Ironick

Links for 2009-12-18 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

Why Design Thinking Matters - BusinessWeek
Instead, it's the work of Filippo Passerini, head of P&G's global business services, that emphasizes the potential impact of the technique. By applying design thinking within the traditionally uncreative corporate engine room of the organization, Passerini brought about radical transformation that could both support and spearhead the turnaround of the company at large. Without this in place, the flashier, more talked-about product introductions would not have had the strong foundation needed to flourish in the marketplace.
Are You Thinking Ahead of the Curve? - Business Exchange
In frequent open-ended brainstorming sessions, he and his core team of five saw that the world was shifting. It was moving from 'big is good' to 'flexible is good' to 'network is good'. "Fifteen years ago, if you were a big company, that was a competitive advantage. Then flexibility was the way to achieve it. But we saw that over the next five years the network would become more and more important." What to do? Passerini's vision was that the entire company should operate from one consolidated, integrated global services network. He and his team assaulted the assumption that the way P&G handled back office functions like finance and accounting, HR, facilities management, and IT was good enough. All non-strategic activities have been outsourced to outside vendors. And Passerini and his group have 'decommoditized' themselves (his word) from being internal service providers to become strategic partners to the organization.
The power of positive deviants - The Boston Globe
This initiative is an example of “positive deviance,” an approach to behavioral and social change. Instead of imposing solutions from without, the method identifies outliers in a community who, despite having no special advantages, are doing exceptionally well. By respecting local ingenuity, proponents say, the approach galvanizes community members and is often more effective and sustainable than imported blueprints.
Positive Deviance Initiative
The term “Positive Deviance” initially appeared in nutrition research literature with the publication of a book entitled” Positive Deviance in Nutrition” by Tufts University nutrition professor, Marian Zeitlin, in the 1990s, where she compiled a dozen surveys that documented the existence of “Positive Deviant” children in poor communities who were better nourished than others. In this book, Zeitlin and her colleagues advocated for the use of this concept to address childhood malnutrition issues at the community level by identifying what was going right in the community in order to amplify it, as opposed to focusing on what was going wrong in the community and fixing it. In the early 1990’s, Jerry Sternin, a visiting scholar at Tufts University, and his wife, Monique, experimented with Zeitlin’s ideas and operationalized the PD concept as a tool to promote behavior and social change to organize various PD-centered social change interventions around the world .
How GE Is Disrupting Itself - HBR.org
GE badly needs innovations like the low-cost ECG and ultrasound machines, not only to expand beyond high-end segments in places like China and India but also to preempt local companies in those countries—the emerging giants—from creating similar products and then using them to disrupt GE in rich countries. To put it bluntly: If GE’s businesses are to survive and prosper in the next decade, they must become as adept at reverse innovation as they are at glocalization. Success in developing countries is a prerequisite for continued vitality in developed ones.

Links for 2009-12-17 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-18T00:00:00-08:00

Geek And Poke: The Benefits Of A SOA
Geek And Poke: It's A SOA
Geek And Poke: Help Me! - Part 2
Gapingvoid: the network is more powerful than the node
etc.
Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones - WSJ.com
Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Links for 2009-12-16 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

"Conway's Law"
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Endless Innovation: The New Way to Work: Top 5 Trends to Watch in 2010
Here are the five trends that I feel are creating The New Way To Work and what they mean to me: (1) Organizations will embrace Design Thinking. In 2009, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO (arguably one of the most important design consultancies in the world), published Change By Design, which suggested that organizations must go even further in their embrace of right-brain, creative thinking. Design must become more than an aesthetic -- it must become an integral part of the overall process of how companies think about products, services and customers. By extension, "design thinking" must now become part of any worker's toolkit.
The World Flattener: Roger Martin - On Designing the Future
Interestingly, my tenure at P&G was during the time Roger Martin was advising A.G. Lafley and I was a part of the substantial changes brought within P&G's approach to business. See information on some my work related to Virtual Shopper here on my friend Franz Dill's blog, who also was one of the founders of the P&G Innovation Centers. Though Mr. Martin speaks candidly, yet the change he suggests carries pain to the corporate as a whole and the machinery of suppliers supporting it. Corporate innovation remains more perception than reality, with incremental results seen in their markets from licensing, buyouts, etc. Breakthrough innovation remains the domain of the entrepreneur, one who can imagine a future unburdened by the past!
P&G Changes Its Game - BusinessWeek
Reframing Is the Key "The analytical process we typically use to do our work—understand the problem and alternatives; develop several ideas; and do a final external check with the customer—gets flipped. Instead, design thinking methods instruct: There's an opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood; use a broader consumer context to inform the opportunity; brainstorm a large quantity of fresh ideas; and co-create and iterate using low-resolution prototypes with that consumer." In his new book, The Game-Changer, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: "Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence)," he writes. "Design schools emphasize abductive thinking—imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them."
Transforming Grounds: Design Thinking in 10 to 20 years
For quite some years I have predicted that the growing interest in design, design thinking, and design research and education will have a profound influence on the fundamental structure and organization of disciplines, schools, and universities. I think it is already possible to see this. When we bring in design thinking as a major component in a field, suddenly it is possible to see simlarities with disciplines that was not there before. We have already seen some new d-schools, for instance at Stanford. Even though these initiatives have not been successful yet, my prediction is that they will.
Transforming Grounds
I was recently asked by a friend if I could make a short list of good readings on design thinking. I tried and here it is. This is a first attempt. The criteria for choosing a text has been if the reading has meant a lot to me. I have also picked texts that are not for the moment but are useful for many years (more or less timeless). So, this is a list of design thinking readings that I constantly use and go back to (I have probably forgotten some really important ones :-)
Andrew G Haldane : Rethinking the financial network
Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England. Amazing speech. Discusses the financial network as a Complex Adaptive System.
Rethinking the Financial Network , Speech by Andrew Haldane ...
Another version of an amazing speech on the financial network as a Complex Adaptive System. By Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England.
Semantic Versioning
As a solution to this problem, I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented. For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version.
Don Norman's jnd.org / Technology First, Needs Last
This is wrong headed in so many ways. The invention of post it notes and the zipper contradict his arguments. The inventions by technologist that succeed (a small %), are those that had design research applied to them. [Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists. They will get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that's good news: we will forever be indispensible.]

Links for 2009-12-15 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-16T00:00:00-08:00

HFT Firms Not Better or Worse, Just Different by Advanced Trading
HFT firms, market makers and NYSE specialists all share the same desire to make profits. While the latter two were highly regulated the former are not. Since the unregulated HFT firms are in effect acting like unregulated market makers, institutional investors need to take special care as they transact in size. One reasonable trading tactic is to avoid the HFT-rich venues and seek liquidity in the so called "dark pools" which cater exclusively to institutional investors. Venues such as BlockCross, Liquidnet and Pipeline neutralize the HFT risk by screening their client base and enforcing high minimum order sizes.
UCSD: Global Information Industry Center
What is the rate of new information growth each year? Who produces the greatest amounts of information annually? Individuals? Enterprises? How does information growth in North America compare with growth in other geographies, markets, and people globally? To answer these questions and others, an updated and expanded How Much Information? (HMI) research program is underway. The program is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Intel, LSI, Oracle, and Seagate, and involves multiple research universities. The Principal Investigator is Prof. Roger Bohn and the research director is Dr. James Short, at UC San Diego's Global Information Industry Center.
UCSD: Global Information Industry Center
The Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) seeks to identify and describe through its research programs the underlying issues and consequences of technology enabled change in information and communications practices in government and industry, and those affecting individuals. The Center functions as a collaborative research and learning environment for faculty, industry professionals and students to engage in projects, discussion forums, and events focused on the major program areas of the Center.
A Breath of Fresh Air for Health Care - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
I’ve written here about how even the most seemingly innocuous details of the health care environment — a dead potted plant in a doctor’s reception room, an ill-fitting hospital gown, a blaring television — can contribute to an unpleasant, at times even devastating experience. Recognizing that reality, Kaiser’s National Facilities Services (N.F.S.) group has, since 2007, been working on the Total Health Environment, a program that is applying design thinking to every aspect of Kaiser’s operations, from medical records to medication administration, color palettes to carpet.
SOA Dead Horse in the Cloud
Funny cartoon about hiding the dead horse of SOA in the cloud.
Development Engineer @ Tetra Pak
The activities you will be involved in or drive are for example: break down of customer requirements, package development, test method development and verification of package concepts. In this work robust design thinking is a must and the concept of World Class Engineering is strongly embedded in our work.
Design Thinking 101 | Studio Notes - Musings on design matters, technology and culture
Great intro to design thinking with good set of references.
Healthcare Innovation by Design
link blog exploring the convergence of innovation, design and healthcare. By Sam Basta
Design thinking at BT
JP Rangaswami (blog "Confused of Calcutta") discusses why BT has the role of Managing Director at BT Design.
BT Design CIO: JP Rangaswami | Videos on ZDNet
JP Rangaswami: BT as you know is one of the world's largest telecom companies that have been converted into a platform based, networked, IT services company. We're in about 190 countries with maybe 150,000 people. Within that, what we have done at BT is something special, believing in the convergent stories that most telcos have been putting out, we've taken our networks, our IT, our products and our processes, and brought all these together so that we have a truly converged design authority. And we've done the same with our operate function, the idea being that if we can bring our people, our processes, our networks, and our platforms together in that shape, we really are in the right place to attack the customers changing requirements.
Hometown Puzzle - National Geographic Store
Give a one-of-a-kind gift with this personalized puzzle featuring a custom map. From any starting point, we'll create a 400-piece puzzle of a six-by-four-mile area using U.S. Geological Survey maps. A house-shaped piece in the center represents the address you choose. Shows main roads, contour lines, water features, vegetation, and notable buildings. Arrives in a presentation box with space for you to write a personal message. Specify recipient's full U.S. address, including street number and name, city, state, and zip code.
excellent quote from Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo - howlvenice's posterous
Tim states the reason for the iterative, non-linear nature of the journey "is not that design thinkers are disorganized or undisciplined but that design thinking is fundamentally an exploratory process; it will invariably make unexpected discoveries along the way, and it would be foolish not to find out where they lead." Bon voyage!
Seesmic for Windows
Feedback forum.
redhat.com | Intro to design thinking
Our success at Red Hat is due to one of the biggest and most successful collaborative/transformative innovation models ever--open source. The value we bring to IT customers the world over is unquestionable and defining. Open source, at its heart, is a design thinking process. What follows is a Q&A with David Burney, Vice President of Brand Communications + Design at Red Hat. Burney is a champion of design thinking.
Red Hat Magazine | Thinking Design: A pencil, a ruler, and a cup of coffee (Part 2)
At Red Hat, we’ve chosen a 7-step process to serve as a common vernacular. Define, Research, Ideate, Prototype, Choose, Implement, Learn. The process is illustrated as a sequential, linear process, but it’s important–in fact, critical–to recognize that the process isn’t truly linear. One has to allow for the free movement within the steps, returning to another step if subsequent data suggests so. In this way, the process isn’t simply a process anyone can follow. It demands a cultural acceptance of another way of thinking.

Links for 2009-12-14 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

William Setliff - LinkedIn
Will went through the following roles at Target: # VP, Marketing Target (Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; TGT; Retail industry) Currently holds this position # VP, Strategy, Insights & Innovation Target (Public Company; TGT; Retail industry) 2007 — 2008 (1 year ) # VP, Innovation & Interactive Marketing Target (Public Company; TGT; Retail industry) 2006 — 2007 (1 year ) # Director, Marketing Target (Public Company; TGT; Retail industry) 2004 — 2006 (2 years )
Voices.com | #1 Voice Over Marketplace for Voice Overs and Voice Over Talent
Site for finding/offering voice over talents.
Envato Marketplaces
The Envato Marketplaces are ActiveDen, AudioJungle, ThemeForest, VideoHive, and GraphicRiver. They are a set of interconnected sites that allow anyone to buy or sell all sorts of digital products, ranging from website templates to royalty free stock graphics. When you create an account on one, it will work on any of them!
100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists | Best Colleges Online
Unless you’re enrolled at a top university or are an elite member of the science and engineering inner circle, you’re probably left out of most of the exciting research explored by the world’s greatest scientists. But thanks to the Internet, and our list of 100 incredible lectures, you’ve now got access to the cutting edge theories and projects that are changing the world.
The Economist praises a dangerous and obsolete management concept: The Experience Curve
It’s certainly true that, properly managed, experience can facilitate improvement. But there’s been 25 years of research now showing that improvement requires deliberate effort, and that the improvement process takes careful management. Toyota, through JIT and “The Toyota Production Process,” essentially invented a system for making more rapid improvement – hence it surpassed GM and everyone else, while a fraction of their size. The semiconductor industry had its own epiphany about the folly of the experience curve, when a major research project run out of Berkeley surveyed a variety of fabs and found vastly different performance that had little to do with scale or cumulative experience
The New, Faster Face of Innovation - Business Insight - Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan - MIT Sloan Management Review
Experiments to Come Where will all this lead? Experiments will become far more pervasive and persuasive as information technology improves and testing grows faster and cheaper. More companies—and more enterprising individuals who work in them—will recognize that experiments don’t have to be time-consuming and expensive, and they will propose more tests that exploit those economies.
The Toyota A3 Report | shmula
Most problems are dealt with in superficial ways. Very few people and organizations actually arrive at the root cause of their problems. At Toyota, they employ Root Cause analysis in almost everything they do. One problem solving approach they employ is the A3 Process. A3 is a paper size, typically 11" x 17". There are actually several A3-type paper sizes, and Toyota believes that when you structure your problem solving around 1 page of paper, then your thinking is focused and structured. Below are the steps of the A3 process, followed by a real-world example of an A3 collaborative problem solving that I was a part of while I spent a short time at Toyota. The steps below are taken from Dr. Durward Sobek’s very informative site
The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas - Magazine - NYTimes.com
In his book "The Medea Hypothesis," named after the Greek mother who slaughtered her own children, Ward argues that for billions of years the biosphere has been its own worst enemy. "Life seems to be actively pursuing its own demise," he wrote recently in New Scientist, "moving earth ever closer to the inevitable day when it returns to its original state: sterile." According to Ward, the mayhem started soon after the emergence of bacteria billions of years ago, which choked the earth's atmosphere first with a heat-reflecting haze of methane and then, a billion years later, with dangerous levels of oxygen, which at the time was toxic to life. Soon after, plants sucked up so much carbon that temperatures plummeted, creating a pair of deep ice ages. Of the five great extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward claims, four were caused not by volcanoes or by meteors but by life itself. To top it off, biomass has been declining for the last billion years.
i do the work for free mk.2 | Gapingvoid
i do the work for free. i get paid to deal with all the f'ing e-mails.
Aiming For Innovation: Living Design in a Business World
In this session we will talk about design thinking and how it relates to software product development in general, and to HCI design in particular. We will also explore the values and methods of strategic ideation and see how they can be applied in various real life/real work situations.

Links for 2009-12-13 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

Meet Bruce Mau. He wants to redesign the world
This is where Mau's principle, "Design what you do", comes into play. It sounds simple, but it's actually a radical use of the term "design". Businesses are used to designing what they make (the products); they may also be used to designing what they say to the outside world (advertising and communications). But it's more unusual to think of applying design principles and approaches to the full spectrum of a company's behaviour - encompassing everything the company does, including what it does behind closed doors. Mau's position is that there really is no "inside" the factory any more. Changing conditions are calling into question the long-held assumption in business that there are two separate realities: the one that is shared with the outside world (in the form of product offering, advertising, communications) and the one that is considered private (the way a company actually makes things, operates, treats its employees, disposes of its waste and generally conducts itself ).

Links for 2009-12-11 [del.icio.us]

2009-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

YouTube - Face-Off With a Deadly Predator
Paul Nicklen describes his most amazing experience as a National Geographic photographer - coming face-to-face with one of Antarctica's most vicious predators.
InfoQ: Thoughts on the Generic vs. Specific Tradeoff
[A key factor is a relevant/useful ecosystem for the generic framework you are thinking about applying to your specific problem space. Summary What is better, a generic solution or a specific one? Stefan Tilkov’s answer is “It depends.” He compares XML vs HTML, DSM-UML, Internal-External DSL, SOAP-REST, and others, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each solution, showing that there is no certain answer to an architect’s quest to solve his problem, but there are some guidelines helping along the way.
Prototype - Six Sigma and Design Thinking - How 2 Methods Should Mix - NYTimes.com
To many, the two skill sets don’t fit together well, and Chuck Jones, vice president for global consumer design at Whirlpool, explains why that may be so. Design thinkers, he says, are like quantum physicists, able to consider a world in which anything — like traveling at the speed of light — is theoretically possible. But a majority of people, including the Six Sigma advocates in most corporations, think more like Newtonian physicists — focused on measurement along three well-defined dimensions.
This Is A Design Revolution? - BusinessWeek
A new book purports to show the potential impact of design when applied to doing good. The argument's confused, but there are lessons for executives
Business Model Knowledge Fair, Amsterdam
Presentation on business models.
Open Government Directive | The White House
The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government. Transparency promotes accountability by providing the public with information about what the Government is doing. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that their government can make policies with the benefit of information that is widely dispersed in society. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal Government, across levels of government, and between the Government and private institutions. This Open Government Directive establishes deadlines for action.

Twitter and I Both Own My Content

2009-09-15T02:54:00-07:00

I just took a look at twitter’s revised terms of service. I posted the my feedback using the feedback link, but I’d thought I’d also post it in my blog for all to see (and respond to):

We both own my content

Given your legal language below, twitter effectively jointly "owns" my content. In other words, anything I can do with my content, twitter can too. You might want to change your "tip" to reflect this.

Currently the tip says: "This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content." When told they own something, most non-lawyers assume that have EXCLUSIVE rights of ownership. That is NOT the case with twitter content. Twitter effectively has ALL the ownership rights to my content that I have. Twitter can use or sell (license) my content any way I can.

I think your "tip" should make that clearer. How about: "This license is you authorizing us to have all the same rights to the content that you have. Your content is twitter's content -- we both effectively own it."

LEGAL LANGUAGE:
You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

Carbonite: Ill check back in a couple of years

2009-06-19T01:27:00-07:00

I finally decided to systematically back up my home computer – the one I have for family/personal use. I’ve been using one sort of PC or another since the Compaq Portable in the mid-1980s. In all that time, I’ve only done sporadic backups of various directories when paranoia kicked in. Despite this utter lack of care, I’ve pretty much never lost an important file due to a failure or accident. I have had two hard drives fail on me, but in both cases a data recovery service was able to recover all the files.

But I figure that after 20 years, I may be pushing my luck a wee bit too far. So I decided to check out Carbonite, based on David Pogue’s review of the leading web (oops, now cloud) based backup services: Carbonite and Mozy.

I’m currently in the middle of a 15-day free trial of Carbonite and I’m loving it: simple to install, completely unobtrusive, continuously operating. There’s only one problem, but it’s a show-stopper for me: Carbonite will not backup external drives! In my case that means it won’t back up the USB drive that I use to store all my photographs and videos and music.

I was (and I still am) incredulous. I didn’t recall a single review mentioning this crippling feature. I was so incredulous that I searched the web to confirm it. My first confirmation was from this 2007 blog post comment (Carbonite: FAIL, Mozy: ON NOTICE) by the (then?) CEO of Carbonite:

David Friend wrote:

James: Hi, I’m the CEO of Carbonite and I noticed your comments about Carbonite on your blog. Backing up external hard drives is a feature that is available in our PLUS product which will be available shortly. Carbonite didn’t fail to back up your hard drive – we state clearly on the web site that the BASIC version does not back up external hard drives. Doing so would alter the economics of our business model and would require that we charge everyone a much higher price, or abandon our UNLIMITED backup policy which most of our customers really like.

Regards,
Dave Friend, CEO
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com Carbonite Online Backup

Posted on 23-Oct-07 at 9:03 am | Permalink

When I read this I thought to myself, “Great! Let’s check out Carbonite Plus to see how much it costs. It’s been almost two years since this post, so I’m sure it’s available now.” So I go to the Carbonite site and search for “carbonite plus”. Unfortunately, this is what I found:

1074 : [General] External, Network, and USB Drives

Article Viewed 3

Reviewed 6/11/2009

The current version of Carbonite backs up only the files that reside on permanent hard drives on your PC.

Check back soon for a Carbonite service plan that will allow you to back up your external drives.

So I guess I’ll check back around mid-2011. In the meantime, I’m off to check out Mozy…

Zemanta

2009-06-17T10:46:00-07:00

I'm trying our Zemanta, an add on to Windows Live Writer. Zemanta is supposedly a semantic web application that automagically enriches your blog posts with suggested links, tags, related articles, pictures, etc.

For example, if I type the phrase mars lander, Zemanta will automatically do wonderful things. Well it's supposed to do amazing things, but I don't see anything happening. Would the concept of Gartner make a difference. Or the happenings in Iran. Nada. The movie, The Watchmen seems pretty cool.

It’s working now as you can see. The problem was that I was running an old version of Windows Live Writer. Now let’s see if it can handle more obscure terms like meiosis, or stigmergy, or tsallis entropy. Wow, it did all of them except for stigmergy, even though stigmergy is in Wikipedia.

Hmmn… It looks as if pictures is not working. I’d love to see a picture of Dolphins, or some Transformers, or maybe even Spider-Man.

I think I’ll try it for a while…

Two Timely T-Shirts

2009-06-04T10:30:03-07:00

Nick Gall

Is Google Chrome Taking Off?

2009-06-03T10:28:39-07:00

I got a lot of hits on my post My 2¢ on Google Wave.... When I looked at the browser share stats (which I rarely do), I was surprised to find Google Chrome had more than a 12% share for the day:

Contrast this with Chrome's under 5% share since the beginning of the year:

Does this mean Chrome is taking off with the technorati? Or was the sample skewed by the fact that my popular post was about Google Wave?

I guess we'll have to wait and see...

Epiphany: Replace HATEOAS With Hypermedia Describes Protocols

2009-06-02T10:08:29-07:00

As a few of my friends know, I live for epiphanies. I love to connect concepts. So I'm really happy to be having one now (it's been a while as regular readers of my blog -- if any remain -- can tell).

For a LONG time, I've been talking about how all interfaces can be defined in terms of IFaPs (Identifiers, Formats, and Protocols). My canonical example of an interface composed of IFaPs is of course the Web: URL (I), HTML (F), and HTTP (P). All three intersect in a particular instance of HTML, say my blog's home page. The HTML for my blog's home page is filled with URLs, HTML tags, and even HTTP "verbs" (though these are quite rare, mostly in an HTML form or embedded JavaScript).

Then along came REST and with it the concept of HATEOAS: Hypermedia As The Engine of Application State. And everyone, myself included, spent a lot of time trying to grok it and explain it to others. We're still trying. One way I try to explain it is by highlighting that HATEOAS requires that each server response must contain not only the requested data -- but also control information (in the forms of specially tagged URLs) describing the next set of permitted interactions with the server. It is this additional control information (at a bare minimum just some links to more data) that turns mere media into hypermedia.

Now along comes Jim Webber with a much better (dare I say brilliant) way of explaining HATEOAS and hypermedia: "Hypermedia Describes Protocols!" (See slide 26.) At first this might seem counterintuitive, since I said that HTTP is the Protocol and HTML is the Format in the WWW. But URLs, HTML, and HTTP are just generic description languages for describing domain-specific identifiers, formats, and protocols. Thus, think of a web of specific HTML pages as a domain-specific protocol. Jim Webber uses the example of ordering a Starbuck's coffee. (What's important is that each hypermedia DSL is composed using the generic languages of URL, HTML, and HTTP.)

This notion of bringing together identifiers, formats and verbs to describe a protocol is not new. One of the best descriptions of this was in the WS-BPEL 1.1 spec:

In thinking about the data handling aspects of business protocols it is instructive to consider the analogy with network communication protocols. Network protocols define the shape and content of the protocol envelopes that flow on the wire, and the protocol behavior they describe is driven solely by the data in these envelopes. In other words, there is a clear physical separation between protocol-relevant data and "payload" data. The separation is far less clear cut in business protocols because the protocol-relevant data tends to be embedded in other application data.

So if WS-BPEL was already thinking about mixing protocol data with "payload" data, what's so new about HATEOAS? The fundamental difference is that WS-BPEL is based on the concept of providing an entire static protocol description up front once and for all -- and providing it out of band. But HATEOAS is based on the notion of progressive description (don't bother Googling the term, I coined it; and not to be confused with progressive disclosure). More and more of the description of the protocol is provided to the client (in band in the protocol itself) as the client executes its part of the protocol. I guess another good term might be JIT Protocol Description (Just In Time). Another good term might be "self-describing protocol". So now when explaining HATEOAS, instead of saying "each server response must contain control information" (huh?), I can say "each server response progressively self-describes the current protocol."

Now there are pros and cons to static/complete vs dynamic/progressive protocol descriptions. How can I program a client to execute its part of a protocol if I don't have a full description of it up front? But if I encode the complete static description of the protocol into my client up front, how can I change the protocol dynamically?

Love to hear others' thoughts. I'm going to think about this some more. That's why I love epiphanies -- they make you think about things in new ways.

My 2 on Google Wave: WWW is a Unidirectional Web of Published Documents -- Wave is a bidirectional Web of Instant Messages

2009-06-01T13:19:03-07:00

I viewed the Google Wave demo over the past several days:

I'm already convinced that Wave represents a Web paradigm shift on par with Ajax/Web 2.0. Just as Google Maps was the killer app that opened the Ajax floodgates (even though the component technologies/standards were already in place) Wave will be the killer app that opens the HTML5/XMPP floodgates. The Wave protocol is arguably the first advance worthy of the title Web 3.0 (though I'm not encouraging anyone to use the term).

My only MAJOR concern is the Wave protocol's impact on the core standards of the Web. Clearly, Wave embraces HTML5. What is not clear is how Wave uses URLs and HTTP? A key question for me is "Can I create a bookmark to a wave or a wavelet?" I'm less concerned with HTTP, though maximizing "backward" compatibility between HTTP actions and XMPP actions would be good evolutionary design. The reason I'm less concerned about HTTP is that URLs are the foundation of the "shared information space" that is the Web. SMTP coexists with HTTP and both use HTML and URLs in the content they transfer. Even Roy Fielding is eager to replace HTTP, e.g., with Waka. It raises the interesting question of whether the Wave protocol is roughly what Roy was proposing with Waka.

Here are a couple of my major take aways:

The Wave client is a major proof of concept (or pilot project) for HTML5. If the wave client becomes a killer app, it will have a major (negative) impact on other RIA architectures.
The Wave protocol is a major proof of concept for the extended use of XMPP. It transforms it from a IM/Presence protocol to a general purpose bidirectional streaming protocol.
Whether or not the Wave client succeeds, Wave is undoubtedly going to have a major impact on how application designers approach web applications. The analogy would be that even if Google Maps had "failed" to become the dominant map site/service, it still had major impact on web app design.

Last but not least -- an observation from left field:

Wave is far closer in approach and capability to Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision than it is to Tim Berners-Lee WWW vision. Both had visions of a READ/WRITE web of linked information. One of the major design decisions TBL made was to drop the then-canonical-requirement of bidirectional links because of the scalability/complexity issue of the required "link servers" (or "link intermediaries"). Wave is fundamentally based on Wave servers. The Google tech talk on the design of the wave protocol explicitly mentions that Google rejected the approach of enabling P2P Wave interactions.

One major accidental design "decision" was when the NCSA Mosaic team decided to only implement rendering in their browser -- not editing. TBL and many others have observed that the last decade or so has been a series of attempts to return to the original vision of a read/write web, eg wikis, blogs, micro-blogging. Wave seems to me to be one of the best approaches ever put forward to redesigning the WWW to be read/write (real time read/write in fact).

We don't actually do what we propose -- we just propose it

2009-03-01T22:12:24-08:00

It's a Small World #3897:

I was recently in Manhattan on business and took the opportunity to have dinner with our dear friends Allison Tolman and her beau Peter Cohen. In the course of our conversation, I was explaining what an IT industry analyst does for a living by referring to the now-famous (at least in the worlds of analysts and consultants) UPS commercial about the two consultants that first aired, I believe, during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

As I described the ad, Peter's smile kept getting bigger and bigger. I paused and said, "What's so funny?" Peter replied, "That's my ad." My jaw dropped to the floor. I've know Peter for years and I never knew he'd been involved with one of my all-time favorite ads. Mostly, we would talk about his creative work for Sun Microsystems, but that's a topic for another post...؟

Check out Peter's other work as well.

A great article on modeling risk

2009-01-28T14:20:24-08:00

I finally got around to reading Risk Management in the New York Times Magazine. It is one of the best articles on

Wall Street
Modeling
Risk
How people game models
How all models eventually fail

that I have ever read. It is must reading.

All risk management systems, all (complex) models for that matter, are examples of robust yet fragile systems: robust in the face of expected events, yet extremely fragile in the face of unexpected events. Of course we will "fix" our models and rebuild. But remember Hawkins Law:

Progress does not involve replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is right, rather it involves replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.

And that more subtle error will one day cause the edifice built upon it to come crashing down. And so it shall always be, since there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Would you drop 10 friends for a hamburger?

2009-01-22T02:42:52-08:00

Has social software really led us to this? According to the NY Times Bits blog, nearly 234,000 facebookers were defriended by their so-called friends looking to score a free hamburger. Burger King ran a promotion on Facebook that gave someone a coupon for a free hamburger if they would drop 10 friends. Harsh but hilarious.

Facebook called a halt to the promotion because the promotion actually told the dropped friends they had been dropped...for a hamburger. Ouch! Something about privacy issues. How about just plain human cruelty issues? Can you top this one?

I would really like to me the person would came up with such a wickedly perverse marketing campaign. I think we would really hit it off.

PS I would never drop 10 Facebook friends for a mere hamburger. I'd need at least a Triple Whopper with Cheese. uhhhHHHhhrghhhuuuuHHHggrruhhhHHhh