle against the tractor manufacturers. True openness would force the manufacturers to publish the repair manuals as well as the interfaces, and allow independent repair shops and knowledgeable consumers to repair their own equipment without relying upon some dodgy download or counterfeit component.

This matches the Boisot model of stuff flowing from the proprietary world into the open world. I'm sure there will be more examples of this to come ...

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Richard Chirgwin, European MPs push for right to repair rules (The Register, 6 Jul 2017)

Jason Koebler, Five States Are Considering Bills to Legalize the 'Right to Repair' Electronics (Motherboard 23 Jan 2017)

Jason Koebler, Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware (Motherboard, 21 March 2017)

Gabe Nelson, Automakers agree to 'right to repair' deal (Automotive News, 25 January 2014)

Olivia Solon, A right to repair: why Nebraska farmers are taking on John Deere and Apple (Guardian, 6 March 2017)


Related posts

Knowledge and Culture (April 2006)
Tesco outsources core eCommerce (March 2009)
Ecosystem SOA (October 2009)
The New Economics of Manufacturing (November 2015)


Link added 18 July 2017

Boundaryless Information Flow

@theopengroup describes itself as "a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium, whose vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ will enable access to integrated information, within and among enterprises, based on open standards and global interoperability". But what exactly is Boundaryless Information Flow?

I had always seen this slogan as representing a continuation of the "open" thinking that inspired the Open Systems movement. The Open Group itself was a merger between the Open Software Foundation and X/Open, and was originally focused on UNIX. [Wikipedia: The Open Group]

This agenda was presented in numerous articles in the early 2000s. See for example these articles by Allen Brown, president of the Open Group (Oct 2002, Dec 2003).

But nowadays, a lot of the activity of The Open Group is now focused on enterprise architecture and TOGAF. Perhaps as a consequence of this, much the emphasis of recent materials appears to be on information flow and interoperability inside a single organization.

Boundaryless Information Flow, a shorthand representation of “access to integrated information to support business process improvements” represents a desired state of an enterprise’s infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the organization. [Open Group Vision and Mission, retrieved 20 June 2011]

A Boundaryless Organization needs Boundaryless Information Flow and the systems currently supporting the business processes present obstacles because they contain multiple stovepipe point solutions where information is not currently shared – that is there is a lack of integrated information. [Open Group FAQ, retrieved 20 June 2011]

It seemed to me that the TOGAF folk are largely focused on internal information sharing (what I call endo-interoperability). So I contacted Allen Brown to check whether this implied that the original mission of the Open Group had been watered down, and whether the Open Group had any other initiatives devoted to open exchanges between organizations and across ecosystems (exo-interoperability). Allen assured me that the original mission remained in force, and emphasized that the term "enterprise" should be understood to refer to the extended enterprise and not just the traditional organization.
 
In 1995, Ron Ashkenas and others published a book called The Boundaryless Organization, based on work done with Jack Welch at General Electric. According to some sources, the term was coined by Welch. See review by Barbara Noble (Strategy+Business, April 1996).

But what's wrong with boundaries anyway, and should we take the rhetoric of boundarylessness literally? Undoubtedly, many existing boundaries are dysfunctional and create inefficient, ineffective and error-prone processes, but that doesn't mean that all boundaries are necessarily bad. Apparently, even Jack Welch didn't think that boundarylessness implied a complete absence of boundaries, merely that the boundaries needed to be porous. In other words, managed interfaces.

But just think about it. If all the boundaries are removed or porous, then the (extended) enterprise or ecosystem becomes like a giant sponge, in which all information permeates the whole. Some people may think that's a good idea, but it's not what I'd call loose coupling.

In my 2001 book on the Component-Based Business, I explained the importance of (non-porous) boundaries in loosely coupled enterprises and ecosystems, and outlined some of the design and management principles for managing boundaries between autonomous and robustly bounded chunks of business capability (which I called business components). My work was influenced by organizational theorists such as Larry Hirschhorn and Karl Weick, as well as earlier work by Lawrence and Lorsch.

The relationship between boundaries and loose coupling is an important one. I don't think anyone is saying that a business component is as rigorously encapsulated as a software component, but an autonomous business component needs to have some ability to cut itself off from its environment. Concepts such as information hiding, knowledge hiding, specialization, separation of concerns and division of responsibilities all imply some degree of closure rather than total openness.

How many people understand the implications of this? Perhaps I need to publish a new edition of my book.

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Philip Boxer, Leading Organizations without Boundaries (Organizational and Social Dynamics 14/1, 2014)

Loizos Heracleous, Boundaries in the study of organization (Human Relations 57/1, 2004)

Larry Hirschhorn and Thomas Gilmore, The New Boundaries of the “Boundaryless” Company (HBR May–June 1992)

I spoke on Boundaryless Customer Engagement at the Open Group conference in October 2015. See Autumn Events 2015 for summary and link to slides.


references added 15 Feb 2016

Types of Openness

Notions of openness can be divided into those that focus on technological openness, those that focus on organizational/management openness, and those that focus on market openness.

Technological openness	Allowing the use of components from various suppliers in the design and development of computer systems, using common standards to help achieve significant economic benefits. Includes portability, interconnection, interoperability and distributability.
Organizational or management openness	Open-ended and incremental systems. Continual evolution and adaptation. Absence of barriers. Possibility of surprise.
Market openness	Level playing field. Low entry barriers. Low exit barriers.

Technological openness

The idea of technologically open systems is to allow the use of components from various suppliers in the design and development of computer systems, using common standards to help achieve significant economic benefits.

Technological openness can be characterized in the following ways:

Portability	The capability of implementing programs without change on different computer systems.
Interconnection	The ability to move information between computing systems using communications.
Interoperability	The ability of joint working between interconnected computing systems.
Distributability	Extends the interoperability idea to allow processes and information to be provided and migrated automatically to the most convenient point of an interconnected set of computing systems.

   
Organizational / management openness

Organizational/management openness can be characterized in the following ways:

Evolution: The ability of an information system to be maintained to respond to changing requirements. Software engineers such as Manny Lehman have encouraged us to consider the information system, across its operational life-cycle, as an evolving object.
   
Unboundedness: The absence of barriers to the provision of information and services for the end-user. The ability of unexpected information, from unexpected sources, perhaps even in unexpected formats, to somehow enter the system. This relates to the notion of the open-ended incremental and continually evolving system discussed by Hewitt and de Jong.

Business information systems have always been open, to some extent. Thus instead of a simplistic binary alternative - fully closed / fully open - it is more useful to consider a spectrum of degrees of openness, with full conformance to open system standards being positioned at (or at least towards) the fully open end of the spectrum.

Market openness

Market openness is often referred to as the 'level playing field'. It can be characterized in the following ways:

Low entry barriers - The ability of new competitors to 'freely' enter a market.

Low exit barriers - The ability of competitors to 'freely' leave a market.

Barriers to entry and exit are partly technological and partly socio-political. Of course, there are few if any markets where it would be appropriate or possible to altogether eliminate barriers to entry or exit. This is partly to do with the fact that operating in a market involves the acquisition of obligations.

Barriers to Exit

In some industries, the important barrier is the exit one.  You shouldn’t be a bank or insurance company unless there is some guarantee that you aren’t going to suddenly quit.  (“This business has unexpectedly quit.”)

In some markets (for example, banking), one of the functions of industry regulation is to prevent players leaving the market without fulfilling existing obligations. This in turn may cause the regulator to restrict entry, only allowing those players whose untimely exit is improbable (or at least properly controllable).

In other markets (for example, IT), this regulatory function is performed by the companies themselves, in order to retain market respect. This is why, for example, IBM was for many years unable to withdraw commitment to the 360 architecture, or to the IMS database architecture. Such considerations in turn lead to entry inhibitions: a potentially high cost of exit may discourage entry into a high-risk market.

Note that self-regulation only works for those that want to remain in the game, it cannot provide effective barriers to exit.

Of course, those in the game can agree to set exit barriers for themselves.  (Ulysses and the Sirens).  There is a moral hazard here – why should any company want to unduly restrict their freedom of action?

Barriers to Entry

Are there any reliable barriers to entry?  Or are most barriers like Hadrian’s Wall – delay and inconvenience, rather than serious obstacle?

Intelligent self-regulation has an advantage here.  If the insiders can keep changing the rules (or the interpretation of the rules, which comes to the same thing), a potential invader has to work twice as fast to breach the entry barrier. 

However, this ignores one of the traditional invasion strategies: an ally on the inside.  When a closed market is faced with a threat from a notorious outsider, it is sometimes possible to muster enough solidarity to keep him out. (Unobtrusive threats rarely trigger as energetic a response.) 

There are all sorts of games to be played here:

• Provoking external threats in order to increase cohesion.
• Provoking a threat in order to distract from a threat somewhere else.
• Supporting or acquiring weak players, who might be vulnerable to external inducements.
• Threatening sanctions on “traitors” (literally: those who trade with the enemy – but this assumes you know who the enemy is, and what counts as trading with him).

In some markets, these games can be openly discussed.  More often, the games – even the rules – are “above the ceiling”.  Lacking certainty or openness as to what is allowed and what is forbidden, some players will err on the side of caution, while others will err on the side of boldness.  Invaders are usually bolder than insiders; however, recent entrants may be more cautious than long-established players.

The market is refreshed both by actual and by threatened entry.  Thus from the perspective of the market as a whole, entry to the market should be selective – perhaps possible for strong companies (where strong means enterprising, well-resourced, and well-connected, among other things), and impossible for weak companies. Or perhaps possible for weak companies but only if they have something new or exciting to offer – after all, the weak ones can always be gobbled up by someone else.

Barrier to entry now transforms into unlevel playing field – a home advantage, if you like.  What is seriously worrying for many companies is that the legacy of old ways of thinking (embedded in people’s heads and working practices, as much as in computer software) means that there is a disadvantage to the established players, and the advantage goes to the new entrants.  Virgin Insurance and Direct Line are powerful competitors, precisely because they are not encumbered by the historical baggage of other insurance companies.  This advantage can be both real and perceived – thus there may be a brand advantage for a well-publicized new entrant.


Notes
 
Carl Hewitt and Peter de Jong, Open Systems (MIT Report AIM 691, December 1982) (pdf)