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
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Over the first 12 months of the Data Ownership in the Cloud group on LinkedIn, the following are the top 12 discussions as rated in descending order by the number of comments:
My attendance at IIW9 was strange and familiar. Surreal and real. It was like 'coming home' to a home I'd never seen before. A kind of deja vu.
My experiences with 'identity' have been in the registration of radically serialized data objects (i.e., data elements with GUIs) that are authored, published and distributed by supply chain participants to supply chains. The focus has been about giving product supply chains the opportunity to know more about the products by providing more permissions control over the shared data. This was first theoretically applied to supply chains for chemical products, and then actually engineered and deployed in 2003-06 to the U.S. beef livestock supply chain following the 2003 'mad cow' case. The developed system was - and is - in the form of a multi-tenant, enterprise class system (we marketed it as a 'data bank') that appears to fit well into the cross-section of the Venn diagram in the September, 2008 blog Venn and the art of data sharing by Eve Maler. That is, with one significant exception. The 'identity movement' was essentially non-existent in 2003-06 (IIW #1 was held in October, 2005) and so we did not at that time have the benefit of client-side or browser-side or smartphone-side means, functions and standards related to data identity.
In lieu of identity standards what we did was bake in our own patented business rules for shifting the capabilities of a relational SQL server toward the registration of objects; objects that would then be granularly revealed, traceable, and controllable to the nth degree of sharing among the tenants of the data bank. Then we thought we would be in a good position to tackle integration with other data silo's driving standards for universal data tags. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the coliseum - the USDA's efforts for introducing mandatory animal identification to agriculture collapsed in late 2006 predictably affecting every supply chain company who had bet that the USDA would do what they said they would do. Since then my company, Pardalis, has essentially been anchored in a 'safe harbor' called North Dakota State University.
Earlier this year I had discussions with Microsoft-Fargo, and then Microsoft-Redmond, that led up to Microsoft's then Worldwide Director of CRM, ERP and Supply Chain Solutions. What I was saying to Microsoft was that neither Dynamics CRM nor SharePoint were relevant outside of the federated or vertically integrated parts of supply chains. But what was broadly used by SMBs - where CRM and SharePoint were not - was Microsoft Excel. And so the logical next step was to connect supply chains end-to-end with a 'data bank' blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I didn't begin to tune into InfoCards and what Microsoft's Chief Identity Officer, Kim Cameron, had been up to until later in the summer. Cameron is touting the application of transactional "claims" to provide "minimal disclosures" about persons which has now evolved into the Windows Identity Foundation. There's no doubt in my mind that the ERP folks inside of Microsoft should talk to Kim Cameron and the Identity folks in Microsoft but that's something they'll have to figure out on their own, right? :-)
Now traceability is 'sexy' again. Pardalis is moving forward with major land grant institutions (North Dakota State University, Michigan State University, Oklahoma State University) and supply chain participants (like Top 10 Produce) in seeking $5M/5 year USDA funding for a Coordinated Agricultural Project under the Special Crops Research Initiative. This initiative supports research for methods to prevent, detect, monitor, control, and respond to potential food safety hazards in the production and processing of specialty crops, including fresh produce. Central to this research will the development/introduction of item-level means and functions for interoperably connecting agricultural supply chains from 'farm to fork'.The goal is to provide real-time access to the supply chain participants of the total system of data - not just the data presented in GS1 labeling - relative to product safety, taste, quality, appearance, environmental responses, tolerances, transportation, marketing, storage characteristics , etc.
Like I said, my attendance at IIW9 was strange and familiar, etc. What was missing for me was the application of identity and social networking to supply chains. I suppose one could argue that the term 'supply chain' was there, so to speak, particularly in the IIW9 sessions covering Vendor Relationship Management, but in my opinion it was way in the background waiting to be brought to the forefront. I'm definitely planning on attending IIW #10 in Mountain View in May, 2010, to do my part in helping raise the visibility of supply chains in this mix. I'm really glad to have found my way to the identity movement.
[The foregoing is substantially reprinted from previous contributions made by the author to the Data Ownership in the Cloud group on LinkedIn.]
With an openbank I get to prove a concept with the most old fashioned metric there is – money…
for what is money than the most generally accepted metric?
I want to educate people about the ownership of their data. No better way than to attach it to their money.
Show them that Data is the new money.
No better way to prove to businesses that people care than to make alot of money off of it.
No better way to get other banks to follow suit than to take money away from them.
yep I am a bit of a more pragmatic gal these days…
Here's my comment ....
Silona,
Truly, data is becoming more and more the 'new money' ....
Data ownership matters because it holds forth the promise of empowering people with much more technological and political control of their information than that provided by conventional information technologies and legislated confidentiality protections.
Give people the opportunity to profit or otherwise benefit from their data products in the form of granular objects, and their valuable data will, ironically, become more accessible to all. Give people the opportunity to familiarly bank their data like they bank their money, and watch the political dynamics shift favorably toward a more data transparent, and data secure, world.
First, there was money. Then there came the banking of money. Now is the time for the Information Age to shift into a Data Banking Age full of new services, and new opportunities, not unlike those brought to us, and facilitated by, our very successful monetary banking systems.
But lest the reader thinks that you and I are too much out in 'left field', or that we are being too idealistic, I'd like to cite what Microsoft and the Information Card Foundation are currently doing that is bringing a realism to the idealism.
Windows CardSpace (aka Microsoft Information Cards), part of the .NET stack, is Microsoft's client software for the Identity Metasystem, an interoperable architecture for digital identity that enables people to have and employ a collection of digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. When an Information Card-enabled application or website wishes to obtain information about the user, the application or website requests the publication of a particular set of claims authored by the user. The CardSpace user interface then appears, switching the display to the CardSpace service, which displays the user's registered identities. The user selects their InfoCard to verify their identity.
Kim Cameron, Chief Identity Officer, Microsoft, is seeking to extend Microsoft's Information Cards with 'minimum disclosures' (that is, claims granularly derived from Information Cards). See "Proposal for a Common Identity Framework: A User-Centric Identity Metasystem" by Kim Cameron, Reinhard Posch, Kai Rannenberg on October 9, 2008.
The granular control of identity in the form of claims is, I suggest, a form of 'data banking', and a form of technological 'data ownership'. Microsoft's CardSpace is now officially being marketed in the context of the 'Geneva Framework', a Claims Based Access Platform. By marketing its Geneva Framework, Microsoft is bringing data banking and data ownership closer and closer to the mainstream.
[This comment previously posted in two parts to a version of Silona's blog post shared to the Data Ownership in the Cloud networking group on LinkedIn - http://tinyurl.com/datacloud]
Roger Dean interviews Kim Cameron, chief architect of identity and distinguised engineer for Microsoft. Interviewed at the european e-identity management conference, 26th June 2009.
This paper proposes a framework for protecting privacy and avoiding the unnecessary propagation of identity information while facilitating exchange of specific information needed by Internet systems to personalize and control access to services. It also sets out factors to be taken into consideration when deciding where the standardization of such a framework should be brought about. Information systems that co-operate to originate, control and consume identity information have been called identity systems. The evolution of the Internet requires increased interoperability of these systems. Such interoperability demands an abstract model that encompasses the characteristics of all co-operating identity systems. We call this abstract model the Identity Metasystem. Describing, designing, deploying and managing identity systems in accordance with this model will facilitate the interworking of identity components:
from different manufacturers;
under different managements;
of different levels of complexity;
based on different protocols ;
employing different syntaxes;
conveying different semantics; and
of different ages.
Editor's note ...
With this paper, Kim Cameron, Chief Identity Officer, Microsoft, is seeking to extend Microsoft's Information Cards with 'minimum disclosures' (that is, claims granularly derived from Information Cards). See also Roger Dean interviews Kim Cameron, Chief Msft Identity Architect.
Windows CardSpace (aka Microsoft Information Cards), part of the .NET stack, is Microsoft's client software for the Identity Metasystem, an interoperable architecture for digital identity that enables people to have and employ a collection of digital identities based on multiple underlying technologies, implementations, and providers. When an Information Card-enabled application or website wishes to obtain information about the user, the application or website requests the publication of a particular set of claims authored by the user. The CardSpace user interface then appears, switching the display to the CardSpace service, which displays the user's registered identities. The user selects their InfoCard to verify their identity. See Identity Selector Interoperability Profile V1.0, Microsoft Corporation (April, 2007). See also US Patent 7,149,977: Virtual calling card system and method.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 11:06PM 
