Fast Company: Your Face Is Your Key

Facial recognition is getting much more accurate, faster, and cheaper.  Fast Company reports on the latest:

Your Face is Your Key

If you didn't see the videos on Microsoft Kinect and the Samsung image recognition marketing program, they're both worth a look as part of understanding the ways technology is recognizing us and changing the ways we interact with machines:

How Technology Disappears: Part 2 of "A World of Services"

Thinking of technology delivery as an expression of services is a big idea.  Services help technology in business disappear.   

Cheshire Cat image from victorianweb.org

Why is this important?  What’s the payoff?

1. Agility: The holy grail of business technology is to get to value more quickly.  Services move IT toward plug-and-play, and away from custom-tailored, take-forever-to-deploy solutions.
2. Cost: standardize, externalize, gain economies of scale. Spend time and money on the things that make you competitive.
3. Services are a foundational part of the move to stateless devices.  “Your-business-as-a-service” is a perfect match for “any device/any time/anywhere.”
4. Services are foundational as part of moving decision-making about technology away from those who provide it (the traditional IT department) and toward those who use it.

As we focus on what that means as a trend, let’s examine the idea of services and think of them as part of the future of business.  

Service definition 1: simplify and standardize complex processes

Building a house is a good example of simplified services. Doors and windows are simplified and built to standard sizes.  You can buy what you need off the shelf and install it without customization, secure in the knowledge that it will fit and meet regulatory codes.  Because it was manufactured in large quantities in a standardized way, economies of scale make it much less expensive than a custom-made equivalent.  In exchange, you accept the range of sizes, styles, and colors, and design the house to accept the standards.

In business, most IT functions labeled “-as-a-service” are built on a model like this; users accept some standardization and buy the service as offered.  But that doesn’t fit for every business need, especially when the legacy technology grew up around ever-increasing levels of customization and complexity.  Which leads to:

Service definition 2: abstract complexity

Frankly, some parts of business are complex, and there is no magical way around it.  Even if you overcome the change management issues around greater simplicity of business processes, there are still regulatory and legal complexities that cannot be avoided. There are some complexities that deliver competitive value. But there are ways to abstract that complexity and mask it so that it appears simple. Someone has to manage complexity, but they can deliver it in such a way that those who use the service neither know nor care what is going on behind the scenes.

For an example of this, look to your car.  In the last 25 years, something remarkable has happened to automobiles.  Engines and transmissions, even in inexpensive cars, have growth dramatically more complex than before: turbochargers (sometimes 2 of them), multiple valves per cylinder, with continuously variable valve timing. Direct injection of fuel, electronic automatic transmissions with up to 8 speeds--all controlled by a computer system more powerful than mainframes of the recent past.  

It’s all abstracted from the driver. Start the car and it goes, without you having to care about a single one of those technological marvels.  Furthermore, during the 100,000 mile warranty period, the only maintenance required is fluid and filter changes.  Most of the engine is shrouded in molded plastic, looking more like a plug-in module than a piece of machinery.  Motive power as a service.  

The technology disappears, the benefit is what’s consumed.  

That’s the model current businesses and their IT departments can aspire to as a means of managing the complexity that can’t be eliminated.  The central questions

1. Does this have to be complex? Is this a complexity of heritage process or legacy technology that is not needed?  Is it a worthwhile tradeoff to lose some customization to gain agility and lower cost? If so, you can move to the “simplify service” route.  Classic examples, standard office applications like word processing and e-mail.  
2. Is this complexity that adds value, or is unavoidable for structural reasons, such as regulatory compliance?  If so,  the goal would be to abstract that complexity away from processes or people who use it, so that to them it appears simple.  For each complex service, ask question 1 again: are there components of this complexity I can simplify to make the abstraction process faster, easier, cheaper.

If you have succeeded, the result will be “building blocks” for technology and business processes, standard-appearing components.  They can be consumed--used as-is--or recombined to create other services.  

A hallmark of service orientation: those who provide a service know and care about the way it is provided, those who consume it don’t have to: DKDC (don’t know, don’t care.)  As service orientation spreads through IT and a company, DKDC spreads downward from the top, while power to deploy technology and combine services spreads upward toward users.

Service delivery starts with the end user, and works back until it reaches infrastructure. At the top, the main deliverable is “IT as a service.” That service is itself composed of individual and federated services.  This chart shows what that would look like:

The lower levels are foundational for those above. The Service Management level and Service Federation levels represent what I believe to be the future of IT within companies:

• Definition and management of services becomes a central role, highly technical and specialized positions in the organization tend to be externally sourced as individual service components or packaged as third party services. Internal skills include high levels of focus on service contracts and service level agreements.  The orchestration of services and the management of quality of service delivery take on new importance.
• Business applications are delivered as a service, either directly by a cloud vendor, as composite applications created in-house through federation of other services, or as legacy applications delivered through desktop virtualization.  
• At the Delivery level, the close tie-in with stateless computing shows its value.  The entire “business as a service” experience is delivered through a web interface, and IT gets out of the user device management business.  
• Key vertical roles within the services organization are the technology architect, who works across the various disciplines on service design, integration, and delivery; and the business technology analyst, a main point of contact between top-level service consumers--the users and the business departments--and the various service delivery teams.  But note, DKDC even extends to this level of consumer; if infrastructure-level services are deployed correctly, the analyst does not need to know or care how they are delivered.  

When technology disappears, information technology will have grown up; delivery of business capabilities through services is how that happens.

Next in the Big Ideas series, we’ll look at how stateless computing and a world of services become success triggers for the third major idea: flattening of organizations, and the movement of tech power ever closer to those who use it.

Tell me where it hurts: part 1 of "A World of Services"

Think about where it hurts when you consider the current state of technology in business:

"I'll need a business case, an ROI analysis, approval from legal

and finance, a project manager, FTEs, and

a development environment in three minutes, or we're all dead!"

• Business technology seems moribund; it takes forever and costs too much to do things you can do easily in the consumer technology world.
• CIOs would like to see themselves as Mr. Spock to the CEO’s Captain Kirk: a trusted consultant who comes up with the right solution, standing by the captain bravely staring into the future.  In practice, IT is often more like Mr. Scott in engineering, asked to perform the impossible with astoundingly complex machines, scrambling to save the day. When Kirk said, “Mr. Scott, I need warp speed in three minutes or we’re all dead!” Commander Scott always came through.  Unfortunately, CIOs don’t have scriptwriters on their side.
• Needless to say, if the fictional USS Enterprise operated like the enterprises we serve every day, it would have fallen out of the sky very early in the first season. There has to be a better way.

People have dreamed of a streamlined, responsive IT and a truly agile business for a very long time.  Enter the idea of services.

Web services. Service Oriented Architecture. Cloud services. Software as a Service. Middleware-aaS. Platform-aaS. Infrastructure-aaS.

Decompose technology delivery into manageable services. 

 

“Service” is a veritable workhorse of an IT word. Append it to anything and like magic it sounds current and desirable.  The challenge with such words is that sometimes, they are important, but get lost in the buzzword sea.

That’s my point. The idea of services in business--IT especially-is one of the keys to understanding the future.  Embracing the services idea actually does have promise to improve things.  We can look more closely to find out why.  

One common theme at Infrics.com is that there is a bigger story about technology, business, and society than we see when we're head-down, working on tasks and projects. There are many reports and many companies who will help you do the head-down work; legions of dedicated people are giving their careers to those endeavors. This is about the other part: looking for themes within the big story that may help us do things better.  The idea of services in that big picture isn't sexy, and it's not all that buzzword-friendly. but I contend that it's worth examining.

First, some level-setting: to understand the potential of services in business, we need to think of business processes and outcomes as either horizontal or vertical:

Look at this definition and this slide, from the Infrics analysis of research styles:
“Is the focus horizontal or vertical?  If many people come to you to solve a similar need across many departments, your focus is likely horizontal.  If you bring together people from many departments to achieve something that wouldn’t happen without that coordination, you’re more vertical.  “


What is a service?  Let’s try this on

Service: a means of delivering value, either through simplification and standardization of complex processes, or by abstracting complexity to the point that it appears simple to users, Services are primarily horizontal in nature; they can be reused and combined with other services to create primarily vertical outcomes.


What does that mean in practical terms?

• Some services are consumed by other services (or processes), some are consumed by people (users.)
• At each level, those consumers are spared the need to know how the service was supplied, they are freed to just use it to accomplish what they need.
• In general, those services that represent simplification and standardization can be seen as plug-and-play building blocks, and represent the lower layers of the chart: infrastructure as service.
• Services that mask complexity so that it appears more simple are enabled by those plug-and-play services lower in the stack.  Human resources, for instance, is a horizontal service composed of other services, and in turn delivered to vertical “run the business” efforts.
• By virtue of their reusability, services reduce or eliminate duplication of effort, driving down costs.
• By virtue of standardization--especially when they represent simplified business processes--services often lend themselves to competitive bidding and outsourcing.
• Services tend to increase flexibility, and reduce deployment times, enabling greater agility from technology and business processes

We know services almost instinctively, because in areas outside of business and IT, we use them all the time.  The most classic example is electricity (thanks, Nicholas Carr); enormous complexities of generation and distribution are abstracted at the end user level. We have wires coming into our homes and a bill once a month.  Because electricity is standardized for voltage, frequency, installation codes, and connectors,  we can provision our entire home with simple, off-the-shelf appliances and lights, secure in the knowledge that it will all work.

Thinking of Power-as-a-Service shows two important ways to evaluate the value of service-oriented thinking, service KPIs, if you will:

1. A good service disappears. You don’t have to be aware that it is there, you just get your work done or your problem solved.
2. A good service enables DKDC--Don’t Know, Don’t Care.  I don’t know where the generators are that power my home, and I have no reason to care whether I know or not.
   
   When you think of services in enterprise and IT terms and consider the cloud computing discussion, the true test of cloud success would be DKDC; if I am the consumer of a cloud service, and don’t have to know or care that it is a cloud service, it’s performing as it should.  By their nature, services push the DKDC question to deeper and deeper levels, away from the consumer.  

“This means something. This is important.”  Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”  

Remember the big picture: 

1. Simplify complexity where possible, push it down the stack away from users where needed, by decomposing technology delivery into reusable services--create a Service Oriented Enterprise. (subject of this series, A World of Services)
2. Decouple the delivery of data and programs from specific devices, to allow users the ability to use technology without being limited by their machines.  Make delivery Stateless. (subject of the first of the big ideas articles, Free Your Machines, and Nothing But Net)
3. Move direct power to manage information closer to the people who use it, and away from complex programming and projects.  Flatten organizations and make IT an invisible part of business processes. (articles in development now)

Next in A World of Services, "How technology disappears" Mapping services to business, describing IT services and the services-based IT organization, and thinking about innovation in the resulting low-inertia business environment. 

from Lean Technology Transformation: How Budgets Ruin Value Creation and Delivery

This is an insightful article, but challenging to traditional management processes.  The central theme parallels one I've made about research in business: in an effort to feel that they're in control, managers often measure the wrong things, the ones that are easy to measure.  And by so doing, create outcomes that hinder their businesses.

This quote from the article is important:

"...budget contracts can act like drugs. They seduce executives into believing that they have control over their future financial outcomes. But, like most drugs, they have serious side effects. They lead both senior executives and operating managers into an annual performance trap from which it is difficult to escape."

Lean Technology Transformation: How Budgets Ruin Value Creation and Delivery

LA Times: kids predict the internet's future (pay attention, they know a lot!)

This article is not just charming, but a good insight about where young people will lead us:

What's Next On The Internet? Ask Your Kids

Nothing but net: stateless computing, technology triggers, and the business of technology

I believe that stateless devices are one of the most important technology trends. The concept is simple and elegant:  all applications and data run from the cloud, with lightweight, fast-booting operating systems delivering a connection to the cloud and a very rich, browser-based user experience.

Devices built as stateless will need much less in the way of complex operating systems, and can be less expensive to build, buy, and operate.

Stateless is important because it changes the discussion about devices in the way social networks change the discussion about communities; we get to manage our lives based on what we need right now, not on being in the presence of the device where the software and data we want is residing.
    

But why should you accept that stateless computing is A Big Thing? 

Predicting technology is a constantly-shifting balance of art and science. But I do believe we can think of the future in ways that are more roadmap, less crystal ball.  That is the idea behind technology triggers, timelines of changing capabilities in which we can observe A and B and think clearly about the still-unknown C.


Here is a timeline for the enabling technologies of the stateless world:





The vertical lines show the triggers. As an example, the emergence of widely-distributed 3g wireless networks was one of the key enablers for the explosive growth of smartphones and the currently-popular online application markets.  Had you examined mobile computing through this lens just before 3g, and extrapolated to possible outcomes once it became available, you might have gained competitive advantage in the mobile space, just as Apple did with the iPhone.  We are clearly past the trigger point for the so called “app internet”  But we are also close to triggers for stateless computing, with Google’s Chrome OS and Chromebook computers being first to market.


Look at the graph as the timeline progresses; the enabling trends are moving in the direction of stateless computing, which overcomes major limitations in even the most advanced “app internet” situation deployed at the time of this article in summer 2011.  

Further, we can see that a true movement to cloud computing is not complete as long as we must still synchronize cloud and local data and do installation and maintenance of locally-installed applications--a model that is as old as Lotus Notes.   Apple’s vaunted iCloud service, which stores data and music in the cloud, still relies on local copies, a move analysts were quick to remind us, “looks great as far as it goes, which is all the way to about 2006.” 


The “app internet” concept is the future, says Forrester Research CEO George Colony.  I respect Mr. Colony and Forrester, but I think the tech triggers say otherwise.  The use of small-locally installed applications on top of a complex and proprietary operating system, using cloud data sync, is the best we can do in a world where connections are not quite pervasive enough. But it is still kludgy beyond belief, and does very little about the device dependence that now seems very old fashioned. 


We have not quite reached the “trigger timeline” when stateless takes off, but I think we are close.  What enablers are not quite there yet?

Trigger	Opportunity	Disruption
better internet connections: faster everywhere, transparently available via multiple sources	IP network providers, especially mobile quality-of-service management for IP connections every “-as-a-service” vendor: Software-, Platform-, Infrastructure- cloud-based media vendors: Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon	proprietary content delivery architectures: non-IP voice, cable and satellite television services
penetration and evolution of browser-enabled applications	HTML 5   desktop virtualization vendors to stateless-enable legacy applications app developers cloud-centric platforms and development environments interface management systems that adapt stateless UI delivery to different browser forms on different devices.	applications and developers still relying on client-server models enterprises with large legacy app portfolios (although see “desktop virtualization” as opportunity to solve this) rich internet application tools that rely on local installation of software: Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight
stateless-enabling operating systems and devices for other form factors: phones, televisions, tablets, automobiles	developers of new web interfaces: voice, gesture, image recognition. the network effect of stateless benefits across many form factors presents a huge opportunity for manufacturers.  With very fast cycle times for mobile devices, a new market leader could emerge very quickly	fat operating system vendors could quickly be disintermediated: the stateless web experience is backward compatible with legacy operating systems, but not the other way around.

Although there is a high rate of change, there is also a big picture, a timeline from early mainframes, to networked PCs, to the internet-centric, multi-device era.


That multi-device era is where we are now: some cloudsourced data and some applications in the cloud, but still using a client-server model and complex operating systems.  While it's easy--facile, even--to say "the PC era is over," the truth is, we're much closer to a time in which the operating system and the purpose-built device of any sort will become almost invisible, and the idea of "browser" as a separate application becomes irrelevant.  

Stateless is the logical next step, based on evolving technologies, the social use of technology, and the historical evidence of the market in the face of the new capabilities brought on by those technologies.

Stateless is also the enabling technology that unlocks the greatest benefit of cloud computing, and helps us apply the lessons of online social interaction to the way we deploy and use the machines that make it possible. 

It is the tool through which data and applications in the cloud will create explosive growth in business value. Stateless computing is a big idea.

Google Takeout: new "export all my data" service, possible enterprise cloud model?

Mashable reports on this new service from Google, which allows you to export copies of everything you have stored in Google services.  

Pictured, their Data Liberation Front team.  Take a look at this story, because inside the news of a simple-sounding consumer add-on could be the seeds of an answer to one of the big challenges enterprises have seen in the cloud computing model: what do I do if I change my mind or change vendors, how do I get all my stuff?