Synthesis

Is er Maemo/ Meego/ Mer dead?

2011-10-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

Recently, Intel announced that it was dropping development on the Meego platform. Since Nokia dumped Meego in favour of Microsoft, the operating system is completely orphaned. Intel, in my humble opinion has made a silly mistake by not having a reference platform for its Atom chips.

The community has decided to take on this task on themselves and need to answer some of the biggest questions?

1. Who is their client? Who will set direction on the product?

2. Who is the customer? Who will pay for the efforts?

3. Who is the consumer? Whose needs will take priority?

Without a convincing answer to these questions, it will be tough going.

The Social Network

2011-02-28T03:52:00.000-08:00

The movie "The Social Network" missed the Oscar. But it has clearly defined a generation of people who are on social networking sites at ungodly hours. Even my mother claims its "awesomeness" and claims to spend 3 to 4 hours on it everyday. There is one question that keeps bothering me. Does being on a social networking site create economic value?

Before we get there, we probably need to understand what social networking offers to me as an individual. While most people may be accessing the site anything between once a week to once a day, there are others who are on these sites much more often.

For that group, it provides access to people, we call our "friends". As I reflect upon it, in the real world, as a person, I can say my mind in to my friends. Its no different from any experience we share in the company of our friends. While in the company of strangers, we go through our experiences quitely, in company of friends we reveal our fleeting emotions. When people experience something with friends, they react to a touch, a feeling, an object, a stranger, everything. They express their emotions about what is happening now under muttered breath.
"Cool", "Wow", "Moron", "Jerk".... And so on. We become overly sensitive to everything around us when we know someone we trust is listening to us.

Those reactions define us within a group of friends. We become clowns, advisors, agony aunts and coaches to our most trusted friends.

Maybe thats what make it valuable. However, apart from reducing our probable vulnerabilities by allowing us to express our reactions about everything, its difficult to see where and how economic value is created.
Meanwhile, everyone from corporations and advertisers realize that people are spending more time on these media than anything else. They understand the commercial value but economic value still eludes me. Maybe Mark Zuckenberg can answer that.

(Re)Thinking Policing

2011-02-27T03:55:00.000-08:00

Rethinking policing.

What would it take to have a society that does not need policing? A group of people who mind their own business, and do not lie, steal or hit each other. That has clearly not happened, and as power structures in any group of humans creates haves and have-nots, eventual transgressions of some kind are inevitable. In any society, with any form of government, the Orwellian Animal Farm is inevitable. To remind, the moral of that story was that sooner or later, in any a society, a group emerges that is more equal than others.

Incidentally crime is lowest in places where everyone is an outsider and everyone has a strong dis-incentive against breaking the law in terms of assured jobs, food on the table, etc. Prime examples are cities like Dubai, Singapore, etc.

For a software system that helps the police to do their job, making the social inequalities visible is probably more important than the effect in terms of burglaries, car thefts, and more violent crimes.

Community policing is based on such a thought process, but instead of tracking dissent and causes thereof, it has chosen to focus on crime statistics. The part it may have got right is ensuring policeman on the street.

Modern surveillance systems such as CCTV and tracking devices on the other hand suggest to people that they are living in a police state.

The concept of time in Enterprise Solutions

2010-08-05T18:01:00.000-07:00

Time is an interesting concept in typical enterprise solutions. Most transactional systems think of time as transaction date for an event. In context of business entities, time is modeled as the date of birth and date of dying/ retirement of a particular entity. People did not have a good way to interact with time. However, the web based stock charting systems are giving users a better way to see time. Users can see stock price variations for a day or a month. These variations can exist as the business entities morph from one legal entity to another or as the scale itself changes due to stock splits and mergers.

Architecture Strategy for Nokia

2010-05-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Will Nokia touch its original price?

Nokia's stock price is behaving wierdly. Market analysts predict that it will touch $24. Current stock price has fallen to $10. As a follower of this company, one wonders, what is the realistic outlook for this company and where does it need to improve from a software architecture perspective?

Nokia is the world's largest cellphone company. It releases mutiple models each year and sells millions of cellphones around the world in different markets.

However, off late it has been losing marketshare to more innovative competitors like Google and Apple. Google has launched its own version of the phone OS Android and Apple has built an eco-system of apps and music around its phone. Apple has already defined iself as a product design company and iPhone and the new iPad are no different.

Nokia on the other hand excels in making reliable cellphone handsets. Nokia should ideally now segment the market and decide which segments it focuses on.

From, the looks of it, Nokia segments its market as follows:
1. The mobile phone user
2. The Email user
3. Music lover
4. The Photo Buff
5. The Mobile Computer.

With each of the above, Nokia needs to think which way it sees the market go. Nokia can still play the role of the ideal converged device by offering something that comes close to the real and perceived needs of the customer. However, iPhone and Android sets a new baseline for the phones of the future in terms of a platform that others can build content for.

It is this partner ecosystem that Nokia needs more than hardware design. A platform that is open and not exclusive to certain channel partners. With a differentiated product line, Nokia will need to make sure that others can treat the Nokia hardware platforms that they themselves can provide differentiated products for. Nokia will also need to ensure that it allows networks and channel partners to package this variability as a differentiated product.

One of the likely problems has been that even though Nokia has very differentiated hardware platform, its operating system is antiquated and not highly differentiated. While differentiation exists at level of Series 40, 60 and so on, it is geared towards hardware capabilities rather than consumer segments. Maybe Nokia needs to think of an OS and SDK strategy that is built for gamers, music lovers, imaging enthusiasts and so on. Maemo would be an ideal foundation to start building that second tier SDK.

The Next Wave of Innovation

2010-03-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

It is now becoming clear to me that the winners in technology innovation will not be the companies who build the technology but the companies that use the technology effectively. The last decade has seen a proliferation of technologies to consumers around the world.

A lot of things a normal person would attach themselves to have been digitized. To name a few,...

1. Books
2. Music
3. Entertainment
4. News
5. Vacation (planning) - may be in future people will take virtual vacations
6. Writing letters
7. Movies

What does it mean? It means that winners in each of these areas will be companies that completely restructure the economics of creating and consuming these virtual content.

Revisiting Open source versus Commercial Software

2009-07-28T04:26:00.000-07:00

I was actually reading an earlier post by myself on Open Source versus Commercial software. The example I had taken was interesting. The realization that dawned is that best transportation systems are ones that offer choice.

So, I can take my car from my house, and still hop on a train to reach my office. This is possible because the train station probably offers a "Park and Ride" facility which follows parking standards, so that I can safely leave my car behind. Doing that with software licenses would require standards, where I can switch between one or the other based on convenience or my perceived value for that software.

Reviving the economy

2009-06-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

Understanding Economic Development Organizations

These days there is a lot of talk and focus on economic recovery. A lot of the funds being distributed by the Obama government are being distributed in the name of Economic development programmes. So what does it actually mean? What does it mean to say that there is an economic development programme.

The meaning of Economic Development

Economic development generally means improvement in quality of life for a people living in a certain area. These quality of life indicators could mean access to well-paying jobs that allow people to grow and attain their full potential. It also could mean access to good schools and hospitals and other social amenities.

It is interesting to see that at all levels in the government as well as various industry groups, there are paid employees engaged in the profession of economic development. Their role is to attract investors, businesses and in many cases skilled individuals to choose the jurisdiction they represent as the ideal destination.

The job probably started with someone providing information to interested businesses from within the Ministry of Commerce. As the art and the discipline grew, professional bodies such as the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) were formed. Prominent real estate agents also like themselves to be called economic developers as to traditional planners and development economists.

The primary focus of economic development practice currently seems to be attracting and retaining businesses.

However, the challenges facing any economic development agency are pretty huge. They cannot forecast to any level of accuracy who the next individual/ company looking for information might be. Consultants and potential customers expect more and more information available directly on the Internet in a manner that is accessible, trustworthy and still compelling.

As many recent studies have shown, the decision process is getting shorter but a lot more information actually changes hands. If your jurisdiction's information is not readily available or accessible then you may be losing business.

The importance of focus

Jurisdictions also seem to be questioning how they are perceived by outsiders and residents alike. Many areas have undergone branding exercises to correctly position their jurisdiction in front of the potential investor.

What kinds of systems are needed to support economic development initiatives?

In my mind, the economic development organizations wear several hats. These include the following:

a. A Sales and Marketing Organization
b. A Venture Capitalist
c. A lobby group
d. A development agency

I will examine each of these roles in subsequent blogs.

Is Productivity to blame?

2009-05-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

What could the economic downturn be telling us.
Everyone has their own perception of the economic downturn. In most cases, the same individual may hold multiple perspectives. I too have a few perspectives about this recession.

Today I will write about one of my such thoughts. I can't help feeling that one of the leading factors that lead to this downturn is our increasing productivity. The thought of an empty To do list dreadens me. At office, I find myself spending a lot of time doing other things because if I spend all my time working on "real work", I would be done in half a day. This is probably because it takes lesser time for me to do stuff than it used to take a few years ago.

On the other hand, I get paid more to do the same work than I used to be paid a few years. A lot more. If I extrapolate this to other people and other sectors in the economy, it could mean that people were being paid more for doing less work. Where does this lead us?

I think, may be I don't need to sit in the office for eight to nine hours. Maybe if I just came to office for six hours, I would be able to leave as well. Where do I spend the additional time. If I spend time to upgrade my skills, I would be paid even more to do even less. This in my mind is the cause of the inflationary economy. Since not everyone is benefiting equally from this productivity increase, there would be others who are going the other way. Getting paid less and less to do more and more work. I am sure there are many others in my predicament.

How do we spend our time so that it keeps us busy without leading to inflation? Maybe get out of the money economy for a while and spend time working in the non-money or re-wiring the economy to reduce external costs to environment and society.

Role of a Solution Architect

2009-02-28T10:13:00.000-08:00

Once again I found myself reading about the role of a solution architect in this MSDN blog

The truth is all the comments sound reasonable, but my experience teaches me a slightly different perspective. The role of the solution architect gets clarified when working on large projects. On small projects, the role gets mixed up with the 10,000 other functions that need to be performed.

In my view the role of the solution architect is to understand and interpret the problem that needs to be solved and then define the solution form. No clear solution can emerge without clearly understanding a problem. Thus, the domain of the solution architect is

1. What needs to be built?

2. Why does it need to be built?, Thats it!

3. How it needs to be built is the role of the technical architect or lead designer. Here the solution architect needs to collaborate with lead designer or technical architect.

In many cases, the last role is filled by the solution architect, but from my perspective this is an additional responsibility.

About the how
The how is never a mathematical problem and everyone will come up with their own interpretation based on the resources, time, budgets, skills of developers, familiarity with technology and so on. The how part is where solution architects need to let go and not control everything in the project. Let the lead designers and developers feel responsible for delivering the solution.

So, what is coding?
Also important is the role of coding. While many compare the software design process to the process of constructing a building... where architects design and programmers construct, most programmers I know will be offended by this description.

Reason being programmers are also designers. In my humble opinion, the roles are closer to dynamics inside an architecture office. In an architecture office, the lead architect would spend days and months understanding a project and in the process create several pencil sketches and hand drawings, (even models), to arrive at a form (solution). Once a form is confirmed, the remaining architects and designers would work out the actual plans using CAD or 3d modeling software. The important thing to note is that both stages are needed. While the initial conceptual stage is important to understand the form that is being sought, without the latter stage the actual construction cannot begin. There is no way the pencil sketches and paper models can be used to begin construction. In this analogy, the role of the solution architect is that of the lead architect, who by themselves or with assistance of a team explore the forms that could be adopted in solving a client's problem.

The second process is in my opinion the role that programmers play. Except there is no separate construction stage in software development. The designers (programmers) create the finished product or solution and work with deployment and/or implementation engineers to get it deployed at a client's site.

Should solution architects code?
Solution architects should not code the project they have architected. They may code something to prove a hypothesis to themselves, but that should never make its way into production source code.

Enterprise Solutions: Where to start

2008-10-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

Recently at work we were conceptualizing a large enterprise solution. A debate started on what needed to be done first .... where to focus. Should we start on focusing on the end user screens or should we start with the information flow in the enterprise. I found it difficult to start focusing on the user screens without understanding the key business outcomes and the resulting information flows. Coming from an enterprise solution background, it was important to see the entire information flow and then looking at each individual user's needs for deciding the screens.

Conversely, my colleagues came from a product development background. My colleagues insisted that it was useless to proceed unless we had conceived the exact screens. It was as if my colleagues wanted to build an Adobe photoshop for the user. They wanted to know what menu options will be available, including tools and shortcuts. They were planning to build this software feature by feature. My colleagues felt that what I was proposing lacked sizzle and excitement and that customer would not see the value unless we had really exciting screens.

We were at an impasse for the next few minutes. Finally I started giving an overview of why the customer wanted us to build a solution for them. I talked about the business case that had been sold to the finance department. As my colleagues got more context, they realized that they did not know how to proceed with building the exact screens. We finally agreed that we needed to start with information flows before reaching the screens.

The whole episode was interesting to me. Neither they nor me could agree on each others' perspective.

It got me thinking. Why was it that enterprises were willing to pay huge sums of money for enterprise middle ware and back end technologies such as databases, ERP solutions and Enterprise Service Buses while cringing on paying for desktop applications that would improve productivity.

I realized that enterprise solutions can justify higher sticker price owing to their relevance for multiple groups. The same piece of information was important for financial, operational and executive decisions. Same cannot be said about productivity tools that may enhance the productivity of one user group within an organization. This is because each group of user will have different toolset requirements for improving productivity.

Therefore for most large organizations, it will be easier to fund something that has benefits for multiple user groups instead of only one. In the process I would recommend, one should start with mapping multiple flows to application functionality and user groups and then flip it around to look at each individual user's needs for designing screens.

The Platform is the market

2008-10-01T20:09:00.001-07:00

"The platform is the market" was the key message from one of the recent articles from Harvard Business Publishing . This was a very interesting perspective from somebody who studies business models day in / day out.

The definition of a market is a place where a buyer and a seller can exchange goods and/or services on mutually agreeable terms. Markets grow as more and more people can enter the market, quickly discover the best person/team to transact with and exchange goods/ services for a fair price. Any control on who can enter the market on what terms will ofcourse mean that it is no longer a fair market and people may go elsewhere.

Translating this in terms of a software platform, it means that the more open a platform is in allowing people to participate, higher the adoption of the platform. I am working with a company that is keen on locking down a platform, to "protect its IP" and to ensure that they can exclusively develop on this platform.

As Bill Joy famously said "innovation happens elsewhere", the risk ofcourse is that the cost of maintaining the platform will fall on the company and it will not benefit from breakthrough ideas elsewhere.

I have a strong suspicion that as software keeps getting commoditized, the cost of maintaining proprietary platforms will keep rising. As
more development happens on more open platforms, this so called "IP"
will disappear.

Upfront versus Iterative/ Evolutionary design

2007-09-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

This is one of the issues I grapple with every day as a software architect. Upfront design offers the comfort of being able to partition systems into sub-systems with some sense of control on the end design. However, complex solutions that we try to build need iterative design.

It makes far more business sense to develop these solutions within an agile framework where the design and architecture themselves evolve and the code is refactored constantly. This also provides external stakeholders visibility into what is being developed and provides them a greater sense of control.

I feel that iterative development, also provides the software architects and engineers validation for the design choices made. This is important to ensure that you do not end up looking like the self-absorbed architect who was afraid to ask for directions.

Another important aspect is that as new information becomes obvious to you and the end client, different stakeholders start zooming in on aspects of the system they had not thought before. As requirements start getting re prioritized, architectural requirements also evolve.

It should be clear by now, which side of the debate I increasingly see myself on. However, I was looking for ways that would provide me the comfort of upfront design while allowing a solution to develop in an incremental fashion. An approach to analyze the sub-systems in the design while not getting locked in to sub-system choices made initially. In short, I was looking for ways to reconcile Upfront design with Incremental design.

This lead me to a rather interesting article by Steve Jurvetson in the July 2006 issue of MIT technology review. Titled Technology Design or Evolution. To quote Steve...

"Designed systems offer predictability, efficiency, and control. Their subsystems are easily understood, which allows their reuse in different contexts. But designed systems also tend to break easily, and they have conquered only simple problems so far. ...

By contrast, evolved systems demonstrate that simple, iterative algorithms, distributed over time and space, can accumulate design and create complexity that is robust, resilient, and well adapted to its environment. In fact, biological evolution provides the only "existence proof" that an algorithm can produce complexity transcending that of its antecedents. Biological evolution is so inspiring that engineers have mimicked its operations in areas such as genetic programming, artificial life, and the iterative training of neural networks.

But evolved systems have their disadvantages. For one, they suffer from "subsystem inscrutability." That is, when we direct the evolution of a system, we may know how the evolutionary process works, but we will not necessarily understand how the resulting system works internally."

Steve goes on to quote Wolfram to imply that it is not easy to discover rules for evolution without going through all the steps of evolution. This is interesting. It means that there are no easy solutions.

One idea that I am toying with, is to focus constantly on maintainability and extensibility of the solution each iteration. The goal, to ensure that resulting designs can be actually partitioned into sub-systems rather than ending up as spaghetti code that cannot be drawn on the white board.

Open source projects: The right client

2007-06-12T04:21:00.000-07:00

At the inception stage of open-source projects, it is important to identify the right client. However, the traditional view that open-source projects automatically benefit from unfiltered requirements and guidance is probably not true. There is a lot of benefit that traditional projects gain from working with people in a vertical structure.

Traditional commercial projects are conceived and implemented by the "caretakers" in any organizational setup. Organizational caretakers are people who represent the organization at different levels. They solve a vital problem of representing a large group of people when they organize to deliver a good or service.

Human society organizes itself at different levels. Earlier societies were defined by traveling distances. Communities and villages were defined by walking distances, cities or towns by driving or riding distances. Regions were defined by primary markets and the areas that served them. This could involve distances that could be covered when transporting perishable goods on a routine basis.

Later on, as the early empires were formed, administrative regions were defined. These were defined by areas where tax could be uniformly collected as well as welfare tasks such as education, health, law and order could be provided so that people did not rebel.

At the outset of nations in 18th and 19th century during the industrial revolution, the distance that could be covered by railroad determined the areas that could be joined to create the first nations. These new entities started sharing defence, budgets, currencies, foreign policy and international trade policies.

Why this does not work for open-source projects

Open source projects represent a larger playing field than most nations or empires can hope to achieve. However, open source projects work at the level of the individual end user. This means that requirements do not come from organizational representatives but individuals. This provides a new challenge. Key individuals have greater insight into an organization due to their functional roles and large amount of time these individuals spend in analysing the organizational needs from their functional perspectives.

There needs to be a way to bring these perspectives into open-source projects. Functional requirements from the people who understand them best in addition to a shared peer review is probably the best way to develop open-source code.

Knowledge is power or is it?

2007-04-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

It is my premise that knowledge is power that destroys those who wield it against common good of people.
The samurai in real history, the jedi in fiction were destroyed because they attempted to control means and production of knowledge. Hindu mythology talks about the great brahmin king - Ravana of Lanka who was destroyed primarily because everyone hated the knowledge and control he exercised over others. Drawing parallels to present knowledge based economy is something I wanted to understand. According to the laws of commerce, when hard products are created - value is actually created in transaction at the point of consumption.
With this premise, knowledge would also only create value at the point of consumption.

So, how it all relates to software architecture? As architects, we have to ensure that systems we build are not exclusionary and are available to everyone. This will allow value to be created at multiple points of consumption, thus increasing the overall value of a system.

What allows a system to be non-exclusionary? Allow it to be accessible, and available on memory constrained and a vast variety of hardwares. However, each segment of users should be studied in isolation of each other. That is the only way a complete offering can be prepared for the end-user

The "Science" of modern management

2007-03-07T04:42:00.000-08:00

For a very long time, I have been debating the role of managers in any organization that has a lot of people that deal with tacit knowledge such as software, medicine, architecture, etc. My own thoughts with respect to my employer have been ranging between extremes. On one hand, I prefer a slightly open environment where I can learn and grow. On the other hand, I would have preferred that there was some structure to day to day workplace battles. If on a day when I am dragged into different roles- the kinds I think would be handled by at-least 4 different persons in a more structured organization, I feel that I am subsidizing the employer's business model or lack thereof.

As I was looking for answers, I came across a book titled False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today by James Hoopes. The editorial review claimed that most modern day management gurus are simply misleading people with management fads. The review claimed that the book exposes the deeper conflict between the authority of managers and the freedom granted by Jeffersonian ideals of a free-man, a concept on which most modern democracies are based.

Intrigued, I finally picked up the book and read it cover to cover. Overall the book offered many interesting facts and insights on the people whose theories most management students study as a part of the curriculum. Based on the reviews, I expected a lengthy discourse on why management conflicts with a persons' freedom as an individual.

What I found was a lot of historical and well-researched facts about the gurus themselves. Another bonus was a sort of comparative discourse of different management theories. Most importantly, it traces the individuals along their own professional and personal paths, as they came up with the theories, something I always am curious about.

I would recommend this book because, I feel a lot of management theories have to be studied in the context they were proposed, which may or may not be valid today.

While many of the critiques I felt were justified, I felt the author over-demonized FW Taylor and got off easy on Peter Drucker. The author built the most convincing case against Edwin Mayo, who conducted the famous Hawthorne experiments. To management students, the Hawthorne experiments are presented as conclusive evidence for morale based management, just like Michelson-Morley experiments are to students of physical sciences as evidence of the absence of ether. Mr. Hoopes evidence proves that the experiments were a farce and the results were mainly fudged.

As for Frederick Taylor, father of modern management, I thought was over-demonized. That his motives were not altruistic is easy to understand, however, by raising production, he was able to offer workers a more decent standard of living.

Some names that the author presented in a good light were Peter Drucker, Deming and Mary Parker Follett. I was familiar with both Drucker and Deming (thanks to management courses and software quality workshops, respectively), the name that surprised me was Ms. Follett.

I must say, I was intrigued by a woman who articulated so many things that I have been trying to resolve in my own head for quite some time. Not only did she answer so many questions almost 90 years before they were bothering me, she took the discussions to a new level and provided answers that are as elegant as E=mc^2.

As a follow up, I read her 1918 book - The New State about which I will write in a later post.

Preventing climate change - software and other strategies

2007-03-07T03:40:00.000-08:00

Governments have now accepted that the earth's climate is changing and that we need to do something about it. Nicholas Stern, a british diplomat submitted a report (The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review) on the economic and financial impact of global warming (or more appropriately climate change) to the British chancellor and prime minister.

The results of the report caused quite a stir when they reported facts that were already known to the scientific research community - that the earth will heat up 1-2% or even 5-6% in the coming years.

Mr. Stern has given tight deadlines to governments around the world to divert at least 1% of global GDP towards mitigation measures and related costs.

Need for new institutions

An institution is something to which people belong, however something that endures across generations. Common institutions known to us include family, school, religious community, profession al institutions among numerous others.

To address the impact and take both preventive and remedial measures we need new institutions. For instance, these institutions may look at carbon flows in an area and determine if carbon levies need to be applied.

To explain this scenario a bit more, lets say a producer in China (a new plastic toy factory), is able to sell its toys to kids in California. The total carbon costs of that toy would be a sum of the carbon emissions towards production in China, emissions in extraction and transportation of raw materials to the factory and costs in transportation of toy to California. Such a scheme not only puts the cost on the factory in China but serves as a demand control mechanism by taxing the consumer.

Will such a scenario happen? For sure, countries that have export driven economies will feel the impact, and will possibly use WTO to rally their cause. But eventually, once Chinese have mastered emission technologies, they will support these scenarios. Another corollary is the need for improvement in global logistics technology that is available to all economies.

Other impacts

We may see changes in siting of carbon based energy production facilities to places like Africa or even Sahara. On software side, new software forms will be needed. We will see a proliferation of environmental monitoring and logistics solutions. Carbon emission models may become open-source libraries that can be easily downloaded. For software architecture, we may need new institutions like LEEDS is for building architecture in choosing technologies (materials) and software processes (automated build and testing scripts) that reduce the energy cost of software solutions. Software deployed on virtualized and shared environments may be promoted to reduce energy footprints.

Open source vs. commercial software: The case for freedom

2007-02-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about the whole open source versus commercial software and realized that at their heart both offer the same thing : freedom!

The whole argument actually goes back to economics or rather formulation of economies: the concept of "gift economy" versus "money economy". While money economy promises freedom from patronage and privilege, "Any body can buy it as long as they have the money", gift economy promises freedom to those, who for some reason cannot or do not wish to participate in the money economy.

In practice, a healthy mix is needed. It is no different from public and private mix required in business or providing mobility in a city. Consider a city where there is no public transportation, only form of mobility offered is through personal vehicles. You can already start guessing the mix of people who will live in that city. A typical modern suburbia.

On the other hand, a city where public transportation is the only means of mobility, chances are people will get stranded when the system breaks down. While the comparison is not entirely valid, many open-source projects are like "Soup nazi" kitchens, where your influence rests on your personal relationship with the committer. However,for a lot of customers with less than adequate money, it offers the ability to deploy technology within their budgets.

As for me, I would like to have the ability to switch a commercial stack with an open-source one, and vice-versa, based on the needs of the client. That is a luxury, however, that I can only dream about....

Responsive buildings and software context

2007-02-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

Building architects are now thinking of making responsive buidings, that change shape based on the context. Software architects have battled such designs since the advent of authorization policies, where the software looks, feels and responds differently in different contexts.

Finally the students of architecture are teaching their building masters a trick or two.

Runtime software structures

2007-02-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

Software architects need to start worrying about runtime software structures on a larger scale than they do currently.

The software landscape is changing from simple client-server models, to a mesh of connected systems, linked by real time calls across the network. As the world increasingly becomes a network of live systems feeding data to each other in real time, the software architects' emphasis will need to change from static structures to runtime structures. This is because devices and computational structures will be needed to constantly monitor several raw streams, for data that needs to be aggregated, compiled and analyzed.

Traditionally software architects focus on static structures while conceiving solutions. Classes, frameworks, libraries, etc, are all static structures that focus on how the written code is structured or layered. Runtime structures, in contrast, are dynamic and may change based on certain system events.

User community world over will start to realize, how their everyday choices impact real time supply chains. This may lead to a change in people's interaction behavior as well. As systems are getting linked, more and more users are interested in getting a dashboard view of the system.

Interaction design then changes from active (initiated by the user) to reactive (response to an event). In his book In the Bubble, John Thackara refers to this as "In the flow" and asserts that a process control paradigm will increasingly become more important.

This also involves a change in user mental models. An important aspect being talked increasingly in solution design is the concept of personal dashboards that would provide people with information they should be looking at or acting on.

All this is great. However, in my humble opinion, the system should force the users at some point to review past data and performance and make some critical decisions. This could be in form of change in policies, or change in the process itself.

An important question to ask is what will be this sub-system and how will vast amounts of information be analyzed and sorted. Lastly, but not less important,is the fact that if everything is reactive, then how do we engage the human operators to make decisions and develop foresight. In the environment where every action is a reaction to an event, what kind of institutions will this create and what will be the impact on social structures.

Design options for reducing environmental costs of mobility

2007-02-04T08:25:00.000-08:00

In my previous blog, I mentioned what I thought were key parameters in determining reducing overall mobility related costs in North America and rest of the world.

At a policy level, there is already a change in investment patterns made by departments of transportation. Departments of Transportation are responsible for investments in state highway systems. There is a growing realization that highway investments have to change from the single dimension of preservation of asset value to multiple dimensions of providing mobility, ensuring safety and reducing environmental costs.

However, that is no longer enough. In urban America, a very large number of people have commute distances that can be best described as intra-regional and not intra-urban. The same is true for container traffic. The option is then, to provide regional multi-modal systems. To be successful, regional multi-modal systems require integration of transportation systems at both ends of the system. Fo most commuters, it means a viable road based personal and public transportation systems for their sub-urban environment.

A similar strategy is required for goods transport. For intra-regional and inter-region transportation of goods, rail systems could become the system of choice rather than the huge fleet of road and air vehicles maintained by logistics organizations. It could also mean developing a market for smaller and more nimble logistics companies that are more regional in nature. These could offer collection, sortation and delivery systems at either end of the system.

Software architecture

How does it all tie back to software architecture? The question obviously is to design a software architecture to meet this requirement. The following stakeholders needs need to be met to meet the above goals.

1. System owners and operators - These are typically the owners of the system such as state departments of transportation.
2. Policy makers - These are national transportation bodies.
3. Local system owners and operators - These are urban bodies responsible for planning and running the system.
4. Individual system users - These are individuals who make travel decisions for planning commutes and making them.
5. Commercial system users - These are organizations who use the system for commercial reasons such as freight and logistics companies.

In the Bubble

2007-01-22T19:45:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading "In the Bubble" by John Thackara. The author's premise is that the design profession has to change to respond to the impending crisis in the future. Mr. Thackara proposes that design profession has to change to offer a more sustainable future. A future which is "people-centred" rather than "gadget-centred".

While I found myself agreeing to most diagnosis and detailed analysis, it is the over-simplification and sometimes complete absence of a solution to the problem that I found nagging. Another question I have is, who exactly is Mr. Thackara's audience. Most designers (in their own realms) have a very good grasp of the issues that the author raises. Agreed, there is a lot of interesting trivia, but trivia is exactly that, trivial.

Taking an example. In chapter 3, the author discusses how the mobility question needs to be re-defined for a more sustainable solution. Most planners and urban designers very well know the difference between sprawl and a high density development. The forces that cause sprawl are not in the designers' domain but in the domain of politicians and interest groups. As long as the automobile is a subsidised means of transport, and gasoline is cheap (like in North America), people will prefer to own their own automobiles. It is this low density development suited to the automobile, with cul-de-sacs and private 3 car garages that make urban transit services such as buses unviable.

In developing countries where vehicle ownership is low, and density is higher , already public transport operates at near capacity. So what solutions remain to various designers while considering options for design. The following comes to mind.

1. Change pattern of investment in state highway systems
2. Make public transport services more demand responsive and attractive
3. Create services that allow automobile owners to integrate with public transportation systems.

We will take a look at each of these in the upcoming blogs.

Identity - of the architect and the project

2007-01-22T05:02:00.000-08:00

As any architect can certify - it is far easier to approach the design of a building whose identity can be understood as an abstraction or even a caricature. Ask any kid in the developing world to draw a cowboy. You will get a drawing of a Marlboro man or a Clint Eastwood clone, straddling down the cattle ranch. Ask the same question to a 12 year old growing up in Alberta countryside and it is a not so easy question. The question of identity comes up - does he ride a horse, or a 4X4. Does he then need to wear spurs on his shoes. Does he carry a guitar or an iPod?

It is my experience that as you start approaching a new project - whether a building or a software project, it is these questions of identity that first need to be answered as an architect. The questions being -

1. Who is the client ?
2. Why do they need the project?
3. What do they aspire that the project be?
4. Is this aspiration sustainable?
5. Do the project goals align with my own morals and belief systems?
6. Do my own belief systems require re-interpretation?
7. Am I the qualified to do this project for this client? Will I hold true to the client's objectives?
8. Has the client chosen me as the architect for some reason? What are these reasons?

Initially, I struggled with these questions myself, even to the point that should I be asking them at all, or should I move on and the answers will come to me? I found that the unanswered questions kept coming back. So it is in everyone's best interest that the architect answers these questions affront.