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Tech: The Missing Generation

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve recently been spending a fair bit of time in hospital. Not, thankfully, for myself but with my mother who fell and broke her arm a few weeks back which has resulted in lots of visits to our local Accident & Emergency (A&E)  department as well as a short stay in hospital whilst they pinned her arm back in place.

nhs hospital
An elderly gentleman walks past an NHS hospital sign in London. Photograph: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

Anyone who knows anything about the UK also knows how much we value our National Health Service (NHS). So much so that when it was our turn to run the Olympic Games back in 2012 Danny Boyle’s magnificent opening ceremony dedicated a whole segment to this wonderful institution featuring doctors, nurses and patients dancing around beds to music from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells.

nhs london 2012 olympics
Olympic Opening Ceremony NHS Segment – Picture Courtesy the International Business Times

The NHS was created out of the ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth. When it was launched by the then minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, on July 5 1948, it was based on three core principles:

  • that it meet the needs of everyone
  • that it be free at the point of delivery
  • that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay

These three principles have guided the development of the NHS over more than 60 years, remain at its core and are embodied in its constitution.

nhs constitution
NHS Constitution Logo

All of this, of course, costs:

  • NHS net expenditure (resource plus capital, minus depreciation) has increased from £64.173 billion in 2003/04 to £113.300bn in 2014/15. Planned expenditure for 2015/16 is £116.574bn.
  • Health expenditure (medical services, health research, central and other health services) per capita in England has risen from £1,841 in 2009/10 to £1,994 in 2013/14.
  • The NHS net deficit for the 2014/15 financial year was £471 million (£372m underspend by commissioners and a £843m deficit for trusts and foundation trusts).
  • Current expenditure per capita for the UK was $3,235 in 2013. This can be compared to $8,713 in the USA, $5,131 in the Netherlands, $4,819 in Germany, $4,553 in Denmark, $4,351 in Canada, $4,124 in France and $3,077 in Italy.

The NHS also happens to be the largest employer in the UK. In 2014 the NHS employed 150,273 doctors, 377,191 qualified nursing staff, 155,960 qualified scientific, therapeutic and technical staff and 37,078 managers.

So does it work?

From my recent experience I can honestly say yes. Whilst it may not be the most efficient service in the world the doctors and nurses managed to fix my mothers arm and hopefully set her on the road to recovery. There have been, and I’m sure there will be more, setbacks but given her age (she is 90) they have done an amazing job.

Whilst sitting in those A&E departments whiling away the hours (I did say they could be more efficient) I had plenty of time to observe and think. By its very nature the health service is hugely people intensive. Whilst there is an amazing array of machines beeping and chirping away most activities require people and people cost money.

The UK’s health service, like that of nearly all Western countries, is under a huge amount of pressure:

  • The UK population is projected to increase from an estimated 63.7 million in mid-2012 to 67.13 million by 2020 and 71.04 million by 2030.
  • The UK population is expected to continue ageing, with the average age rising from 39.7 in 2012 to 42.8 by 2037.
  • The number of people aged 65 and over is projected to increase from 10.84m in 2012 to 17.79m by 2037. The number of over-85s is estimated to more than double from 1.44 million in 2012 to 3.64 million by 2037.
  • The number of people of State Pension Age (SPA) in the UK exceeded the number of children for the first time in 2007 and by 2012 the disparity had reached 0.5 million (though this is projected to reverse by).
  • There are an estimated 3.2 million people with diabetes in the UK (2013). This is predicted to reach 4 million by 2025.
  • In England the proportion of men classified as obese increased from 13.2 per cent in 1993 to 26.0 per cent in 2013 (peak of 26.2 in 2010), and from 16.4 per cent to 23.8 per cent for women over the same timescale (peak of 26.1 in 2010).

The doctors and nurses that looked after my mum so well are going to be coming under a increasing pressures as this ageing and less healthy population begins to suck ever more resources out of an already stretched system. So why, given the passion everyone has about the NHS, isn’t there more of a focus on getting technology to ease the burden of these overworked healthcare providers?

Part of the problem of course is that historically the tech industry hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory when it comes to delivering technology to the healthcare sector (I’m thinking the NHS National Programme for IT and the US HealthCare.gov system as being two high profile examples). Whilst some of this may be due to the blunders of government much of it is down to a combination of factors caused by both the providers and consumers of healthcare IT mis-communication and not understanding the real requirements that such complex systems tend to have.

In her essay How to build the Next Unicorn in Healthcare the entrepreneur Yasi Baiani   sets out six tactical tips for how to build a unicorn* digital startup. In summary these are:

  1. Understand the current system.
  2. Know your customers.
  3. Have product hooks.
  4. Have a clear monetization strategy and understand your customers’ willingness-to-pay.
  5. Know the rules and regulations.
  6. Figure out what your unfair competitive advantage is.

Of course, these are strategies that actually apply to any industry when trying to bring about innovation and disruption – they are not unique to healthcare. I would say that when it comes to the healthcare industry the reason why there has been no Uber is because the tech industry is ignoring the generation that is in most need of benefiting from technology, namely the post 65 age group. This is the age group that struggle most with technology either because they are more likely to be digitally disadvantaged or because they simply find it too difficult to get to grips with it.

As the former Yahoo chief technology officer Ashfaq Munshi, who has become interested in ageing tech says:

“Venture capitalists are too busy investing in Uber and things that get virality. The reality is that selling to older people is harder, and if venture capitalists detect resistance, they don’t invest.”

Matters are not helped by the fact that most tech entrepreneurs are between the ages of 20 and 35 and have different interests in life than the problems faced by the aged. As this article by Kevin Maney in the Independent points out:

“Entrepreneurs are told that the best way to start a company is to solve a problem they understand. It makes sense that those problems range from how to get booze delivered 24/7 to how to build a cloud-based enterprise human resources system – the tangible problems in the life and work of a 25- or 30-year-old.”

If it really is the case that entrepreneurs only look at problems they understand or are on their immediate event horizon then clearly we need more entrepreneurs of my age group (let’s just say 45+). We are the people either with elderly parents, like my mum, who are facing the very real problems of old age and poor health and who themselves will very soon be facing the same issues.

A recent Institute of Business Value report from IBM makes the following observation:

“For healthcare in particular, the timing for a game changer couldn’t be better. The industry is coping with upheaval triggered by varied economic, societal and industry influences. Empowered consumers living in an increasingly digital world are demanding more from an industry that is facing growing regulation, soaring costs and a shortage of skilled resources.”

Rather than fearing the new generation of cognitive systems we need to be embracing them and ruthlessly exploiting them to provide solutions that will ease all of our journeys into an ever increasing old age.

At  SXSW, which is running this week in Austin, Texas IBM is providing an exclusive look at its cognitive technology called Watson and showcasing a number of inspiring as well as entertaining applications of this technology. In particular on Tuesday 15th March there is a session called Ageing Populations & The Internet of Caring Things  where you can take a look at accessible technology and how it will create a positive impact on an aging person’s quality of life.

Also at SXSW this year President Obama gave a keynote interview where he called for action in the tech world, especially for applications to improve government IT. The President urged the tech industry to solve some of the nation’s biggest problems by working in conjunction with the government. “It’s not enough to focus on the cool, next big thing,” Obama said, “It’s harnessing the cool, next big thing to help people in this country.”

obama-sxsw
President Barack Obama speaks during the 2016 SXSW Festival at Long Center in Austin, Texas, March 11, 2016. PHOTO: NEILSON BARNARD/GETTY IMAGES FOR SXSW

It is my hope that with the vision that people such as Obama have given the experience of getting old will be radically different 10 or 20 years from now and that cognitive and IoT technology will make all of out lives not only longer but more more pleasant.

* Unicorns are referred to companies whose valuation has exceeded $1 billion dollars.

Getting Started with Blockchain

Peter Cripps education , , , , , , , ,

In an earlier post I discussed the UK government report on distributed ledger technology (AKA ‘blockchain‘) and how the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Mark Walport, was doing the rounds advocating the use of blockchain for a variety of (government) services.

Blockchain is a shared, trusted, public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls. The participants in a blockchain system collectively keep the ledger up to date: it can be amended only according to strict rules and by general agreement. For a quick introduction to blockchain this article in the Economist is a pretty good place to start.

Blockchains are going to be useful wherever there is a need for a trustworthy record, something which is pretty vital for transactions of all sorts whether it be in banking, for legal documents or for registries of things like land or high value art works etc. Startups such as Stampery are looking to use blockchain technology to provide low cost certification services. Blockchain is not just for pure startups however. Twenty-five banks are part of the blockchain company, called R3 CEV, which aims to develop common standards around this technology. R3 CEV’s Head of Technology is Richard Gendal Brown an ex-colleague from IBM.

IBM recently announced that, together with Intel, J.P. Morgan and several large banks, it was joining forces to create the Open Ledger Project with the Linux Foundation, with the goal of re-imagining supply chains, contracts and other ways information about ownership and value are exchanged in a digital economy.

As part of this IBM is creating some great tools, using its Bluemix platform, to get developers up and running on the use of blockchain technology. If you have a Bluemix account you can quickly deploy some applications and study the source code on GitHub to see how to start making use of blockchain APIs.

This service is intended for developers who consider themselves early adopters and want to get involved with IBM’s approach to business networks that maintain, secure and share a replicated ledger using blockchain technology. It shows how you can:

  • Deploy and invoke simple transactions to test out IBM’s approach to blockchain technology.
  • Learn and test out IBM’s novel contributions to the blockchain open source community, including the concept of confidential transactions, containerized code execution etc.

It provides some simple demo applications you can quickly deploy into Bluemix to play around with this technology.

Marbles
Marbles Running in IBM Bluemix

This service is not production ready. It is pre-alpha and intended for testing and experimentation only. There are additional security measures that still must be implemented before the service can be used to store any confidential data. That said it’s still a great way to learn about the use and potential for this technology.

 

Back to the Future Day

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,

So, the future has finally arrived and today is ‘Back to the Future Day‘. Just in case you have missed any of the newspaper, internet and television reports that have been ‘flying’ around this week, today is the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in the 1980s movie Back To The Future II as dialled into the very high-tech (I love the Dymo labels) console of the modified (i.e. to make it fly) Delorean DMC-12 motor car. As you can see the official time we can expect Marty and Doc Brown to arrive is (or was) 04:29 (presumably that’s Pacific Time).

Back to the Future Delorean Display
Back to the Future Delorean Display

Depending on when you read this therefore you might still get a chance to watch one of the numerous Marty McFly countdown clocks hitting zero.

Most of the articles have focussed on how its creators did or didn’t get the technology right. Whilst things like electric cars, wearable tech, drones and smart glasses have come to fruition what’s more interesting is what the film completely missed i.e. the Internet,  smartphones and all the gadgets which we now take for granted thanks to a further 30 years (i.e. since 1985, when the first film came out) of Moore’s Law.

Coincidentally one day before ‘Back to the Future’ day I gave a talk to a group of university students which was focussed on how technology has changed in the last 30 years due to the effects of Moore’s Law. It’s hard to believe that back in 1985, when the first Back to the Future film was released, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost $71,000 and a megabyte of RAM cost $880. Today those costs are 5 cents and a lot less than 1 cent respectively. This is why it’s now possible for all of us to be walking around carrying smart devices which have more compute power and storage than even the largest and fastest super computers of a decade or so ago.

It’s also why the statement made by Jim Deters, founder of the education community Galvanise, is so true, namely that today:

“Two guys in a Starbucks can have access to the same computing power as a Fortune 500 company.”

Today anyone with a laptop, a good internet connection and the right tools can set themselves up to disrupt whole industries that once seemed secure and impeneterable to newcomers. These are the disruptors who are building new business models that are driving new revenue streams and providing great, differentiated client experiences (I’m talking the likes of Uber, Netflix and further back Amazon and Google). People use the term ‘digital Darwinism’, meaning the phenomenon of technology and society evolving faster than an organization can adapt, to try and describe what is happening here. As Charles Darwin said:

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Interestingly IBM is working with Galvanise in San Francisco at its Bluemix Garage where it brings together entrepreneurs and start ups, as well as established enterprises, to work with new platform as a service (PaaS) tools like IBM Bluemix, Cloudant and Watson to help them create and build new and disruptive applications. IBM also recently announced its Bluemix Garage Method which aims to combine industry best practices on Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile Development, DevOps, and Cloud to build and deliver innovative and disruptive solutions.

There are a number of Bluemix Garages opening around the world (currently they are in London, Toronto, Nice and Melbourne) as well as local pop-up garages. If you can’t get to a garage and want to have a play with Bluemix yourself you can sign up for a free registration here.

It’s not clear how long Moore’s Law has left to run and whether non-silicon based technologies, that overcome some of the laws of physics that are threatening the ongoing exponential growth of transistors in chips, will ever be viable. It’s also not clear how relevant Moore’s Law actually is in the age of Cloud computing. One thing that is certain however is that we already have access to enough technology and tools that mean we are only limited by our ideas and imaginations in creating new and disruptive business models.

Now, where did I leave my hoverboard so I can get off to my next meeting.

Hello, World (from IBM Bluemix)

Peter Cripps education , , , , ,

“The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages: Print the words ‘hello, world’.”

So started the introduction to the book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie back in 1978. Since then many a programmer learning a new language has heeded those words of wisdom by trying to write their first program to put up those immortal words on their computer screens. Even the Whitehouse is now in on the game.

You can find a list of how to write “hello, world” in pretty much any language you have ever heard of (as well as some you probably haven’t) here. The idea of writing such a simple program is not so much that it will teach you anything about the language syntax but it will teach you how to get to grips with the environment that the code (whether compiled or interpreted) runs in. Back in 1978 when C ran under Unix on hardware like Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11 the environment was a relatively simple affair consisting of a processor, some storage and rudimentary cathode ray terminal (CRT). Then the ‘environment’ amounted to locating the compiler, making sure the right library was provided to the program and figuring out the options to run the compiler and the binary files output. Today things are a bit more complicated which is why the basic premise of getting the most simple program possible (i.e. writing ‘hello, world’ to a screen) is still very relevant as a way of learning the environment.

All of this is by way of an introduction to how to get ‘hello, world’ to work in the IBM Bluemix Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment.  In case you haven’t heard, IBM Bluemix is an open source platform based on Cloud Foundry that provides developers with a complete set of DevOps tools to develop, deploy and maintain web and mobile applications in the cloud with minimal hassle. Bluemix-hosted applications have access to the capabilities of the underlying cloud infrastructure to support the type of non-functional requirements (performance, availability, security etc) that are needed to support enterprise applications. Bluemix also provides a rich set of services to extend your applications with capabilities like analytics, social, internet of things and even IBM Watson cognitive services. The Bluemix platform frees developers and organizations from worrying about infrastructure-related plumbing details and focus on what matters to their organizations – business scenarios that drive better value for their customers.

IBM Bluemix
IBM Bluemix

Because Bluemix supports a whole range of programming languages and services the options for creating ‘hello, world’ are many and varied. Here though are the basic instructions for creating this simplest of programs using the JavaScript language Node.js.  Follow these steps for getting up and running on Bluemix.

Step 1: Sign Up for a Free Bluemix Trial

You can sign up for a free Bluemix trial (and get an an IBM ID if you don’t have one) here. You’ll need to do this before you do anything else. The remainder of this tutorial assumes you have Bluemix running and you are logged into your account.

Step 2: Download the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface

You can write code and get it up and running in numerous ways in Bluemix including within Bluemix itself, using Eclipse tools or with the Cloud Foundry command line interface (CLI). As this example uses the latter you’ll need to ensure you have the CLI downloaded on your computer. To do that follow the instructions here.

Step 3: Download the Example Code

You can download the code for this example from my GitHub here. Thanks to Carl Osipov over at Clouds with Carl for this code. Once you have downloaded the zip file unpack it into a convenient folder. You will see there are three files (plus a readme).

  • main.js – the Javascript source code. The code returns a ‘hello, world’ message to any HTTP request sent to the web server running the code.
  • package.json – which tells Bluemix it needs a Node.js runtime.
  • manifest.yml – this file is used when you deploy your code to Bluemix using the command line interface.  It contains the values that you would otherwise have to type on the command line when you ‘push’ your code to Bluemix. I suggest you edit this and change the ‘host’ parameter to something unique to you (e.g. change my name to yours).

Step 4: Deploy and Run the Code

Because all your code and the instructions for deploying it are contained in the three files just downloaded deploying into Bluemix is simplicity itself. Do the following:

  1. Open a command a Command Prompt window.
  2. Change to the directory that you unpacked the source code into by typing: cd your_directory.
  3. Connect to Bluemix by typing: cf api https://api.ng.bluemix.net.
  4. Login to Bluemix with your IBM ID credentials: cf login -u user-id -o password -s dev. Here dev is the Bluemix space you want to use (‘dev’ by default).
  5. Deploy your app to Bluemix by typing: cf push.

That’s it! It will take a while to upload, install and start the code and you will receive a notification when it’s done.  Once you get that response back on the command line you can switch to your Bluemix console and should see this.

IBM Bluemix Dashboard
IBM Bluemix Dashboard

To show the program is working you can either click on the ‘Open URL’ widget (the square with the right pointing arrow in the hello-world-node-js application) or type the URL: ‘hello-world-node-js-your-name.mybluemix.net’ into a browser window (your-name is whatever you set ‘host’ to in the manifest file). The words ‘hello, world’ will magically appear in the browser. Congratulations you have written and deployed your first Bluemix app. Pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee and bask in your new found glory.

If you live in the UK and would like to learn more about the IBM Bluemix innovation platform then sign up for this free event in London at the Rainmaking Loft on Thursday 25th June 2015 here.

“I’ll Send You the Deck”

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,

Warning, this is a rant!

I’m sure we’ve all been here. You’re in a meeting or on a conference call or just having a conversation with a colleague discussing some interesting idea or proposal which he or she has previous experience of and at some point they issue the immortal words “I’ll send you the deck”. The “deck” in question is usually a (at least) 20 page presentation, maybe with lots of diagrams so quite large, of material some of which may, if you’re lucky, relate to what you were actually talking about but most of which won’t. Now, I’m not sure about you but I find this hugely annoying for several reasons. Here are some:

  1. A presentation is for, well presenting. It’s not for relaying information after the event with no speaker to justify its existence. That’s what documents are for. We need to make careful decisions about the tools we use for conveying information recognising that the choice of tool can equally well enhance as well as detract from the information being presented.
  2. Sending a presentation in an email just clogs up your inbox with useless megabytes of data. Not only that but you are then left with the dilemma of what to do with the presentation. Do you detach it and store it somewhere in the hope you will find it later or just leave it in the email to ultimately get lost or forgotten?
  3. Chances are that only a small part of the presentation is actually relevant to what was been discussed so you are left trying to find out what part of the presentation is important and what is largely irrelevant.

So, what is the alternative to “sending a deck”? In this age of social the alternatives are almost too overwhelming but here are a few.

  • If your presentation contains just a few core ideas then take the time to extract the relevant ones and place in the email itself.
  • If the information is actually elsewhere on the internet (or your company intranet) then send a link. If it’s not commercially sensitive and available externally to your organisation why not use Twitter? That way you can also socialize the message more widely.
  • Maybe the content you need to send is actually worth creating as a blog post for a wider, and more permanent distribution (I actually create a lot of my posts like that).
  • Many large organisations are now investing in enterprise social software. Technology such as IBM Connections provides on premise, hybrid and in the cloud based software that not only seamlessly integrates email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis and files but also delivers the information to virtually any mobile device. Enterprise social software allows people to share content and collaborate in new and more creative ways and avoids the loss of information in the ‘tar pits‘ of our hard drives and mail inboxes.

Finally, here’s the last word from Dilbert, who is spot on the money as usual.

Dilbert PowerPoint

(c) 2010 Scott Adams Inc

Let’s Build a Smarter Planet – Part IV

Peter Cripps architecture , , , , , ,

This is the fourth and final part of the transcript of a lecture I recently gave at the University of Birmingham in the UK.In Part I of this set of four posts I tried to give you a flavour of what IBM is and what it is trying to do to make our planet smarter. In Part II I looked at my role in IBM and in Part III I looked at what kind of attributes IBM looks for in its graduate entrants. In this final part I take a look at what I see as some of the challenges we face in a world of open and ubiquitous data where potentially anyone can know anything about us and what implications that has on people who design systems that allow that to happen.

So let’s begin with another apocryphal tale…ec12d-whosewatchingyou

Target is the second largest (behind Walmart) discount retail store in America. Using advanced analytics software one of Target’s data analysts identified 25 products that when purchased together indicate a women is likely to be pregnant. The value of this information was that Target could send coupons to the pregnant woman at an expensive and habit-forming period of her life.

In early 2012 a man walked into a Target store outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation. “My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”fd140-thisisforeveryone

Two of the greatest inventions of our time are the internet and the mobile phone. When Tim Berners-Lee appeared from beneath the semi-detached house that lifted up from the ground of the Olympic stadium during the London 2012 opening ceremony and the words “this is for everyone” flashed up around the edge of the stadium there can surely be little doubt that he had earned his place there. However as with any technology there is a downside as well as an upside. A technology that gives anyone, anywhere access to anything they choose has to be treated with great care and responsibility (as Spiderman’s uncle said, “with great power comes great responsibility”). The data analyst at Target was only trying to improve his companies profits by identifying potential new consumers of its baby products. Inadvertently however he was uncovering information that previously would have been kept very private and only known to a few people. What should companies do in balancing a persons right to privacy with a companies right to identify new customers?

There is an interesting book out at the moment called Age of Context in which the authors examine the combined effects of five technological ‘forces’ that they see as coming together to form a ‘perfect storm’ that they believe are going to change forever our world. These five forces are mobile, social media, (big) data, sensors and location aware services. As the authors state:

The more the technology knows about you, the more benefits you will receive. That can leave you with the chilling sensation that big data is watching you…

In the Internet of Things paradigm, data is gold. However, making that data available relies on a ‘contract’ between suppliers (usually large corporations) and consumers (usually members of the public). Corporations provide a free or nominally-priced service in exchange for a consumer’s personal data. This data is either sold to advertisers or used to develop further products or services useful to consumers. Third-party applications, which build off the core service, poach customers (and related customer data) from such applications. For established networks and large corporations, this can be detrimental practice because such applications eventually poach their customers. In such a scenario, large corporations need to balance their approach to open source with commercial considerations.

Companies know that there is a difficult balancing act between doing what is commercially advantageous and doing what is ethically the right. As the saying goes – a reputation takes years to be built but can be destroyed in a matter of minutes.

IBM has an organisation within it called the Academy of Technology (AoT) which has as its membership around 1000 IBM’ers from its technical community. The job of the AoT is to focus on “uncharted business and technical opportunities” that help to “facilitate IBM’s technical development” as well as “more tightly integrate the company’s business and technical strategy”. As an example of the way IBM concerns itself with issues highlighted by the story about Target one of the studies the academy looked at recently was into the ethics of big data and how it should approach problems we have mentioned here. Out of that study came a recommendation for a framework the company should follow in pursuing such activities.

This ethical framework is articulated as a series of questions that should be asked when embarking on a new or challenging business venture.

  1. What do we want to do?
  2. What does the technology allow us to do?
  3. What is legally allowable?
  4. What is ethically allowable?
  5. What does the competition do?
  6. What should we do?

As an example of this consider the insurance industry.

  • The Insurance Industry provides a service to society by enabling groups of people to pool risk and protect themselves against catastrophic loss.
  • There is a duty to ensure that claims are legitimate.
  • More information could enable groups with lower risk factors to reduce their cost basis but those in higher risk areas would need to increase theirs.
  • Taken to the extreme, individuals may no longer be able to buy insurance – e.g. using genetic information to determine medical insurance premium.

How far should we take using technology to support this extreme case? Whilst it may not be breaking any laws to raise someones insurance premium to a level where they cannot afford it, is it ethically the right thing to do?Make no mistake the challenges we face in making our planet smarter through the proper and considered use of information technology are considerable. We need to address questions such as how do we build the systems we need, where does the skilled and creative workforce come from that can do this and how do we approach problems in new and innovative ways whilst at the same time doing what is legally and ethically right.

The next part is up to you…

Thank you for your time this afternoon. I hope I have given you a little more insight into the type of company IBM is, how and why it is trying to make the planet smarter and what you might do to help if you choose to join us. You can find more information about IBM and its graduate scheme here and you can find me on Twitter and Linkedin if you’d like to continue the conversation (and I’d love it if you did).

Thank you!

This is for Everyone

Peter Cripps comment , , , ,

Twenty years ago today on 30th April 1993 CERN published a brief statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis and changed the world forever. Here’s the innocuous piece of paper that shows this and that truly allowed Tim Berners-Lee, at the fantastic London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony to claim “this is for everyone”. Over the past twenty years the web has become imbedded in all of our lives in ways which most of us could never have dreamed of and has probably given many of us in the software industry quite a secure (and for some, lucrative) living during that time.How fitting then that yesterday, almost 20 years to the day since CERN’s historic announcement, IBM announced a new appliance called IBM MessageSight designed to help organizations manage and communicate with the billions of mobile devices and sensors found in systems such as automobiles, traffic management systems, smart buildings and household appliances, the so called Internet of Things.

I’ve no idea what this announcement means in terms of capabilities, other than what is available in the press release, however it is comforting to note that foundational to IBM MessageSight is its support of MQTT, which was recently proposed to become an OASIS standard, providing a lightweight messaging transport for communication in machine to machine (M2M) and mobile environments. Today more than ever enterprises and governments are demanding compliance with open standards rather than proprietary ones so it is good to see that platforms such as MessageSight will be adhering to such standards.

A Step Too Far?

Peter Cripps comment , , , , , ,

The trouble with technology, especially it seems computer technology, is that it keeps “improving”.  I’ve written before about the ethics of the job that we as software architects do and whether or not we should always accept what we do without asking questions, not least of which should be, is this a technology step too far that I am building or being asked to build?

Three articles have caught my eye this week which have made me ponder this question again.

The first is from the technology watcher and author Nicholas Carr who talks about the Glass Collective, an an investment syndicate made up of three companies: Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers whose collective aim is to provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem to help jump start their ideas.For those not in the know about Glass it is, according to the Google blog, all about “getting technology out of the way” and has the aim of building technology that is “seamless, beautiful and empowering“. Glasses first manifestation is to be Internet-connected glasses that take photos, record video and offer hands-free Internet access right in front of a users’ eyes.

Clearly the type of augmented reality that Glass opens up could have huge educational benefits (think of walking around a museum or art gallery and getting information on what you are looking at piped right to you as you look at different works of art) as well as very serious privacy implications. For another view on this read the excellent blog post from my IBM colleague Rick Robinson on privacy in digital cities.

In his blog post Carr refers to a quote from Marshall McLuhan, made a half century ago and now seeming quite prescient:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

The next thing to catch my eye (or actually several thousand things) was around the whole sorry tale of the Boston bombings. This post in particular from the Wall Street Journal discusses the role of Boston’s so called fusion center that “helps investigators scour for connections among potential suspects, by mining hundreds of law enforcement sources around the region, ranging from traffic violations, to jail records and criminal histories, along with public data like property records.”

Whilst I doubt anyone would question the validity of using data in this way to track down people that have performed atrocities such as we saw in Boston, it does highlight just how much data is now collected on us and about us, much of which we have no control over of broadcasting to the world.

Finally, on a much lighter note, we learn that the contraceptive maker Durex has released their “long distance, sexy time fundawear“. I’ll let you watch the first live trial video of this at your leisure (warning, not entirely work safe) but let’s just say here that it adds a whole new dimension to stroking the screen on your smartphone. I guess this one has no immediate privacy issues (providing the participants don’t wear their Google Glass at the same time as playing in their fundawear at least) it does raise some interesting questions about how much we will let technology impinge on the most intimate part of our lives.

So where does this latest foray of mine into digital privacy take us and what conclusions, if any, can we draw? Back in 2006 IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist Jeff Jonas posted a comment on his blog called Responsible Innovation: Designing for Human Rights in which he asks two questions: what if we are creating technologies that go in the face of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what if systems are designed without the essential characteristics needed to support basic privacy and civil liberties principles?

Jeff argues that if technologies could play a role in any of the arrest, detention, exile, interference, attacks or deprivation mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights then they must support disclosure of the source upon which such invasions are predicated. He suggests that systems that could affect one’s privacy or civil liberties should have a number of design characteristics built in that allow for some level of auditability as well as ensuring accuracy of the data they hold. Such characteristics as, every data point is associated to its data source and every data point is associated to its author etc. Given this was written in 2006 when Facebook was only two years old and still largely confined to use in US universities this is a hugely prescient and thoughtful piece of insight (which is why Jeff is an IBM Fellow of course).

So, there’s an idea! New technologies, when they come along should, be examined to ensure they have built in safeguards that mean such rights as are granted to us all in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not infringed or taken away from us. How would this be done and, more importantly of course, what bodies or organisations would we empower to ensure such safeguards were both effective and enforceable? No easy or straightforward answers here but certainly a topic for some discussion I believe.

Steal Like an Artist

Peter Cripps creativity , , , , ,

David Bowie is having something of a resurgence this year. Not only has he released a critically acclaimed new album, The Next Day, there is also an exhibition of the artefacts from his long career at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. These includes handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs and Bowie’s own instruments.

David Bowie was a collector. Not only did he collect, he also stole. As he said in a Playboy interview back in 1976:

The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

He even steals from himself, check out the cover of his new album to see what I mean.

Austin Kleon has written a whole book on this topic, Steal Like an Artist, in which he makes the case that nothing is original and that nine out of ten times when someone says that something is new, it’s just that they don’t know the the original sources involved. Kleon goes on to say:

What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.

So what on earth has this got to do with software architecture?

Eighteen years ago one of the all time great IT books was published. Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides introduced the idea of patterns, originally a construct used by the building architect Christopher Alexander,  to the IT world at large. As the authors say in the introduction to their book:

One thing expert designers know not to do is solve every problem from first principles. Rather, they reuse solutions that have worked for them in the past. When they find a good solution, they use it again and again. Such experience is part of what makes them experts.

So expert designers ‘steal’ work they have already used before. The idea of the Design Patterns book was to publish patterns that others had found to work for them so they could be reused (or stolen). The patterns in Design Patterns were small design elements that could be used when building object-oriented software. Although they included code samples, they were not directly reusable without adaptation, not to mention coding, in a chosen programming language.

Fast forward eighteen years and the concept of patterns is alive and well but has reached a new level of abstraction and therefore reuse. Expert Integrated Systems like IBM’s PureApplication SystemTM use patterns to provide fast, high-quality deployments of sophisticated environments that enable enterprises to get new business applications up and running as quickly as possible. Whereas the design patterns from the book by Gamma et al were design elements that could be used to craft complete programs the PureApplication System patterns are collections of virtual images that form a a complete system. For example, the Business Process Management (BPM) pattern includes an HTTP server, a clustered pair of BPM servers, a cluster administration server, and a database server. When an administrator deploys this pattern, all the inter-connected parts are created and ready to run together. Time to deploy such systems is reduced from days or even, in some cases, weeks to just hours.

Some may say that the creation and proliferation of such patterns is another insidious step to the deskilling of our profession. If all it takes to deploy a complex BPM system is just a few mouse clicks then where does that leave those who once had to design such systems from scratch?

Going back to our art stealing analogy, a good artist does not just steal the work of others and pass it off as their own (at least most of them don’t) rather, they use the ideas contained in that work and build on them to create something new and unique (or at least different). Rather than having to create new stuff from scratch they adopt the ideas that others have come up with then adapt them to make their own creations. These creations themselves can then be used by others and further adapted thus the whole thing becomes a sort of virtuous circle:Adopt Adapt

A good architect, just like a good artist, should not fear patterns but should embrace them and know that they free him up to focus on creating something that is new and of real (business) value. Building on the good work that others have done before us is something we should all be encouraged to do more of. As Salvador Dalis said:

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

Happy 2013 and Welcome to the Fifth Age!

Peter Cripps architecture , , , , , ,

I would assert that the modern age of commercial computing began roughly 50 years ago with the introduction of the IBM 1401 which was the world’s first fully transistorized computer when it was announced in October of 1959.  By the mid-1960’s almost half of all computer systems in the world were 1401 type machines. During the subsequent 50 years we have gone through a number of different ages of computing; each corresponding to the major, underlying architecture which was dominant during each age or period. The ages with their (very) approximate time spans are:

  • Age 1: The Mainframe Age (1960 – 1975)
  • Age 2: The Mini Computer Age (1975 – 1990)
  • Age 3: The Client-Server Age (1990 – 2000)
  • Age 4: The Internet Age (2000 – 2010)
  • Age 5: The Mobile Age (2010 – 20??)

Of course, the technologies from each age have never completely gone away, they are just not the predominant driving IT force any more (there are still estimated to be some 15,000 mainframe installations world-wide so mainframe programmers are not about to see the end of their careers any time soon). Equally, there other technologies bubbling under the surface running alongside and actually overlapping these major waves. For example networking has evolved from providing the ability to connect a “green screen” to a centralised mainframe, and then mini, to the ability to connect thousands, then millions and now billions of devices. The client-server age and internet age were dependent on cheap and ubiquitous desktop personal computers whilst the current mobile age is driven by offspring’s of the PC, now unshackled from the desktop, which run the same applications (and much, much more) on smaller and smaller devices.

These ages are also characterized by what we might term a decoupling and democratization of the technology. The mainframe age saw the huge and expensive beasts locked away in corporate headquarters and only accessible by qualified members of staff of those companies. Contrast this to the current mobile age where billions of people have devices in their pockets that are many times more powerful than the mainframe computers of the first age of computing and which allow orders of magnitude increases in connectivity and access to information.

Another defining characteristic of each of these ages is the major business uses that the technology was put to. The mainframe age was predominantly centralised systems running companies core business functions that were financially worthwhile to automate or manually complex to administer (payroll, core accounting functions etc). The mobile age is characterised by mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) and apps which are cheap enough to just be used just once and sometimes perform a single or relatively few number of functions.

Given that each of the ages of computing to date has run for 10 – 15 years and the current mobile age is only two years old what predictions are there for how this age might pan out and what should we, as architects, be focusing on and thinking about? As you might expect at this time of year there is no shortage of analyst reports providing all sorts of predictions for the coming year. This joint Appcelerator/IDC Q4 2012 Mobile Developer Report particularly caught my eye as it polled almost 3000 Appcelerator Titanium developers on their thoughts about what is hot in the mobile, social and cloud space. The reason it is important to look at what platforms developers are interested in is, of course, that they can make or break whether those platforms grow and survive over the long term. Microsoft Windows and Apple’s iPhone both took off because developers flocked to those platforms and developed applications for those in preference to competing platforms (anyone remember OS/2?).

As you might expect most developers preferences are to develop for the iOS platforms (iPhone and iPad) closely followed by Android phones and tablets with nearly a third also developing using HTML5 (i.e. cross-platform). Windows phones and tablets are showing some increased interest but Blackberry’s woes would seem to be increasing with a slight drop off in developer interest in those platforms.

Nearly all developers (88.4%) expected that they would be developing for two or more OS’es during 2013. Now that consumers have an increasing number of viable platforms to choose from, the ability to build a mobile app that is available cross-platform is a must for a successful developer.

Understanding mobile platforms and how they integrate with the enterprise is one of the top skills going to be needed over the next few years as the mobile age really takes off. (Consequently it is also going to require employers to work more closely with universities to ensure those skills are obtained).

In many ways the fifth age of computing has actually taken us back several years (pre-internet age) when developers had to support a multitude of operating systems and computer platforms. As a result many MEAP providers are investing in cross platform development tools, such as IBM’s Worklight which is also part of the IBM Mobile Foundation. This platform also adds intelligent end point management (that addresses the issues of security, complexity and BYOD policies) together with an integration framework that enables companies to rapidly connect their hybrid world of public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise applications.

For now then, at least until a true multi-platform technology such as HTML5 is mature enough, we are in a complex world with lots of new and rapidly changing technologies to get to grips with as well as needing to understand how the new stuff integrates with all the old legacy stuff (again). In other words, a world which we as architects know and love and thrive in. Here’s to a complex 2013!