2011

Technology and the Zone of Uselessness

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They let me out for a short trip to the shops today, and whilst I was waiting to pay, I watched an old geezer struggling to put his chip'n'pin card in the right way round.  Which set me off thinking about what happens when you get old, and at what point does the pace of technology evolution overtake and you are left in the dust, a crumbly, fumbling, useless old curmudgeon, no longer able to function properly nor interact sensibly with the environment.

To further the analysis we can consider this table of the evolution of user interfaces (keeping a fairly tight scope to cover mainly electronic means)…

Primary Mode
of Interaction		 Examples Era of invention
Tap Telegraph key (button) Late Georgian
Shout Candlestick phone Victorian
Rotate Rotary phone, Wireless with Bakelite knobs, steering wheel (drive by wire) Victorian
Bash / Prod  QWERTY keyboard, keypad Victorian
Look Eye tracking Early Miss-Marple
Wiggle Joystick Wilson-WhiteHeatian for electrical (although Early Edwardian/La Belle Époque (for mechanical)
Blow Typing aids,
Blow controlled mobile phone, ignoring the Captains speaking tube…		 Flower-Power
Waggle Mouse Engelbarto-Xerox PARCian
Scribble GridPad, Apple Newton, Palm, Ipaq, Tablet PC Yuppie-time
Fondle & Stroke Smart phone, tablet SonyEricssonian-Jobsian
Wave Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect, data glove TomCruisian
Shout 2 Speech Recognition Rock and Roll, but it hasn't really happened yet properly, maybe JeremyClarksonian, when it does (JC is famously unable to use any voice operated equipment)
Think emotiv EPOC neuroheadset Yuppie-time

…and whilst you can see that a lot of stuff was actually invented a long time ago, having been around for over 100 years in some form, there has been quite a rush of invention in more recent years, hanging on the cot-tails of the primary evolution of computing technology, no surprise there, I suppose.

One of the more interesting insights, for me as an analyst and connoisseur of number crunching, is that whilst many of the newer inventions have been for various methods of computer control,  there is a paucity of newly invented data entry methods, beyond the humble and ancient keyboard.  

With the dominant design of the QWERTY keyboard to the fore, there have been really no successful disruptive plays, and most inventions have focussed on just reworking the layout (e.g., DVORAK, frogpad, FITALY and their kin).  Chord keyboards made a bid, but, of course, like any shorthand method you need to learn a new language, and they never took off.

The FITALY keyboard is a nice design that fits well with modern joy-pad units like xBox and smartphone touch interfaces, as it minimise the amount of clicks, or finger movement movement to type a letter so is quite fast , however at $49 for a tablet computer it is never going to amount to much

Extending the idea of chord keyboards and use of non-verbal language, there is undoubtedly some scope for non-keyboard data-entry devices using gesture control  to recognise sign language (and that hopefully avoid Gorilla-arm that afflicted early days vertical touch screen users).   Although, the new “language” learning problem still exists, and Babel will always be an issue, unless we all adopt Ameslan or Microsoftlan, or AppleJobsLan.

Now I believe that I can rightly consider myself  pretty well up on the world of technology and there is very little that fazes me.

In fact, many pieces of broken equipment will just fix them in my presence, or so it seems, when my family call the DadHelpdesk, and I just lean over languidly and in my calming presence, and the recalcitrant kit just bursts in to life (maybe with a judicious key press or two)

But don't ask me about *&^$*^%ing plumbing – compression joints, meh!

So I do think that my threshold of uselessness is likely to be pretty high (or do I mean low), and consoling me today, my elder son told me that “people don't get dumb, they just get old” (i.e, if they were stupid to start with, they will be stupid, old people), so maybe there will be some hope…

However, like VCRs, which kids can programme with ease whilst their parents just fumble, the evolution  of new technologies and UIs in particular, is much influenced by the volume of fluent, capable users, which itself flows with the generations.

To this, one area of technology that I do not really bother with is computer games beyond a half-finished PC version of Dune in 1992, I'm just not interested in playing them (I can feel my life slipping away).  Therefore I am not particularly adroit when it comes to using a joypad, and have not built up great dexterity and flexibility in my hands and fingers (unlike most teenage boys) for that type of device.  The one time I played Castle Wolfenstein, I spent the whole game bumping into walls whilst staring at the floor or sky!  And Second Life, oh so bad!

More so, I  have never been able to make the three-fingered boy scout sign – I never was a boy scout, also just not interested – my hands just don't bend that way.

And finally, I have a very highly tuned embarrassment inhibitor which tries to stop me doing things that would cause a red face (it doesn't always work, even with my personaility type…)

So what is my old-age technology nightmare scenario?

  • having to visit Castle Wolfenstein to get my pension…
  • …electronically bruised after a long, slow, meandering (virtual) walk from the entrance of the Cyberspace Business Park…
  • …inputting my data by waving my arms wildly whilst holding my walking stick trying not to fall over…
  • …and making complex mudra with my crippled and twisted old hands.

Ye gods!  Build me a Bluetooth neural uplink, and make it snappy!

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Elephants…

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Spring is busting out all over up here in Lincolnshire, spurred on by the lovely weather recently.  The swallows are back in the barn, always good to see that they made it back from South Africa (where the RSPB tells me British swallows over-winter).  The trees and flowers are all blooming, not quite yet into the Bluebell season yet, but plenty of colour… Lincolnshire Spring 2011

Whilst enjoying the sunshine and in the full flush of the other joys of Spring, one of the topics on my mind recently recently has been Service Integration, an important ingredient for delivering excellent IT services.  The nub of the issue that Service Integration looks to solve is like this:

In recent years, the trend for contracting IT Services has been to push beyond the big-bang mega-deals of old to selective outsourcing of like groups of IT services , dubbed “towers” by industry pundits such as Gartner and their ilk, thus:

IT Service Towers

I won’t bore you with the detail here as to why this model doesn’t work that well

However, user services are often a combination of pieces from each tower, so to make users happy, avoid incident “ping-pong” and other good things, services really need to be managed in a joined-up way, orthogonally to the towers, like this

End to end service model

This glues, or integrates, if you like, the different elements of a complete service, hence, this joining-up is “Service Integration”

You could abbreviate Service Integration to SI, but this is ripe for confusion with the older usage of SI, as Systems Integration, all about gluing together bits of software and hardware to make new systems, i.e., Building systems rather Running services.

There have been a number of landmark deals espousing the Service Integration model , from ABN/AMRO and the “Guardian” model back on 2005, through to the most recent state if the art at National Grid with the recently penned deal with HP ( Computing article on National Grid / HP SMI deal and HP Press Release).

One of the usual suspects in building such a model, is dear old ITIL, now ISO/IEC20000

Not to be confused with Tyltyl and Mytyl, characters from Maeterlink’s Blue Bird, a well-known childrens’ classic

ITIL is a worthy model  and has been around for many years since penned by the CCTA, and is now at version 3,. Version 3 is quite good, as it has finally acknowledged that services have a life-cycle, and gosh, this sort of stuff is iterative (what a buzz).  V1 and V2 in contrast had rather static views of the world)

I was astonished recently in one of those rare, but memorable, jaw-dropping, goggle-eyed moments when a sales guy from some other organisation opined in a meeting (to paraphrase) “Why all this fuss about V3, there’s some really good stuff in V2”.  Everybody in the room looked  at the poor unfortunate in deadly silence as he swallowed his foot and half his leg up to the knee and lower thigh, and from that moment he became nobody, a nebbish, a zero.  Ouch!

Nebbish – a Yiddish word meaning “an insignificant, pitiful person; a nonentity”, very effectively characterised in a book I once read but can no longer recall the title so cannot name-check or credit the author (sorry), as a person who when they walk into a room is like someone just walked out

ITIL V3 was published in 2007, but only just really made it into the 21st century with its iterative, nay, agile, flavouring, yet there are a number of “elephants in the room”, major topics not covered that are essential components in the full business architecture of modern IT service delivery…

Not just a few elephants, but a thundering herd in fact, in the form of (not exhaustively):

  • Innovation
  • Managing Technology investments
  • Multi-vendor service integration
  • Deal Structure  and Partnership Management
  • Pricing, Billing & Charging
  • People, Culture & Structure (at least 3 elephants, in just this line alone.)

COBIT makes a much broader sweep in its attempt to embrace the whole entity that is a living, breathing IT organisation and seems to fill many of the gaps not covered by ITIL.

Yes, I know I bang on about Innovation quite a bit in these posts, but it is a common current complaint I hear that innovation has been squeezed out  in deals struck in the 2000s, and now the demand is to find ways to enable it again, even to the extent of considering to pay an Innovation “premium”.

COBIT, founded in GRC, and providing an excellent check-list with which to herd most of the elephants, is as blind as ITIL when it comes to Innovation.  If you search through the text of the COBIT 4.1 framework definition doc, you will find the word “innovation” writ not once at all in its 197 pages!

GRC = Governance, Risk Management & Compliance, in case you wanted to know

Risk management is as central to innovation and agility as it is to the philosophy of COBIT with its focus on control.  Yet there is a classic schism between the COBIT GRC-based shibboleths and the ways of innovation and agility, and one might cynically draw the conclusion that COBIT is about stopping things getting done, whereas innovation and agility are the polar opposite – “skunkworks” innovation is the antithesis of the GRC mindset, even anathema.   And, of course, COBIT is process-oriented, just like ITIL.  Good, but rather 1990s Hammer & Champy and still further to go to get into the 21st century.

The COBIT 4.1 Executive Summary contains a hugely contentious and flawed.headline on page 13 vide “PROCESSES NEED CONTROLS”. To justify this you need to follow this syllogism:

  • Processes are risks
  • Risk need controls
  • Therefore, Processes need controls
    (yes, this is, indeed, nonsense)

This does not compute, the base premise is wrong: Yes, High risks, whether processes or otherwise do need controls, but don’t waste time putting controls on low risk processes.

“Quick, evacuate the building, we’ve had a slightly embarrassing failure to detect a root cause in Problem Management”

Also, processes can be controls, so do we add meta-control processes to control the control processes? – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ad nauseam.

You may think that I am  being rather harsh on the solid works of people who have created ITIL, COBIT et al.  These frameworks are all useful check-lists of best practice, but need to be used with some care, lest the medicine kill the patient.  And they help with the standardisation of service descriptions when making like-for-like comparison somewhat easier in the sourcing and procurement process.  However, they are inevitably behind the leading edge. for example, getting joined-up in the customer experience dimension (orthogonal to both towers and process orientation) is yet another step to go.

On the other hand, getting up the curve to build Innovation into modern IT service deals, well, that can be done right now (give me a call!)

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Three Laws of Innovation?

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A couple of topics popped up together recently to make me think some about Innovation and maybe what might be considered as the “Three Laws of Innovation”

Yes, again, why not, Innovation theory (and practice) is very interesting and a favourite subject area of mine

(Embedding further) Three laws were good enough for Newton, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Kepler, and Thermodynamics (Thermo-man?), so is enough for us here

The two topics that pinged on my radar were the DAB radio switch-over and  the growth of mobile “apps”.

Very observant, young man, you might say with cutting irony, considering how the latter elephant is not exactly a not a small thing to notice, however, the specific shading that drew my attention is the conflation of “apps” with the relatively absurd concept of the “Consumerisation of IT”, but that is something for another day

As is generally well known (maybe at least to the connoisseurs of such), there are two great peaks of thinking about Innovation (or at least well promoted, anyway), which are strong candidates for Laws 1 & 2:

  • Utterback’s theory of “Dominant Design”, and
  • Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation”

I shall ignore Foster’s S-Curves, fun but largely useless without 20:20 hindsight.  Although his retrospective observations on historic R&D yield in mature industries were also interesting

It happens that both of these theories are about competition – essentially, quasi-Darwinian “survival of the fittest” ideas in the commercial eco-system.  This prompts the thought that ideas are like animals or plants colonising new territory and perhaps supplanting existing species.

Indeed one can conceive the evolution of computers in just such a way,   In the first stage, the mainframe mega-dinosaurs lumbered in to empty lands and all five of them hunkered down in their primeval swamp…

Computer_Generation_1

The slower and smaller minicomputers grew up and ate some of the mainframe lunch but otherwise nested in  vacant slots in the eco-system…

Computer_Generation_2

Then the nimble and populous Personal Computers burst on to the scene and set up home next to the others, but also occupy some completely different space…

Computer_Generation_3

And most recently, the little amoebal-mobile devices sneak in, erode some of the desktop territory but also set home home in a new country (and they opened a shop too, well, a marketplace, and everything)

Computer_Generation_4

The point here being that it is not all about competition although this does impact some of the legacy techno-animals but, in many cases, the new mechanisms opened up new territories and enabled some new things.

It should also be observed that Christensen’s theory applies well here as the cost performance of computing has fallen dramatically so that the dinosaur mainframes are now well and truly outclassed by the lower performance systems that came in from underneath, such that, that a typical mainframe is no more powerful than reasonably sized Wintel enterprise server, but about 100 times more expensive to feed and water!

In the model above, although there are some new territories to invade, the spaces between older technologies are getting ever smaller with the “idea-space” becoming ever more congested and the eco-system constipated.  The niche features and almost fractal scale of new mobile apps squeezing into uses not previously envisaged…

just how did we ever live before without those iFart apps?

…together with the growing variety of device formats seem to mirror this reducing space into which new things must fit.   Just so, oh best beloved, indeed, this is a feature of another evolutionary effect: specialisation.

Tangentially, this notion of congestion does raise the question is that can/will the total “idea-space” fill up?

At the end the of 2010, the US Patent Office (profligate as it is in granting patent “all-sorts” due to its perverse budgeting incentives) records shows that there were 4,767,685 utility patents (broadly, “inventions”) granted in the 47 years between 1963 and 2010, and the annual rate of grants is increasing.  If you project the growth curve (it is a good fit for a third order polynomial), then in just the next 20 years, the number of utility patents will double to over 10 million…

PatentGrowth

…something is going to break…

Consider, for example, the evolution of electric tools, for example, a thrilling topic perhaps of rather particular interest, but well known to DIY old-timers.

In the early days, a power drill was a treasured item, costing a kings ransom to buy, and then enhanced by the ingenious design of various add-ons that allowed the drill to power other devices.  However, the combination tools were rather average at the job and you spent ages swapping attachments to get a job done.

Now, the cost of base motor-drive parts has reached the point (relative to average income) that dedicated tools are generally in B&Q and all good local stockists (yes, even here in Lincolnshire).  The evolutionary generations are broadly thus…

Electric_Tools_evolution

….and the key point is here that specialisation has followed an age of standard/generic, multi-purpose designs.

On the topic of power tools and attachments, we shall not dwell on a very dark DIY episode many years ago, when one gimlet sharp child of mine watching out of the window said, “Mummy, why is Daddy hitting that piece of wood with the jigsaw?”. Gilly wisely closed the curtains and drew attention away from the gathering storm clouds outside, &%@+^$(&^%$%$%^^%&$…

In the evolutionary context, the thin-client Internet browser has much in common with the 1970s Black and Decker drill, it performs some functions well (the hole-making ability) but does others really badly.  The central management of pages on a web-site and server push for software add-ons is very good but, in contrast, browser-based transactional applications are appallingly bad (vide the immensely frustrating and totally unacceptable experience of the https payment page in a checkout process that displays “page not found”, cue lost or duplicated orders and payments).  In other words, a very poor substitute for a properly constructed fat-client, event driven, distributed application

As an aside, the nineties/noughties Browser can be considered an example of the “When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail” principle, graphically:Hammer

The pendulum is now swinging away from the generic macro browser to micro apps as fat clients, with a huge range of variety, diversity, and utility.  Whilst there is a potential for a tremendous mess and confusing mishmash, some of the previous lessons have (fortunately?) been enshrined within the application architectures with common frameworks and interfaces (e.g., Android security permissions and sharing” model) and UI design (e.g, Windows Phone 7 Metro style guide)

Considering that “apps” are no more then evolved, differentiated versions of web-pages, recasting Apple’s trademarked bon-mots “there’s an app for that”  back in time becomes “there’s a web-page for that”….

Not so impressive, but invokes a scary vision that there are over 20 billion pages indexed on the surface of the WWWeb, and many more in the deep, suggesting that if even a fraction of the pages and their features were to escape as mobile apps, then there could be millions, if not, billions of apps to come, and then die on our phones like the husks of a defeated blue-bottle infestation

So what about the DAB switch-over, I hear you cry, what does this have to do with the price of fish?  Well, DAB is an example of a somewhat different trend of technological sophistication, and growing complexity.

A quick trip to the dictionary confirms that “Sophistication” and “Sophistry” have the same root in the Ancient Greek word for wisdom (σοφία, sophia) which should be a good thing, you might think. However. the fallacious, specious and dishonest taint of sophistry slops over into a pejorative meaning, and so your average fashion-victim socialite may be unaware that being called “sophisticated”  is not cool and an oh so subtle insult!

Unlike the rather simplistic two-dimensional competitive territory model above, of course, the “idea-space” is much bigger and more multi-dimensional. Consider here an abridged picture of the evolution of the modern auto-mobile, from fire and wheel to pinnacle of multiplexed CAN-bus wiring and other goodies that can no longer be fixed with a few Lucas connectors and the ubiquitous half-inch spanner of my youth.  Each generation of innovation is built on the foundations of previous, and also mashed up from wildly different sources to build a pyramid of complexity

So. back to DAB, in my mind which is tuned always to consider contingencies, it is a comforting thought that when civilisation falls and we are hiding from the hordes of flesh-eating zombies, we can at least make an AM radio from a handful of salvaged components, whereas DAB FM is at least two orders of more complex – no, it’s just a recipe of the end of humanity as we know it.

So drawing this monologue to a close, which Innovation mega-theory would make a good candidate to sit in a trinity of the Laws of Innovation together with with Dominant Design and Disruptive Innovation?

Might be interesting to draw in something around that is not just about competition as the other two, but perhaps combination / complexity.   Food for thought and an ongoing search, I think.

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