The most important idea behind the On Demand Network and central to its design strategy is a concept known as The Singularity, the evolution of the Internet and other networks combined with XML Web services and other technologies to enable one global computing environment.
A singular instance of a universal,programmable process network that can intelligently provide customers immediate, ‘On Demand’ satisfaction for their needs, and present the mostimportant concept for boardrooms to consider for the 21st century.
What is The Singularity?
While this may all seem impossibly futuristic, it’s important to understand that in essence The Singularity already exists: The Internet. As it sounds, TheSingularity is about universality and uniformity, it’s a singular instance of a global computing environment. One that will continue to grow across a number of dimensions, especially access (what devices you can use it from) and sophistication (what useful things it can do for you).
Terminology isn’t important; The Singularity is a term from the AI community referring to a single instance of self-aware computing (see www.singularitywatch.com), so these guys may argue what it is or isn’t, or you could still describe it as the Internet. Indeed it is essentially the evolutionof the Internet that we’re talking about, upgrading its’ capabilities so that it can achieve more useful things for us.
So independent of what it’s called, what is important to guide business and technology strategy is to think in terms of global singularity, to think in terms of designing your business systems to operate within the context of one singular, global computing environment.
The Internet already is such an environment, but although it’s impact on the world has been staggering in such a short space of time, it is still relatively limited and crude in what it can achieve for consumers and businesses. So the frame of reference to plan and quantify this evolution is to understand how the environment will become more sophisticated and what changes and opportunity this will bring.
Collapsing complexity: Building ultra-lean businesses
Fuelled by advertising from the IT vendors, rising quickly to the top of the boardroom agenda is the management science of corporate agility: Becoming lean and nimble, capable of adapting to changing market conditions and providing each and every customer a highly personalised experience, on demand. I.e. being the corporate cheetah of the business ecosystem, not the flabby prey.
Complexity can be described as the flab and removing it therefore the exercise of getting fit, burning away fat to leave only lean muscle. Since processes and systems are needed to fulfil customers needs quickly, then so they can be described as muscle, and whatever stands in their way of dynamically executing in a instantaneous manner across the supply chain partners required, the fat.
The principle contributor to complexity is duplication. For example, you and your neighbour both drive your kids to the same school, creating a situation of complexity with a factor of two (two cars, two journeys). “Collapsing” this complexity is achieved by eliminating one of the journeys so one car takes both kids, so the essence of simplification is to reduce the many to the one. A school bus that ferries many kids is therefore collapsing the complexity of a situation of 40 or 50 families to one solution. Manageable simplicity has been achieved.
The Singularity is about applying this principle to business and IT architecture, and thinking in terms of one giant school bus that takes every kid in the world to school.
20th century IT strategy results in increasing duplication, increasing complexity. When new business capabilities are required, new applications and new code development is deployed. More databases are added and process-centric data, such as customer information, that already exists in multiple forms in thousands of systems elsewhere, is replicated yet again.
Similarly, core processes such as buying and selling that require purchase orders and so forth are equally built from scratch. Re-invention of the wheel is a fat-producing process that is being repeated in every company everywhere. One version of a process is muscle, additional copies of it excess fat.
XML Web services and application integration
Therefore when we review the IT market trends such as XML Web services, although most of the commentary is around the technicalities such as SOAP and WSDL and so forth, what’s most important about them is the convergence on universal business process methods. Adoption of the same single method for buying and selling processes tackles everyone’s complexity problems.
There are currently various standards groups, such as OASIS (www.oasis-open.org) and the BPMi (www.bpmi.org), defining open standards for business messages such as purchase orders and other core functions. Naturally there will be a degree of competition between them, each proposing their formats are more suitable for real-world needs, and there are also those, particularly from theAI computing world, who will say these aren’t even necessary. That intelligent communications between applications doesn’t require pre-defined standards.
‘The how’ isn’t quite so important, it is ‘the what’ that should be guiding strategic planning. Technology and standards and so on will always evolve, always be changing, the new and superior replacing the legacy, so encompassing this change as a constant factor is critical to adaptability: I.e. always be adopting whatever works best, don’t get caught up in the semantic battles.
So ‘the what’ is The Singularity. Independent of how it is achieved, what’s important to businesses is the universal collapse of systems complexity. A solution that doesn’t just solve your problem, it solves everyone’s, important because everyone’s problem is also yours. Their complexity is yours too, because your systems connect to theirs.
Business integration is cited as the number one problem facing CTO’s, and it’s not surprising: Working with supply chain partners is how we service customer needs and how we design new business models that generate growth, and for workflow to fluidly execute across all these companies then numerous applications must communicate, sharing process data to achieve a sequence of steps.
EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is simply about processes, moving customer and other data from one system to another to facilitate workflow, requiring the translation of data formats and so on to allow it. The problem is that it is commonly achieved in a ‘point to point’ manner: Siebel is wired up to SAP, SAP to Documentum, Documentum back to Siebel and so on. Each interface a new piece of “hand cranked” code. With each new application added, a new suite of interconnecting interfaces is built, and so the overall environment is increasing in complexity, not decreasing. More and more software is being added, more and more data duplicated. In an effort to tackle business integration complexity, 20th century EAI led IT strategy increases the issues it is trying to tackle, it’s the root cause of its own problem.
In kids and school terms, it’s the equivalent of adding a new car and journey for each new kid, AND to provide more space in each to accommodate change, DIY upgrading the vehicle. More and more cars are being added, and each is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Conveniently it is the bus metaphor that is what the alternative approach is based on. Again, independent of the technologies and methods that enable it, the Service Oriented Architecture, the basis for this model, is about simplifying communications between applications and thus decreasing the complexity of the environment as a whole. They don’t communicate directly, they instead worry only about passing messages to and from a ‘bus’ that handles all the complexity for them.
Instead of each parent taking on the hassle of door to door kid delivery, they just throw them on the bus in the morning and get them back at the end of the day. The bus itself provides the intelligence for where and when to stop, who to pick up and so on. Parents all get the same universal benefit, a simpler life.
If we translate kids to purchase orders exchanged by business systems to facilitate workflow, then the benefits are the same. Each application only hasone interface to worry about: How to get their messages on and off the bus, hence the focus on standards and other universal methods of achieving this. It also builds IT architecture where workflow is configurable separate from the systems that enable it.
XML Web services may be dismissed by some as ‘blue sky’, but it’s really onlyjust about messages and formats, something that we already have and use incorporate IT, it’s just that we have thousands of them. Therefore the nature ofthe structure is less important, what will bring great change is the widespreadadoption of whatever method unifies business systems communication, and tendsus towards the point of The Singularity, a global environment of shared business process programming “lego bricks”.
If everyone adopts whatever method is most appropriate, then everyone benefitsthe same way: Everyone gets greatly reduced EAI costs, simpler systems andfaster business integration with partners.
Plug and Play Business Integration
It’s not difficult to map this to what business benefits it would bring. Timeto market is one of the most crucial success factors for corporate effectiveness, and it is directly impacted by business integration. I.e. How quickly can you assemble the configuration of processes of your own plus those of your supply chain partners to deliver whatever new product or service you’re taking to market. This is the level of change resistance in your current infrastructure. If it takes twelve months because of the EAI and other issues that must be tackled, you’re operating with twelve months worth of change resistance. More adaptable competition may be able to bring the same product to market in three months, hence its strategic priority.
This emphasises the need for global thinking in terms of IT strategy requiredto support its equivalent in business planning. Designing your IT architectureonly within the scope of your own organisation somewhat misses the point, andthe potential available. Your business is part of an interconnected network ofcustomers and suppliers operating throughout the world, so while you may tackleyour own issues, if your partners still take twelve months to catch up, youwill still only go at that speed. Process re-engineering at the level of yourcompany only is like Olympic sprinter training only one man in a line ofchained together prisoners planning an escape. Sure, he can do 100m in elevenseconds, but unless they can all do it, it’s going to take quite a while longer.
No business exists without buying goods and services from other suppliers, andthis is the chain, the sequence of events, that must be automated end-to-end toreally achieve customer-centric On Demand capabilities. Designing for globalcapabilities is designing the best for you and your business.
This is why 21st century IT strategy is about The Singularity. A single computing environment where any application can be plugged in just once, so that it can talk “business process speak” to what is in essence a global services bus, would mean that any company could quickly partner with any other company connected the same way. Programming tools will become available that allow us to address this singular environment, writing “workflow code” that is addressed at this global level, allowing us to design sequences of steps in a context that reflects the scope of the exchanges. Writing it just within our own company always results in us having to later connect it up to partners systems anyway, so why not just start with the end-result in mind?
These programming tools will also evolve to be appropriate to non-technical people, allowing commercial staff to use drag and drop methods of joining up workflow that it is displayed to them via this universal ‘application grid.’ Business integration will evolve from the heartache it currently features to Plug and Play, joined-up business from the get-go.
On Demand: “One-Click ™ Everywhere”
What will these plugged together processes enable? Users of Amazons web site will appreciate how connected simplicity maps to customer satisfaction. What’s easier: Filling in numerous forms over and over again, or pressing a button, once?
Of course. It’s what your customers want from you because it’s what you want from your suppliers. Everyone wants friction in buying processes eliminated because everyone prefers convenience and simplicity to annoyance and hassle.
Therefore mapping the potential of The Singularity to e-business can be described as “One-Click ™ Everywhere”, and this is the essence of what On Demand is all about. When I want something, when the demand is expressed, it’s satisfied immediately with the least amount of friction. If I’m sitting on my couch watching TV and an interesting product is advertised, I don’t want to have to phone a call centre or jump through any other hoops, I want to press a button on my remote control once and be done with it.
If the advert is for a new food item then I’d want it added to my regular grocery list that I also maintain via the web or even in the supermarket. I don’t want forced into using only one medium like my PC, I want my preferences to be ubiquitous so I can use whatever device is relevant to my current context. This knowledge about my context can be assembled from input from multiple parties. For example, my mobile provider can tell’ other interested services what my current physical location is. Combine this with a Wi-Fi presence in shopping malls and you have the triangulation required for “intelligent hotspots”: Adverts that appear dynamically on the customers’ mobile phone as they move through these zones.
No more queues or tills. See the advert, click, purchased, pick it up and walk out. From movie tickets to clothes items.
This is why although we may describe it as the evolution of the Internet, The Singularity will be implemented independent of IP or other physical technologies, as it will come into effect across multiple networks, multiple devices, from mobile to D-TV to RFID to the web. These are only the enabling infrastructure, what The Singularity is concerned with is the universality of its building blocks: Identity and intelligence.
For my TV to be able to translate my shout for “Pizza!” into my preferred delivery arriving twenty minutes later, we need the TV to be able to authenticate who I am, process my request andcommunicate it in the appropriate form to the various suppliers I interact with.
Digital Identity and utility computing
These kinds of examples highlight that this is principally about “blending” the application world with that of the network service provider, so that application functionality becomes an inherent part of the network itself, not just a logically separate system connected to it. This is the essence of E-Business On Demand’: Business process infrastructure that is available in an immediately consumable utility manner “down the pipe”, emphasising how important the telcos and other service providers are to the future of IT. Sun was right, the Network is The Computer, or more accurately the network of networks is the computer.
To achieve this we need to look at the elimination of duplication that is required, what is preventing this fluid supply of on demand infrastructure. The simplest example is the username/password logon. Repeated a thousand times to access services because of a thousand different instances of a CRM/ web site system with your personal details in it. Widespread duplication of data and process that causes customer friction. Instead what everyone wants is one step of authentication, ideally even without a username/password prompt where our Identity can be verified automatically from another means, such as a retina scan or fingerprint.
Then what we want is for our Identity and all its relevant information to be known’ to every application we want to interact with, no matter which network it is located on. Hence The Singularity, the simplicity we all want achieved by just one instance of our online Self, which is universally understood across multiple environments. Achieved not by adding new systems but by simply having information shared in a uniform manner by participating organisations. Once you log on to one network, it can “tell” the others so you don’t have to.
Like the Internet, this will be based on voluntary adoption of universal addressing standards, those applied at the application and user level, so that in the same manner The Singularity won’t be built top down’, centrally controlled by one party, it will come into being and grow as various organisations implement these standards and methods. Delegation of control so that organisations can control their own domain will be in effect in the same way DNS (Domain Name Service) provides the current universal identity addressing scheme.
Hence the point that this is about the evolution of the Internet, not building something new from scratch; it is simply about expanding the scope of the addressing scheme to feature applications and users in exactly the same consistent way across numerous networks that makes the web and email possible.
Intelligent Agents and Autonomic Commerce
This singular instance of our online self across multiple networks will start with basic data, such as our username/password, name, address and so forth and over time build up to be a full profile that represents our Digital Self. For example, in the above On Demand TV’ example, where we added an advertised product to our regular grocery list, the key point is that this grocery list isn’t information locked away in only one suppliers CRM system, but knowledge that is universally available as part of your Digital Identity. That way you will be able to “One-Click Anywhere” in the same manner for any scenario; you might see an outdoor poster advert and repeat the step of adding it to your list, but through your mobile phone this time, not the TV.
This information about us will include everything from our shopping lists to our current physical location to what payment provider we use to fulfil our On Demand commerce. Equally this ubiquitous intelligence will combine with technologies such as RFID tagging, so that for the example of retail shopping, the item you purchase has its’ anti-theft signal de-activated upon purchase, and the retailers stock control systems are updated. One click, everything updates.
This increasing richness of profile data about ourselves will see The Singularity evolve to the entity described by the AI guys, the universal SELF, a single instance of a self-aware, intelligent computing environment.
With our Digital Identity equipped with the in-depth knowledge of our personal preferences, then intelligent software agents that represent’ this knowledge can communicate with other agents to achieve goals that autonomically satisfy our needs.
Satisfaction will be achieved by emphasising another key point: Online intelligent Digital Identities won’t be exclusive to people, they will also represent non-human entities, most notably business processes of commercial companies.
If you want to express the desire for a cheap holiday in the sun as soon as possible’, your agent will need to negotiate with the agents of travel firms and so on. Those agents equipped with the selling preferences’ required to conclude the transaction in a mutually satisfactory manner for both parties.
Thus this network of agents intelligently communicating with be the mesh that becomes the AI vision of The Singularity, capable of achieving what every customer wants: An experience that is quickly and automatically assembled to meet their specific needs exactly the way they want them satisfied. Autonomic, on demand commerce.
The Internet currently looks the same to each different user. When I visit a web site it looks the same as when you do too, more or less. The Singularity in contrast will achieve what every business aspires to, it will be uniquely and exactly customised to each user. It will look and behave exactly the way you want it to, the way I want it to.
This is the basis of the SELF architecture at the heart of the On Demand Network: The means to allow your business to be designed not by your management, but by your customers. Entirely, exactly personalised.
Change Impact and Opportunities
The potential for the business world is clear: From enterprises to telcos to SMEs, a single instance of a global computing environment that can tackle the issues the Internet currently can’t, such as application service QOS (Quality of Service), will dramatically change how it can support our business needs. The abstraction of customer identity to the universal level of a network of networks will require CRM strategists to completely re-think how they design their customer experience framework. It also offers considerable possibilities beyond just business, reaching across society and government too. For example, having a singular Digital Identity that could be verified “officially” offline so that it can’t be falsified could be used for:
– E-Democracy and general government issues. For example, currently in the UK there is a growing initiative to implement citizens’ Identity cards. However the UK government is one of the worst perpetrators of process and data duplication, their social services are delivered via a mountain of forms that must be repeatedly completed. So a Digital Identity strategy would not only underpin and enable an Identity card scheme but also simultaneously pay for it through eliminating the complexity that causes their bureaucratic quagmire.
– Chat rooms: Our children could be protected online by offering chatrooms where only those with a verified Digital Identity that proves they are of the required age could participate. In general verifiable Digital Identity could tackle many of the issues that plague us on the Internet, from spam to serious fraud.
Investment opportunities
If we look at the key drivers of the growth from the dot com period, we see trends such as the exponential expansion of mobile and Internet users, the promise of online e-business and how companies could better access IT from ASPs (Application Service Providers). In essence, we can see a “version 1.00”, a version hinting at where we will end up should these trends continue on a logical path of evolution. A single network that we can access via various devices that gives us useful services to meet our needs with minimal friction and hassle.
However, it only mainly succeeded in rolling out the base infrastructure, the connectivity and the devices, the services never really materialised and hence why we all got so disappointed. The best we got was text messaging from our phones and the odd football score, numerous equally frustrating e-commerce sites that didn’t really do more than a catalogue but with more hassle, and ASPs that were simply co-locating applications in a different physical place. The joined up intelligence just wasn’t there.
This characterises what “version 2.0” will bring: The services. Services that save us time, money, hassle and do useful things for us, as both consumers and businesses. So if you think the boom was big just from laying down the basic infrastructure, think what will come when a wealth of intelligent services are instantly available to you from any device, anywhere, on demand.
With basic mechanics such as this new layer of Digital Identity creating opportunity like the domain name goldrush for the web, The Singularity is in essence a completely new market, a new frontier of untouched snow ready to offer a entire realm of business growth opportunities. Given the “blending” together of enterprise IT and telco networks, these are opportunities best exploited quickly through joint venture scenarios to structure them for rapid growth and exit: Telco + app vendor = utility IT business with existing customers and so on.
Membership services
The On Demand Network is a new industry forum launching in 2004, with membership programs and services relevant to this article being:
Catalyst – For individuals and organisations predominately interested in being involved in the investment and strategic partnering activities around this overall market opportunity, featuring a managed service to engineer the joint venture scenarios mentioned.
Tier 1 – Tier 1 Membership is intended for vendors and service providers who want to play a direct part in defining and implementing The Singularity, becoming part of its “backbone” and therefore being able to offer relevant services.
Business Partner – There will be an explosive growth in demand from boardrooms of businesses seeking to understand how they can benefit from this massive scale of change, and consulting and solution services will be delivered by ODN Business Partners.
E-Business On Demand – For the large community of smaller application developers, service providers etc. who want to be part of the above proposed solutions.
Executive – A personalised service to rapidly assemble a group of executives from potentially complimentary organisations to discuss and explore joint venture business models that would exploit these capabilities.
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Neil McEvoy is CEO of the Genesis forum (http://www.webservices-strategy.com), an
industry initiative of Service Oriented Architecture vendors describing the
business benefits of their technologies. He is the Chief Architect of the On
Demand framework, the platform for autonomic business models that match demand
and supply perfectly. Neil provides unique consultancy solutions to enterprise
end-users and vendor suppliers customised to deliver ROI within the On Demand
market. He can be reached at http://www.ondemand-strategy.com
