IT Transformation with SOA

Interlude Three: On Technology

This being my 50^th blog, it represents a good vantage point to take stock of the road traversed and the reason why we are in this journey in the first place. I started my blog describing the promise of technology and the importance of technology transformation to accomplish that promise. I moved on to a discussion on how to make the business case to start the technology transformation ball rolling. I then proceeded to cover more technical matters, such as the characteristics of Service Oriented Architecture and the various classifications of services, and then delving even deeper into the detailed considerations for SOA design and management.

In fact, we have gone so deep that I am reminded of this “gedanken” (mental experiment):

Assume there is a tunnel so deep that it reaches the center of the earth. In fact, imagine digging this tunnel until it reaches the surface on the opposite side of the Earth (the antipode). Now, let’s have a brave athlete jump into the tunnel. What would happen?

Removing all other physical considerations such a as air resistance, and temperature and pressure, as the athlete reaches the center of the Earth, she should begin to feel less and less gravity. In the center of the Earth she should be completely weightless. The force of gravity is zero down there. The reason being that gravity is caused by the Earth’s mass. At the center, the gravitational pull is offset by the Earth’s surrounding mass.

So far, so good, but now the athlete has inertia and will continue to “fall upwards” towards the surface on the other side of the Earth! As the athlete falls upward, the gravitational pull will increase (more and more mass from the Earth will be behind her), slowing her down until the “upward fall” is halted just as she reaches the surface at the antipode. At this point, our athlete will begin to fall once again toward the center of the planet until she returns to the entrance of our tunnel . . . only to fall again. In this hypothetical, frictionless environment, our athlete would act like a perpetual Yo-Yo, repeatedly falling and re-falling back to the surface.

So, imagine that this SOA blog is a bit like this athlete. It feels like we have reached the center and that it’s time to now “fall” upwards towards the surface. Next I will be covering detailed engineering considerations (remember, we are still near the SOA core!), followed by less technical discussions. These items will be related to program execution governance, project management, and organizational and people matters. That is, we will return from the detailed to the general.

Still, given that we are still knee deep in the details, it is also good to remind ourselves why we are on this journey. In the end, this is not about SOA or even Technology, but about what we can do with SOA and with Technology. Yes, there is the technologist viewpoint regarding the power of SOA. While you can certainly run non-SOA system in a Cloud Computing environment, without SOA it is almost impossible to truly leverage the power of Cloud computing on behalf of an enterprise-wide system. Then again, the labor involved in creating SOA systems has an objective beyond Cloud Computing or using Software-as-a-Service. The most exciting goals are all about shaping the future of technology. That is, our ability to make technology so flexible that it eventually becomes hidden.

Arthur C. Clarke’s famed third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I would add a fourth law: The best indication that a technology has matured is that it has become invisible.

Think of electricity, the water supply, or even the internal workings of an automobile. In all these cases, we operate these technologies almost obliviously in a Switch On/Switch Off basis.

For the most part, technologies follow a well-defined life-cycle that takes them from inception in a lab all the way to invisibility. The time spent within a cycle is technology-dependent, but the average time to maturity can span decades.

Many futurists believe that one of the main evolutionary aspects of computing in the future is to have it also become invisible—embedded in the fabric of the thing we call “reality”. Instead of screens, keyboards and mouses, users will interface with computers in a seamless manner.

The ultimate interface achievement will be to hide the fact that a user is accessing, or even programming, a computer. This later attribute is often confused with the famed Turing Test of Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, the Turing Test establishes that Artificial Intelligence will only be achieved when a computer is able to hide the fact that it is a computer when communicating with a human in a broad domain. AI has been long in coming, and many believe it to be still a century away; others that it is around the corner. But AI requires common-sense and pattern recognition capabilities if it is to work, and progress has been fairly slow on these fronts. I tend to agree that AI as originally envisioned will take a long time to be achieved. However once it happens, AI will not appear as an overnight invention; instead, we will continue to see improvements in computer systems that gradually appear to make them smarter and smarter.

Think about your car’s navigation system which already appears quite smart and of the novel capabilities of your digital camera, such as face recognition. Pseudo-AI behavior in narrow knowledge domains is arriving thanks to the growing computer power made possible by Moore’s law. Consider that in the beginning it was assumed that a chess program capable of beating a chess grandmaster would require a full-fledged AI system. However, this feat has been achieved thanks to the use of the brute-force represented by massive parallel processors and the ingenuity of sophisticated heuristics; not by the invention of a human mind emulator. In May, 1997 an IBM computer nicknamed Deep Blue beat World Chess champion Garry Kasparov much to the chagrin of the Grand Master who found it difficult to accept he had been beaten by a computer! To all intents and purposes, playing against a chess computer does convey the eerie feeling of competing against an “intelligent” device. The machine behaves like AI, but it is actually based on the narrow domain of chess-playing, making the computer an “idiot-savant” of sorts.

As discussed earlier, most transformative technologies are the result of synergistic combinations of various evolutionary advances. To the degree that we see continued advances in user interface paradigms as represented by gestures ala iPhone or voice recognition, combined with improved algorithms and availability of ultra-fast communication bandwidths, we will see a wealth of interesting applications; many of them with true transformative effects. For example, enhanced user interfaces in the future, combined with more advanced artificial intelligence heuristics and the merging social networking paradigms, can deliver a suite of Virtual Sidekick capabilities:

· Attaining complete knowledge of your preferences. In fact, complete knowledge of you as a person.

· Exercise controlled empowerment to take independent action.

· Have immediate access to all sources of information available electronically. The ability to alert you to those specific developments that interest you, such as breaking news or TV specials.

· Adopt different service personalities based on context.

· Monitor actions performed on your behalf in a non-obtrusive manner. Certain events will automatically initiate pre-approved actions. For example, a calendar event schedule change will automatically trigger an action from your Virtual Sidekick to initiate a flight change.

This type of automated avatar will spawn new industries just as the Internet has spawned the multi-billion dollar Google. The Virtual Sidekick is but one example of the kind of thinking that should be propelling your R&D efforts. There are others. For example, it’s logical to imagine a future in which web access devices will have become so small and non-intrusive that they can be implanted into our bodies. In a world permeated with wireless access to the Web (the” Infosphere”, I discussed earlier), imagine a scenario where you can search and access the Internet by simply thinking about it; where you can “Skype” your wife and talk to her using your own embedded phone. You won’t even need to speak to communicate. A microprocessor embedded in your brain will convert your brain waves into speech. Think of this scenario as technology-enabled telepathy! These and other interesting possibilities can be extrapolated from the intriguing technology forecasts by author, Ray Kurzweil, in his book “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”.

There can be no doubt that the transformative effects of such future inventions will generate heated debates about the ethics and dangers associated with their use, but that’s a subject matter for a future blog.

Labels: Artificial Intelligence, avatras, Clarke, Cloud Computing, Future, gravity, predictions, SaaS, SOA, Technology

posted by IT Transformation with SOA @ 11:49 AM

Virtual Presence—A Prognostication Example

Let’s play around a bit with the techniques covered in my prior Blog. My most recent experience is from the travel and hospitality industry. It’s my believe that this industry is on the verge of major tectonic shifts due to changes in travel patterns caused by the energy costs, economic restructuring, and yes, technology. For example, when travel costs rise and the economy tightens, people change their leisure travel habits, and there is a reduction in business travel as more business is conducted via telephone, emerging online meeting means, or via old-style videoconferencing.

Still, anyone who has ever tried to hold a productive meeting via a 25 inch TV screen knows how hard is to detect nuances in facial expressions or to read the body language from other attendees—aspects of human interaction that are undeservedly underrated. The quality of such business meetings usually turns out to be less than satisfactory. Good business communication is about sensing moods, detecting reactions, and establishing the kind of warm rapport that only seamless proximity can provide.

Could there be room here for an emerging technology in this area? I suggest we can try to answer this question by following the prognostication techniques I covered earlier:

· Reinterpret the past, don’t ignore the value of second generation pruning

· Extrapolate what is known and to imagine what would happen if a known element were to become pervasive

· Identify the various technology trends whose trajectories will make them combine in novel ways

· Define a likely frame of reference with assumptions bound by bracketed extremes

Original Videoconferencing can rightly be seen as a first generation technology, something like the Atari was for Videogames, but now technology has advanced to a degree that overcomes some of the original limitations thanks to the use of large high definition screens and better control of the interaction. Clearly, companies like CISCO and HP have already identified enhanced teleconferencing as an area of great opportunity for the future. However, even though both companies refer to their enhanced teleconferencing products as “Telepresence”, what if an economic and effective form of actual 3-Dimensional Telepresence were developed? What I have in mind is something more like the stuff shown in the latest Star Wars movies—something I will refer to as “Virtual Presence”.

Just like with this very important meeting between Ki-Adi-Mundi, Yoda, and Mace Windu,[1], wouldn’t be great to use Virtual Presence in order to avoid having to fly from LA to New York for just a two hour meeting?

If Virtual Presence were to become ubiquitous, efficient, and economical, it could definitely become a transformational technology. The real question is this: How close are we to developing it?

Economically speaking, if past trends are an indication, chances are the initial engine for introduction of this type of capability will come from the so-called adult entertainment industry—especially if Virtual Presence is complemented with technologies intended to enhance sensory experience. There could be the addition of gloves with actuators to simulate the sense of touch, and . . . you get the idea. Smirk all you want, but economics wouldn’t be a problem in that area!

What would be next? Just as travel became a leading application in the early Internet days, its avoidance will surely drive Virtual Presence technology. After all, business travel takes time, money, and energy (in a world that's becoming more aware of energy consumption, this is not a small issue). Also, let’s be frank: business trips are not often as fun or effective as we would all like them to be.

I once participated as a panelist in a conference, answering questions related to the aftermath of 9/11. One of the questions was how I would recommend companies reduce travel. Being a representative from the hospitality industry, my answer was plain and sincere: “please don’t cut your travel, just stay in one my company’s brands!”

Clearly, business travel avoidance is not good if you happen to be in the travel and hospitality business. Now, I know some of you may argue that travel avoidance was precisely the goal original videoconferencing was meant to achieve, but I’m not talking here about dated NTSC TV screen resolutions. Virtual Presence is all about truly replicating the experience of being in the same room with someone who may be several thousand miles away. Compared to that, existing videoconferencing systems are just primitive thinker toys.

To create Virtual presence, we will need a 3D scanner—perhaps a laser-based system that will rapidly trace each participant, digitizing the contour of their bodies and faces in real-time.

Next, we are going to need an extremely fast network to transfer the digitized information generated by the scanner. We will certainly need a very fast pipe to transfer what are certain to be terabytes of scanned data even after compression. Also, in order to rapidly compress this information, we’re going to need a very fast computer. After all, we still won’t be able to exceed the speed of light and there’s just so much information that can be transferred on a sub-second basis.

Fast computers on the receiving end will be needed to decode the scanned images and 3D technology will then be needed to project the resulting image, using hologram techniques, somewhere in the virtual conference room.

Do we really have the technologies to make this happen? Well, not quite yet, but we could be very close…

• Huge bandwidth: Take the shift from analogue to digital spearheading novel uses for the telecommunication networks. The first time ever that telephone wires carried more digital data than voice conversation was in 1997. Yet, it took only 7 additional years before, of all the data transmitted across telephone networks, only 3% consisted of voice.

In 1999, Bell Labs was able to transmit 1.65 gigabits of information across a single fiber optic line in one second. This is equivalent to transmitting the entire contents of the Library of Congress in about six seconds. Only five years later, in 2004, a record announced at the Spring 2004 Internet2 Conference was the transmission of data over nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second, and in 2007 it went up to 9.08 gigabits per second.

• Moore’s Law to the max: hardware costs continue to be driven down

• 3D holographic display technology is currently being tested in labs

• Basic 3D scanners are now on the market and their prices are dropping

Virtual Presence could just be around the corner. In my prognosticating opinion, we should expect real, albeit expensive, applications no later than 2015 (remember when the 50” plasma TVs went for $100K?). So the main questions are these: when will economics allow for its broad deployment? And better: What is the business impact of such a technological development likely to be?

Next week, I’ll go over some thoughts on how to envision the business impact of technology.

Till then!

Labels: Cisco, Future, Hospitality, Hotels, HP, Marriott, Prognosticaing, technology IT, teleconferencing, Telepresence, Travel, Virtual Presence

posted by IT Transformation with SOA @ 1:01 PM