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As enterprise supply chains and consumer demand chains have beome globalized, they continue to inefficiently share information “one-up/one-down”. Profound "bullwhip effects" in the chains cause managers to scramble with inventory shortages and consumers attempting to understand product recalls, especially food safety recalls. Add to this the increasing usage of personal mobile devices by managers and consumers seeking real-time information about products, materials and ingredient sources. The popularity of mobile devices with consumers is inexorably tugging at enterprise IT departments to shifting to apps and services. But both consumer and enterprise data is a proprietary asset that must be selectively shared to be efficiently shared.

About Steve Holcombe

Unless otherwise noted, all content on this company blog site is authored by Steve Holcombe as President & CEO of Pardalis, Inc. More profile information: View Steve Holcombe's profile on LinkedIn

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Entries in Audio (5)

Tuesday
Jun102008

Cloud Computing: Billowing Toward Data Ownership - Part I

Let's begin with the definition of Cloud Computing as currently found in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -

"The term ... derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet ... using an illustration of a cloud. The computing resources being accessed are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in data center locations. Target consumers are not concerned with the underlying technologies used to achieve the increase in server capability, [the availability of which] is sold simply as a service available on demand."

As reported in Data Center Knowledge, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently spoke about the boom in data center growth -

"The shift of services to the Cloud is getting us to think about data centers on a scale we never have before .... When you think about design, you can be very radical and come up with some huge improvements as you design for this kind of scale ...."

As reported in The Economist there is indeed a boom in the data center industry -

"Data centers are essential to nearly every industry and have become as vital to the functioning of society as power stations are .... American alone has more than 7,000 data centers .... And each is housing ever more servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data .... Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centers with ... more than 1 million servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month .... In America the number of servers is expected to grow to 15.8 million by 2010 - three times as many as a decade earlier."

This boom is building the Cloud where software as a service (SaaS) will find the 'oxygen' it needs to survive and thrive. The expansion of the Cloud augurs well that distributed data within the Cloud will come to substitute to some extent - perhaps substantially so - for data distributed outside of the Cloud.

One resulting consequence will likely be that mobile technology becomes promoted not as a storage device but as a utilitarian tool for taking a sip of data as needed, when needed, from the moisture of the Cloud. Imagine the Cloud holding the data for each user's personal mobile technology. Imagine users traveling as 'digital nomads' without laptop computers, because they will stay connected to the Cloud through their internet-accessible mobile phones.

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, spent a week recording his life as one such digital nomad for The Economist.


Click on image to play video podcast [5m 25s]

Here's the takeaway quote (paraphrased) from this podcast - "In my travels I keep a pen and a BlackBerry. My assumption is that the network has become ubiquitous across the world. The network is more a utility for me than a destination." 

    Again, data distribution becomes more about distribution of data stored within the Cloud and less about distribution of data stored on mobile technology. Lost your internet-accessible mobile phone in Paris, France? Purchase another one when you land in San Francisco and re-connect to the Cloud (and your address book, scheduling calendar, etc.) without missing a beat.

    Another likely consequence of the Cloud is that as people and businesses consider moving their computer storage and services into the Cloud, their direct technological control of information becomes more and more of a competitive driver. The buzz created by Dataportability.org is the early evidence of this driver. See Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership (Part I).

    But mere portability is not enough. It only whets the appetite of people and business owners for more technological control - not just legislated or contractual privacy protections. See, e.g., Personal Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm. That is, the Cloud significantly increases the opportunities for privacy friendly technologies, including data ownership technologies.

    "The [online] company that ... figures out ways of ... [technologically] building into [its] compliance systems ... [privacy] compliance mechanisms ... will be putting itself at a tremendous competitive advantage for attracting the services to operate in [the cloud computing environment]." Quoting Reidenberg in Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data.

    Steve Inskeep of NPR's Morning Edition recently talked with Craig Balding, an information technology security expert for a Fortune 500 company, about Cloud Computing. Here's the takeaway exchange from the 3m 30s audio clip 'Cloud Computing' Puts Computer Resources on Tap -

    Inskeep (2m25s): "Is somebody who runs a business, who used to have a filing cabinet in a filing room, and then had computer files and computer databases, really going to be able or want to take the risk of shipping all their files out to some random computer they don't even know where it is and paying to rent storage that way?"

    Balding: "Yes, that's really a key question, even though these are reputable companies ... there's going to be a whole ecosystem that builds up around around [Cloud Computing] ... of smaller companies that will offer additional services on top of [Cloud Computing's] basic services .... so what I've done is [I've} actually started up a blog [called] cloudsecurity.org and what I'm trying to do is to get the various cloud providers to come and have a discussion about what security they are doing ..."

    If you are an IT security expert, I would encourage you to take a moment to familiarize yourself with Mr. Balding's Cloud Security blog. Security is an absolute essential for the Cloud, as it has been for databases of any size since they were first engineered.

    But security ... is not enough.

    As Bruce Schneier has written in Secrets And Lies - Digital Security In A Networked World -

    "The average person can not tell good security from bad security... the world is filled with specialties that are critical to public safety and security, and yet are beyond the comprehension of the general population... Commerce works the same way. When was the last time you personally checked the accuracy of a gas station's pumps, or a taxicab's meter, or the weight and volume information on packaged foods?" [emphasis added]

    Schneier's language parallels the central theme of Banking on Granular Information Ownership -

    "People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. That’s a good thing because without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it .... [By comparison, we] live in a world that is at once awash in on-demand information courtesy of the Internet, and at the same time the Internet is strangely impotent when it comes to information ownership ....

    In many respects the Internet is like the Wild West because there is no information web similar to our monetary banking system. No similar integrated system exists for precisely and efficiently delivering our medical records to a new physician, or for providing access to a health history of the specific animal slaughtered for that purchased steak. Nothing out there compares with how the banking system facilitates gasoline purchases."

    Banks meet the expectations of their customers by providing them with security, yes, but also credibility, compensation, control, convenience, integration and verification. It is the dynamic combination of these that instills in customers the confidence that they continue to own their money, even while it is in the hands of a third-party bank.


    No, security is not sufficient by itself to compel the hypothetical business owner, whom Inskeep was referencing, to take the risk of putting his or her information into the Cloud.

    As blogged in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership (Part IV), nobody has done a better job of describing why data ownership matters to the use and effectiveness of big databases than Marshall Van Alstyne. And I continue to be charmed with the 1994 publication he co-authored entitled, Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design.

    You might have seen this before, but here’s my favorite quote from Van Alstyne's paper -

    The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data.” (emphasis added)

    I know I am in effect bootstrapping Van Alstyne's research results.

    I am taking liberties by stretching his research from big organizational databases to cover that of the Cloud. I recognize that the Cloud is already of a scale that is astronomically larger than even what Van Alstyne in his mid-1990's research could have possibly imagined it would become today.

    But when I read Van Alstyne's paper there is an insistent voice inside of me that says "data ownership matters to the Cloud for the same reasons it matters to big, organizational databases." 


    Clouds V1 from Robert Beyer on Vimeo.

    [This concludes Part I of a three part series. On to Part II.]

    Thursday
    May222008

    Personal Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm

    Google began offering online personal health records (PHRs) to the public this last Monday. So earlier this week I clicked over to Google Health and signed up for an account.

    I was offered the choice of conveniently entering in my medical profile (e.g., age, sex, blood type, allergies, test results, immunizations, etc.). Or, though it was a moot point, I could also upload any medical information of mine that might already be held by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, Longs Drug Stores, Medco, CVS Caremark, Quest Diagnostics, RxAmerica, or Walgreens Pharmacy.

    And then I did not fill out any of my medical profile information.

    I did not because while it looks like a beautiful information garden that Google is offering, it’s nonetheless a garden that has been charted within a continuing privacy paradigm that unnecessarily allocates more power into the hands of the garden's gatekeeper (i.e., Google) than to the actual gardeners themselves (like you and me).

    The privacy paradigm in this instance is not perpetuated by the Congressional Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, but by Google’s Health Terms of Service …

    “If you create, transmit, or display health or other information while using Google Health, you may provide only information that you own or have the right to use. When you provide your information through Google Health, you give Google a license to use and distribute it in connection with Google Health and other Google services. However, Google may only use health information you provide as permitted by the Google Health Privacy Policy, your Sharing Authorization, and applicable law. Google is not a "covered entity" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the regulations promulgated thereunder ("HIPAA"). As a result, HIPAA does not apply to the transmission of health information by Google to any third party.”

    Now, don’t get me wrong. Google Health is a worthy service by the standards of the prevailing privacy paradigm. There are going to be a number of people who will choose to enter in their medical information.

    Notwithstanding, Google Health indeed represents the predominant privacy paradigm of data possession by online companies at a time when the momentum is beginning to shift toward a 'data ownership' paradigm - see Dataportability, Traceability and Data Ownership - for truly empowering information owners and producers with technological possession of their own information.

    Furthermore, it is difficult for me to imagine Google convincingly claiming the moral high ground for PHRs when I read about U.S. Senators, in a Congressional hearing held the day after Google Health was made public, pressing executives from Yahoo, Google, and Cisco Systems “to justify their business practices in China and other Internet-censoring countries”. See Senators weigh new laws over China online censorship.

    An article in The New England Journal of Medicine was recently published entitled Personally Controlled Online Health Data — The Next Big Thing in Medical Care?

    “Most physicians in the United States have paper medical records — the sort that doctors have kept for generations. A minority have electronic records that provide, at a minimum, tools for writing progress notes and prescriptions, ordering laboratory and imaging tests, and viewing test results .... Yet electronic health data are poised for an online transformation that is being catalyzed by Dossia (a nonprofit consortium of major employers), Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and other Web services that are seeking expanded roles in the $2.1 trillion U.S. health care system.” [emphasis added]

    If you choose not to gain access to the full text of this article by subscribing to The New England Journal of Medicine, see Internet Health Records: Convenience at a Cost? by Joanne Silberner on the National Public Radio website (which is available in both text and a 4m 36sec audio).

    Silberner does a professional job but it seems like once you have read (or listened) to one of these articles about PHRs, you have pretty much read them all. What she familiarly relates is that despite the involvement of Dossia, Google Health, and Microsoft HealthVault, creating and maintaining a full health record may be a job for the compulsive and, on top of that, medical records experts are worried about privacy.

    Holding that thought ...

    ... let’s pause for a moment to jump from the world of PHRs over to current events vis-à-vis data portability within social networking. Michael Arrington blogs a very neat summary in Data Portability – It’s The New Walled Garden at TechCrunch.

    "A huge battle is underway between Google, MySpace and Facebook around control of user profiles and, therefore, users themselves …. Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over. So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site …. The companies with the profiles (mostly MySpace and Facebook) know this. And they know that to keep users happy, and to stop them from entering in all that friend data into other sites, they need to make their data at least somewhat portable. Not too portable, mind you. That means they’d lose control. But just portable enough …. [emphasis added]

     Arrington further states ...

    Google is a little different. They don’t have a social networking presence in the U.S., so they are trying to get in the middle between the guys with the profiles (like Facebook) and the sites that want the data. Their Friend Connect product does just that, and makes them an important data middle man. That position can later be leveraged intensely. In fact, in many ways Google can become the most important social network without actually having a social network." [emphasis added]

    In other words, Google's Friend Connect provides it with an opportunity to place MySpace and Facebook within a Google ‘picture frame’ from the perspective of internet users. And that picture frame is the opening to a walled garden of data – yours and mine. Whomever controls the entrance to the garden controls ... well, you get the picture, right?

    And, coming back to the world of PHRs, it takes no imagination to conclude that Google might do the same with Google Health. That is, Google Health as 'a picture frame' for Microsoft HealthVault, Dossia, etc.

    But for all these machinations inside of Silicon Valley the question still goes begging ...

    • Is there to be a critical mass of internet users who will actually put their medical profile online under the current privacy paradigm?

    Speaking only for myself, the answer is ‘no’.

    Monday
    May122008

    Data Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV

    [return to Part III]

    Connecting Portability to Traceability

    Let’s begin this final part with a nicely presented video interview of Tim Berners-Lee, the widely acclaimed inventor of the World Wide Web, by Technology Review.

    Video: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web
    Technology Review (March, 2007)
    Clicking on this link opens the video in a separate window for an 8 min 24 sec video.
    Close that window when the video is complete and you'll be returned here.

     
    Berners-Lee has a degree in physics from The Queen’s College, Oxford. He well expresses in the video the insight of an academic technologist preaching the benefits of the emerging Semantic Web as, essentially, one big, connected database.

    For instance, Berners-Lee discusses life sciences not once but twice during this interview in the context of making more and better semantically connected information available to doctors, emergency responders and other healthcare workers. He sees this, and rightly so, as being particularly important to fight both (a) epidemics and pandemics, and (b) more persistent diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Presumably that means access to personal health records. However, there is no mention in this interview about concerns over the ownership of information.

    Here’s a more recent interview excerpt in March, 2008, initiated by interviewer Paul Miller of ZDNet, in which Berners-Lee does acknowledge data ownership fear factors.

    Miller (03:21): “You talked a little bit about people's concerns … with loss of control or loss of credibility, or loss of visibility. Are those concerns justified or is it simply an outmoded way of looking at how you appear on the Web?”

    Berners-Lee: “I think that both are true. In a way it is reasonable to worry in an organization … You own that data, you are worried that if it is exposed, people will start criticizing [you] ….

    So, there are some organizations where if you do just sort of naively expose data, society doesn't work very well and you have to be careful to watch your backside. But, on the other hand, if that is the case, there is a problem. [T]he Semantic Web is about integration, it is like getting power when you use the data, it is giving people in the company the ability to do queries across the huge amounts of data the company has.

    And if a company doesn't do that, then, it will be seriously disadvantaged competitively. If a company has got this feeling where people don't want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem ….

    Well actually, it would expose... all these inconsistencies. Well, in a way, you (sic) got the inconsistencies already, if it exposes them then actually it helps you. So, I think, it is important for the leadership in the company … to give kudos to the people who provided the data upon which a decision was made, even though they weren't the people who made the decision.” (emphasis added)

    Elsewhere in this ZDNet interview, Berners-Lee announces that the core pieces for development of the Semantic Web are now in place (i.e., SPARQL, RDF, URI, XML, OWL, and GRDDL). But, again, what I find lacking is that these core pieces do not by themselves provide a mechanism for addressing data ownership issues.

    I wish I could introduce Berners-Lee to Marshall Van Alstyne.

    Actually, they may already know each other. Like Berners-Lee, Van Alstyne is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Van Alstyne is an information economist whose work in the area of data ownership I have greatly admired for some time (though I have yet to have had the pleasure of making his acquaintance).

    There are other noteworthy recent papers by Van Alstyne but, since I first came across it several years ago, I have continued to be enamored with the prescience of a 1994 publication he co-authored entitled, Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design. Here’s my favorite quote from that paper.

    The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data.” (emphasis added)

    Whether they know each other or not, the reason I would want to see them introduced is that I don’t hear Van Alstyne’s socio-economic themes in the voice of Berners-Lee. In fact I have checked out the online biographies provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of the very fine team that Berners-Lee, as the head of W3C, has brought together. I find no references to academic degrees or experiential backgrounds in either sociology or economics. The W3C team is heavily laden with technologists.

    And, why not? After all, the mission of the W3C is one of setting standards for the technological marvel that is the World Wide Web. One must set boundaries and bring focus to any enterprise or endeavor, and Berners-Lee has reasonably done so by directing the W3C team to connect the data that society is either already providing, albeit free of data ownership concerns (i.e., the information already available in massively populated government databases, academic databases, or other publicly accessible sources).

    It’s just that I wish there was some cross-pollination going on between the W3C and the likes of Van Alstyne that was resulting, for instance, in something like author-controlled XML (A-XML) as exampled in Parts II and III, above (and, again, below).

    That the W3C is not focusing on data ownership is an opportunity for the likes of Dataportability.org. Similarly, as mentioned in Part III, above, in the world of supply chains a likely candidate for a central ‘any product data bank’ would be EPCglobal, the non-profit supply chain consortium. But EPCglobal is a long way from focusing on the kind of data ownership proposed in this writing, or perhaps even envisioning as an organization that they might want to do so.

    Like EPCglobal within the ecology of supply chains, Dataportability.org has seated at its table some very powerful members of the social networking ecology (i.e., Google, Plaxo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, SixApart and Microsoft). There is a critical mass in those members that provides an opportunity for an organization like Dataportability.org to become a neutral, central data bank for portable information among its members for the benefit of social networking subscribers.

    For instance, for e-mail addresses desired by a Facebook subscriber to be portable to other social networking websites, Facebook would add tools to the subscriber's interface for seamless registration of the e-mail addresses with a central, portability database branded with Facebook's trademark (but in fact separately administered by Dataportability.org).  The subscriber would merely enter the chosen e-mail addresses into his or her interface, click on the 'register' button, and automatically author the following draft XML object ...

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>
    <emailaddr>noname01@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
    <emailaddr>noname02@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
    <emailaddr>noname03@pardalis.com</emailaddr>
    </PortabilityDictionary_DraftElements>

    ... which would come to be registered in the central portability 'bank' (again, administered by Dataportability.org) as the following XML object.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

    <emailaddr UniquePointer =
    " http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21263 "/>

    <emailaddr UniquePointer =
    " http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21264 "/>

    <emailaddr UniquePointer =
    " http://www.centralportabilitybank.org/email_IDs/21265 "/>

    </PortabilityDictionary_RegisteredElements>

    Again, as illustrated in Part III, above, this would set the stage for a viable model for Dataportability.org, as a non-profit consortium managed by the likes of Facebook, Flickr, etc., to provide more than just portability services. Now, with a centralized registry service for A-XML objects (i.e., author-controlled, informational objects) the portability service could easily be stretched into a non-collaborative data authoring and sharing service.

    IP Comment: Compare and contrast the collaborative data authoring and sharing systems illustrated by Xerox's US Patent 5,220,657, Updating local copy of shared data in a collaborative system Φ and eiSolutions' US Patent 6,240,414, Method of resolving data conflicts in a shared data environment.

    And, again, the 'data ownership' service would presumably be branded by each of the distributed ‘bank members’ (like Facebook, Flikr, etc.) as their own service.

    What might this data ownership service entail? To instill confidence in subscribers that they ‘own’ their portable data, what could be provided to members by Facebook, Flickr, etc. as part of the data ownership service made possible by the central Dataportability.org?

    For instance: 

    • Each time an administrative action is taken by Dataportability.org affecting the registered data object - or a granular data element within a registered object - the subscriber could choose to be automatically notified with a fine-grained report.
    • Each time the registered data object is shared - or data elements within the object are granularly shared - according to the permissions established by the subscriber, he or she could choose be immediately, electronically notified with a fine-grained report.
    • Online, on-demand granular information traceability reports (i.e., fine-grained reports mapping out who accesses or uses a subscribers shared information)
    • Catastrophe data back-up services
    • etc. 

    Thus could Dataportability.org light a data ownership pathway for both the W3C and EPCglobal. 

    Concluding Remarks 

    The fundamental point of this multi-entry blog is that data ownership matters. With it, the Semantic Web stands the best chance for reaching its full potential for the porting of records between and among social networking sites, and for the tracking and discovering of information along both information and product supply chains.

    And holding that positive thought in mind, it’s time to end this writing with a little portability rock n’ roll. It's courtesy of Danny Ayers. Enjoy!

    Thursday
    May082008

    Wal-Mart's Widening Lens of Sustainability

    The following Social Innovation Conversations podcast is produced by the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

    Andrew Ruben & Jib Ellison
    Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
    Lens of Sustainability
    [runtime: 00:54:16, recorded 2006-12-07]

     
    At the time of this audio Andy Ruben was the Vice-President for corporate strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart. He is now head of Branding at Sam's. Jib Ellison is the founder of Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting which is characterized as Wal-Mart's sustainability partner. The conversation was moderated before Stanford MBA students.

    The central theme of this audio is made by Ellison early in the conversation.

    "The greatest untapped source of competitive advantage in our time - in [the United States] in particular - is found in ... radical adoption of sustainability principles into [for profit] business systems." (emphasis added)

    What makes this all very interesting are representations - supported by anecdotes - by both Ellison and Rubin that Wal-Mart is shifting from its Every Day Low Price mindset toward a broader vision that they call the lens of sustainability.

    Ruben and Ellison assert - and, in many respects, compellingly so - that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision is inexorable. And there seems to be a very good sense and understanding - especially by Ruben -  that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision will rely heavily upon trusted information sharing among and between the many participants of complex, international supply chains feeding into the world's largest retailer.

    If so, the work of EPCglobal and the W3C will no doubt come to feel the gravitational pull of Wal-Mart's sustainability vision. The question will then be whether these consortiums will develop nimble, architectural standards supportive of data ownership by information producers, big and small. See also Dataportability, Traceability and Data Ownership elsewhere in this blog.

    These are the kinds of tools that Wal-Mart will need to overcome the social, political and economic fear factors to information sharing that seem to exponentially increase each time a new fragment of participation is added to a product supply chain. 

    Monday
    May052008

    The Disruption of Cloud Computing

    Any move toward 'Cloud Computing', like any move toward the Semantic Web, will have to mean a greater and greater need for on-demand data traceability that goes way beyond mere password protection.

    Listen to the NPR report, Cloud Computing Puts Computer Resources on Tap.

    See also Peter Rip's journal entry entitled The Quiet Disruption in Process.

    At the very least, data ownership is about on-demand data traceability. That is, knowing who is doing what with one's information when one wants to know.

    People and businesses need to feel as comfortable with placing their valuable information into the hands of an online company as they are in placing their valuable money into the hands of their banker. See Banking on Granular Information Ownership.

    The calculus is really just that simple.