communication

the literal, the colloquial, and the peace of nothing

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I try very hard to write using phrases that convey literal meaning. I look down on writers who rely too much on colloquial phrases. I consider it sloppy, especially when the writer is unfamiliar with the concrete situation from which the phrase originated. Then, the phrase is merely repeated to convey a shallow meaning without understanding its deeper meaning and context.

Today, I was curious about the origin of the phrase “extend an olive branch”. I thought there must be a great, gripping story behind it. It turns out the origin has long been forgotten. It was that memorable and significant. The symbol of peace that is so widely understood across many cultures is anchored by… nothing. It is learned by rote and repeated mindlessly, not knowing that it is hollow and empty. Perhaps that becomes the truly significant origin of the modern phrase. Contemplate what new and deeper meaning this would assign to the phrase “extend an olive branch”, when applied to present day situations like the Middle East peace process. There is a certain perfection to that. Shaka, when the walls fell.

innovation

mobile devices and carriers

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When I upgraded to an Android mobile device with AT&T, I signed a new two year contract with a more costly data plan. The device was discounted to zero thanks to a special promotion, but actually the full cost of the device is amortized over the life of the contract. This explains why there is a prorated termination fee for recouping that cost.

AT&T, like most carriers, preinstalls their own lineup of apps on top of the base Android operating system. They also disable features like being able to specify alternative sources for downloading apps. Many AT&T apps require a subscription with an additional monthly recurring charge. AT&T Family Map is an example. There are many disadvantages to this arrangement.

AT&T is extremely slow to upgrade their apps to newer releases of Android. In fact, they don’t even bother to do so for legacy (2yr old) hardware. This is horrible for users who cannot take advantage of the constant stream of software innovations available from Google.

The preinstalled apps cannot be uninstalled. This bloat occupies precious memory and storage that is better used for the user’s favorite apps. These undesirable apps occupy valuable resources and drain battery life.

It is understandable that a carrier would want its users to install its apps in the hopes of generating more revenue. It is a never-ending quest for carriers to avoid becoming dumb pipes, while over-the-top content and Internet services vendors become rich. Unfortunately, no matter how hard they try, carriers will never innovate fast enough to maintain a competitive advantage in these value added services, because they are too slow and too old-school. Dumb pipes are all they are good at.

On my next device, I will almost certainly reimage it with Cyanogenmod.

innovation

Integrating Automobiles with Mobile Computing

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I would love to see automobile manufacturers join mobile computing device manufacturers in producing vehicles that support standardized off-the-shelf electronic devices that integrate seamlessly with the vehicle’s console, electrical system, controls, and accessory mounts. We should be able to incorporate our personal tablets, music players, and mobile devices for all of the following functions.

  • hands-free telephone calls
  • maps and turn-by-turn navigation
  • traffic, accident, and road condition warnings
  • music
  • video entertainment for passengers
  • fuel economy monitoring and optimization
  • driving behavior and safety monitoring
  • location tracking and history
  • vehicle telemetry recording (“black box”)
  • external camera monitoring
  • vehicle maintenance tracking – schedule for oil, brake fluid, transmission fluid, and power steering fluid changes

Replacing proprietary electronics with commercial off-the-shelf components would provide the following advantages.

  • User serviceability (hardware repair and replacement)
  • Electronic hardware upgrades can keep pace with rapid advances in technology innovation
  • Multi-sourcing for electronics hardware will lower costs through competition, standardization, and commoditization
  • Software applications can be installed and upgraded at will
  • It opens up a vast market for applications that work in conjunction with the vehicle and its subsystems
  • The cost of development is externalized from the vehicle manufacturer, allowing it to take advantage of the economies of scale associated with the computing and consumer electronics industry
  • And most importantly, consumers will love it. A vehicle with this capability will be of enormous appeal to the market. This would be such a revolutionary improvement that any manufacturer without this capability will be at an immediate and insurmountable disadvantage in terms of desirability.

Limitless possibilities open up, when the automobile’s subsystems are integrated with mobile computing devices that have high speed network connectivity (e.g., HSPA, LTE) and user installed software applications. I am sure that developers would invent a huge range of applications to take advantage of a platform that is such an important element of people’s lives. In many occupations, mobile computing is done while parked in a vehicle. Such a platform could greatly improve the ergonomics for this mobile work force. With such a platform, I bet it would not take long, before an application appears to enable vehicles in close proximity to collaborate to assist drivers in avoiding accidents. A platform with applications such as this would no doubt open up a market for integrating additional components, such as external cameras, sensors, and signaling mechanisms. The possibilities are endless.

innovation

Email Retention – automated organization

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Like most people who work with computers on a regular basis, I receive a high volume of email every day. I would like software to automate the classification and organization of my email so that important and unique information is retained and easily accessible later, when I have a need to find it. I spend a significant amount of time doing this by hand, and it seems like a task that would be done more efficiently and effectively by software.

Most email accounts have a storage limit. Even when there is no technical limit, users would like to keep their mail box pruned so that it is not cluttered with messages that are a waste of space. The available space should be utilized most efficiently, and enough room should always be made available so that inbound mail is not rejected due to the quota being exceeded.

It is helpful to classify email to identify what type of content is represented, so that appropriate retention policies can be applied to each type. Classification may be done by organizing email into folders, and tagging messages with keywords or categories. An email’s classifiers can be used to determine which retention policies to apply.

Email can be moved to various offline repositories for archival purpose to stay in compliance with storage limits associated with an account on the email server. This allows email to be retained despite server storage limits, so that valuable information can remain searchable and accessible. The utility of the information is not apparent until the need for it arises later.

Often when a user replies to an email, the entire content of the previous email in the thread is embedded as a quote. Throughout the thread, the entire history of content is duplicated in quotes again and again. When determining which email messages to retain, it is usually sufficient to keep the latest messages, which include the content from every past message in the thread.

It is also helpful to prioritize messages for retention (or deletion) based on topics of significance or recognizable patterns. We have seen how Bayesian spam filtering successfully distinguishes spam from non-spam messages. Using similar techniques, it should be possible to distinguish significant content from email that contains content that is not valuable to retain.

Certain categories of email contain time-sensitive information. When we receive notifications and reminders, these should expire fairly quickly resulting in deletion. When we receive a list of this month’s events, this should expire at the end of the month. It should be possible to recognize these types of content, classify them, and apply expiration policies to them automatically.

These are some of the more obvious requirements that should be satisfied by an email classification and retention component. An add-on to popular email clients like Thunderbird and Exchange would be a valuable time-saver to many users. I am optimistically hopeful that someone will take up the challenge to develop such a useful tool.

innovation

Enterprise Tablet Computing

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I would like to explore how tablet computing could improve how work is done within enterprises.

In my previous article, Enterprise Collaboration, I identified the need for workers to collaborate with greater decoupling in space and time. Today’s audio and Web conferencing technology combined with email, instant messaging, blogging, Wikis, and sharing documents in the cloud are not providing a game changing improvement in productivity. Something is missing to enable a geographically dispersed, mobile work force to revolutionize the way that work is done.

A technology that coincides with the advance of always-on mobility, compact form factor, touch screen, and cloud computing is the tablet computer.

What is one thing you can do with a tablet that you cannot do with a laptop?

You can use your fingers to write, draw, and gesture.

Is there some kind of application that would benefit from this advantage in the enterprise?

When technical staff needs to interact to collectively explore ideas, such as the meetings that facilitate analysis and design, we frequently find that audio and Web conferencing provide an inadequate degree of real-time interactivity. These tools facilitate a single presenter and an audience that is not heavily engaged. If a group of peers is meeting to facilitate contributions from every participant, these tools are entirely unhelpful. This degree of interactivity will usually require everyone to meet in person, and the tools for the job are a laptop, a projector, a whiteboard, dry erase pens, and an eraser. The ability to write, draw, and annotate as a group makes all the difference.

Here is where the tablet can fill a need, and do so in a superior fashion. The content on a whiteboard is not in digital form. A photograph of the content is still not very useful, beyond distributing copies. The content needs to be treated as a mix of documents, raster images, structured diagrams (or models), textual annotations, free form drawings, and possibly even video and audio media.

Imagine if each meeting participant used a tablet that is capable of remotely collaborating via an application that served as a whiteboard for presentation, collective editing, and interactivity using any digital content. Cameras and headsets can facilitate video and audio conferencing simultaneously with whiteboard interactions. Text chat can allow covert or overt conversations to happen without being limited by a shared audio channel. Perhaps advanced features like speech-to-text translation could even be incorporated to maintain a complete transcript of all conversations and interactivity in all simultaneous modes of communication.

If such an application existed today, it would immediately eliminate a great deal of costly travel expenses. It would give back many hours of wasted travel time to employees. It would even enable them to work more effectively from home, reducing the need to travel to the office every day. In fact, anyone could work equally effectively from anywhere, at any time of day. It would be liberating for the individual. It would also make workers in remote offices collaborate much more effectively on a daily basis. The enterprise would immediately become a great deal more social, because their interactions would be more engaging and productive.

innovation

Enterprise Collaboration – how we work

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Over the past few years we have seen Web 2.0 technologies being established in our personal and professional lives. Social networking tools are being used to keep us connected with friends, family, and colleagues across space and time. In business, technology has ignited a new era in collaboration and social interaction to bring customers closer to those who market, sell, and support their products and services. But we have still not seen this bring about a new era in collaboration among workers within the enterprise.

In January 2011, Tomi Ahonen wrote the Fortune 500 CEO Guide to Mobile, which brought to my attention the on-going technology revolution that we are currently experiencing—the steady move to mobile. It was not just the speed and scale of adoption that is impressive (and it is extremely impressive). It is the way that mobile is permeating every aspect of our personal and professional lives. It is the way that it is transforming almost everything that we do, and the tools that we use to do them.

However, I still believe that we are only seeing this transformation in its infancy. It has started with the adoption of platform technologies (mobile, Internet, Web 2.0), but we have yet to see a cultural transformation to accompany the technological revolution at the scale we are seeing. We have yet to see Enterprise 2.0 yield gains in productivity at work that are comparable to the improvements in our interpersonal relationships on Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Blogs, Wikis, Instant Messaging, and the gradual enabling of tools to become more social are adding incremental value to our business processes, but they are not fundamentally changing the way we do business.

We still drive to the same office and largely interact with our colleagues face-to-face or by audio conference and with web conferencing (and accompanying presentation tools) as a visual aid. The manner in which we facilitate work between remote participants remains awkward and inconvenient. Awkward and inconvenient in that audio and video conferencing provide a very poor user experience in the following ways.

  • Only a single person is able to speak at once. Interruptions are inevitable. Often the individuals who speak the most do not yield sufficient time for others to contribute their ideas and opinions. It is sometimes not clear whether the most valuable insights have actually been discussed, because the person moderating the discussion has not structured it to give time to key participants at key points in the conversation. Time is allocated according to the aggressiveness (and courtesy) of the speakers, usually in proportion to rank, as opposed to the merit of their content.
  • Forcing conversations to happen in real time limits the forum due to participant availability (i.e., conflicting schedules, time zone differences), attention span (i.e., often our thoughts are occupied by other priorities), and preparedness (i.e., expecting participants to have reviewed material beforehand in preparation to reach consensus). Some people do not perform well in this setting; they perform better when given time to collect their thoughts. Some people respond better in writing.
  • Although audio and video can be recorded for later playback, it is not a digital transcript whose content can be indexed and searched. A scribe may take notes and publish minutes, but this is labor intensive, and the result is not a full-faith representation of the conversations.
  • Often a key participant is not included in a meeting, because the organizer was not aware of that person’s capabilities until later.

For the preferred mode of collaboration in the enterprise to evolve from real time conferencing to a format that overcomes the above deficiencies, we need a culture that relies less on real time collaboration and more on online tools that bring people together to work more closely, while allowing them to be more decoupled in space and time.

Clearly we need better tools to fulfill this need. We have seen tools like Google Wave appear and quickly disappear. Google Wave failed to integrate with enough supporting tools to enable collaborative editing, peer review, and post-processing (interchange) of a broad range of content (documents, images, audio, video, presentations, conferences, models, charts). It failed to integrate with enough supporting applications to participate in real world business processes. But worst of all, it failed to provide a compelling paradigm or inspiration for a cultural shift to collaborate more effectively in real time and otherwise.

Where do we go from here?

Recognize that workers need to collaborate with greater decoupling in space and time. Mobile computing with always-on smart phones and tablets is a fundamental enabler for such decoupling. Enterprise applications that run in the cloud are another element that enables the work force to collaborate using these devices. What we are missing is the right mix of applications and integration into business processes that support the new ways of doing work.

As the corporate office, desk, desktop computer, and telephone become extinct, we must anticipate how a mobile always-on work force will need to work. We must develop applications to facilitate this new work paradigm where activities are often time-shifted; and real-time collaborations are between remote workers, who may be anywhere (e.g., at home on the couch, at the coffee shop, in the airport, in-flight on an airplane, driving an automobile). We will know that the revolution has arrived, when the culture in the enterprise considers it more natural to do work using mobile devices from anywhere and at all hours rather than at the office during office hours.

politics

$114.5T unfunded liabilities

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I just thought of a solution to the $114.5T unfunded liabilities problem in the US federal government balance sheet.

Given that entitlements due to retirement will bust the federal budget over time; given that people who perform purposeful work live longer and remain in better health than those who do not; given that people who continue to work will contribute to tax revenues instead of drawing on entitlements; my solution entails…

(1) Offer future retirees the option to defer retirement indefinitely.

(2) Remove regulatory barriers and provide legal protections for the elderly who want to work after the age of retirement.

(3) Most important to solving the budget problem, provide an incentive for the elderly to continue working by lowering personal income tax rates for employment income to zero.

By keeping the elderly employed, their health insurance continues to be employer subsidized, which eliminates their participation in Medicare. By continuing to work, they also forego receiving Social Security payments. As a bonus of participating in the work force, they continue to contribute to tax revenues through payroll taxes paid by their employers.

Certain industries will greatly benefit from the retention of employees with scarce skills, which are not being replenished in the work force. For example, COBOL programmers. As baby boomers retire, certain legacy technologies which will remain mission critical for decades are at risk of being under serviced. This proposal would provide some degree of relief for these industries as a side-benefit.

politics

Above The law – Obama’s legacy

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Let’s explore the many ways in which the current administration behaves in ways that are above the law.

politics

symmetry and asymmetry – warfare

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I am completely supportive of stooping to the depths of whatever hell the opposition is willing to inhabit in retaliation. This principle (symmetry) applies to both intellectual exchanges and kinetic military action. As a civilized society, we cannot allow ourselves to believe that we are somehow “above” resorting to brutality to respond in kind to savages, who employ such tactics. Doing so invites asymmetric conflict, which the opposition will happily exploit to our detriment.

[Originally posted on 14 Jun 2004]

When did we start considering civilians to be non-combatants? In World War 2, cities throughout Europe were devastated with strategic intent. Innocent bystanders were not immune from the life or death struggle that dominated everyone. Germany surrendered unconditionally, because its nation and its people faced annihilation. Japan surrendered unconditionally, because annihilation was already upon them. The people were accountable for their nation’s deeds, and they acted accordingly.

What happens when we offer immunity from attack to civilians? Military power can be rendered combat ineffective. By disguising combat forces as civilians, they gain an advantage. If attacked, they claim brutality, and they accuse the military of war crimes. Meanwhile, they can conduct their offensive operations, and return to the safety of civilian life. More importantly, because civilians are immune from the consequences of financing, harboring, and otherwise supporting a campaign of terrorism, there is no reason to ever surrender to the opposition. There is no possibility of military defeat, so long as the people are willing to endure prolonged economic hardship to achieve a strategic political victory.  

Terrorism takes this to an extreme. Suicide bombers die as martyrs with the peace of mind that comes from knowing that their loved ones will be compensated by the terrorist establishment, and they will be immune from retribution. There is no accountability, because we allow terrorists to get away with having nothing to lose, except for their lives, which they don’t value.

In ancient times, leaders prosecuted a policy of capital punishment for the worst criminals. Knowing that family loyalties would lead to the criminal’s closest loved ones seeking to avenge the execution, a policy was implemented to also execute three generations of direct family related to the criminal.

To combat terrorism effectively, the consequences of violent action must be dealt with harshly, not only by exterminating the terrorists, but also by punishing the loved ones on whose behalf the terrorists are acting. Civilian immunity from combat breeds cultures, which will continue sponsoring asymmetrical combat, without any reason to surrender, because there is no possibility of defeat. The people who sponsor terrorism must be required to be accountable for their loyalties. Only then will they surrender.

In summary, the policy statements to effectively counter terrorism are as follows. Kill the terrorists. Kill their families. Kill their friends. Do not stop, until they surrender. Live by the sword, die by the sword. He who shall survive will have the biggest baddest sword and the will to wield it. In a world of terror, the most terrifying shall prevail.

politics

war of words

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If the pen is a weapon, words are the ammunition. Politics is marketing, and marketing is a war of words. In both realms, the goal is to sway public opinion with ideas. A good tactic for undermining the opponent’s position is to poison the language they use to identify themselves.

For decades, whenever a leader wishes to be resolute about a cause, they declare a war as a call to arms. We have seen the war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, war on AIDS, war on terror, and now even a war on obesity. The indiscriminate use of war parallels the prosecution of indiscriminate wars in Bosnia, Iraq, and Libya. This enables the term “war on” to become vulnerable to poisoning, so that future use of this term becomes toxic. Furthermore, “war on” is conveniently similar to “moron”, which makes for a perfect nexus of ideas (superficial and with substance) for contaminating the term “war on”. We can now apply “war on” as a derogatory adjective; for example, should the President declare another war on something, he can properly be identified as yet another war-on President. War-on decisions become acts of foolishness and symbols of an ignorance of unintended consequences.

Insights into innovation