Back to the Future: How We can Synergize the Current Polarized Politics While Integrating Technology

 Currently, the political situation in the United States is similar to the political chaos in the 1850s—moving toward the Civil War.  Like the Civil War, it is a war between economic architectures, “crony” capitalism and Marx’s Communism.   However, there is a better way, returning to the organizational economic architecture of the founding fathers, in particular Thomas Jefferson.

There is a second overriding issue, of which we are all aware, the change from the Age of Print to the Digital Age that is creating more cultural (and even biological) change than most people are aware of.  Right now, the smart phone is becoming the third lobe of our brains.  It remembers the phone numbers of our contacts, it enables us good asynchronous communications with them (in the form of text messages and email), it tells us the weather (current and future), it sings to us the music we want to hear, it even tells us where to drive our vehicles, and so much more.

But it also knows where we are, what we are doing, what we’re interested in, and who we are doing it with.  In the near future it will enable politicians and bureaucrats to control all our activities; that is unless advanced artificial intelligence enables the technology to take over and reduce humanity to slaves of the singularity.

Again, there is a better way.  My book, Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age discusses an alternative.  It starts, in part 1, with a new theory of the definition and source of economic value. In this part economic value and wealth is defined as a direct result of knowledge. An increase in knowledge increases the organization’s ability to survive and thrive.  It goes on to demonstrate that this concept and theory is very likely to be true.

Part 2 describes and discusses organizational architecture.  This architecture applies equally to individuals and nations throughout human history.  It starts with a static enterprise architecture based on the IDEF0 model.  It details the functions and components of that architecture to show how it interlinks these functions of input, process, output, control and mechanisms.  It then adds a process to the architecture using the OODA (observe, orient, decide and act) loop, to produce an organizational architecture.  Further, it shows how by using this model any organization can become more effective in what it’s producing and more cost-efficient in how it produces it.

Part 3 uses this organizational architecture model within the historical context of humanity to support the reality of organizational model.

Part 4 interlinks this organizational model with both the Declaration of Independence—mostly written by Thomas Jefferson—The US Constitution—of which he was involved—with recent technological concepts of Services Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing to produce a political/economic architecture that allows and enables everyone the “pursuit of happiness” wherein “pursuit” means work at what they want to do and have a talent for.  It also means that there will be a great many more millionaires and very few billionaires, that is, it enables sharing the wealth rather than forcing the wealth through governmental redistribution taxes.

While it would be nice to receive royalties from the sale of this book, my purpose for writing it is my hope the people will take a serious look at the political right and left, and technology change, and consider the far-reaching consequences of not starting from the concepts in this book to transform the political/economic system without having a pyric civil war.

I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas you have on this paper or on Jeffersonian Economic Architecture in the Digital Age.

The Digital Future: Services Oriented Architecture and Mass Customization, Part 5A

From Previous Parts

Part 1 discussed the four ages of mankind.  The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by verbal communications.  It also transformed the hunting and gathering into an economic architecture of small somewhat settled communities over the course of 300,000 years.   Settlement produced first significant increase in economic activity, wealth per capita, and in the academics in the form of the shaman for tribal organization.

The second, the Age of Writing, produced a quantum leap in data and information that could be accumulated, communicated, and stored.  This was over a period of at least 6,500 years.  During this time, academic activity evolved from everyone working to survive to a diversity of jobs and trades and the economic stratification of political organizations.   Again, the total wealth of humanity took a leap of orders of magnitude as the economic architectures of city states, then countries, and then empires evolved.  The academics evolved from the shaman, to priests, clerics, researchers, mathematicians, and universities (e.g. the Museum at Alexandria ~ 370 BC and the University of Bologna, 1088) and libraries.

The third, the Age of Print, started with Gutenberg’s press in 1455, but blossomed with Luther’s radical admonition that everyone should “read” the bible about 1517.  Suddenly, the quantity of information and knowledge to a leap of several orders of magnitude as all types of ideas were accumulated, communicated, and stored.

Part 2 dealt with history of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as it developed hand in glove with computing architecture—a natural fit.

 Part 3 A, deals with how SOA works with mass customization of products, systems, and services. 

Part 3 B, discussed the three economic architectures, infrastructure, mass production, and mass customization will be employed in the Digital Age.

Part 4 discussed how the Mass Customization (Services Oriented Architecture) will change the culture within which the individual lives.

Part 5A and B will discuss the effects of the  paradigm shift to Mass Customization (Services Oriented Architecture) will effect various industries and the Mass Production Culture currently in vogue. In Part 5A I will forecast how I see Mass Customization will effect Golf Club, Education, Retailing, and Entertainment industries.

Future Mass Customization Changes to Various Industries

The Services Oriented Architecture model used in Mass Customization will sooner or later completely supplant the mass production architecture in most industries in the Digital Age.  It will affect all industries to a certain degree.  The following are examples that I see coming; some are currently changing. 

Mass Customization of Golf Clubs

Recently, I saw a new ad on TV for Golf Clubs.  This was not from a golf club manufacturer, but from a golf club Mass Customizer.  The ad claimed that the firm would match the grips, the shafts and the heads to the golfer.  While I’m not sure how they do this, they are advertizing Mass Customized golf clubs.  This is the future in the Digital Age.

Mass Customization of Education

Education is likely to see change as massive and discontinuous as the change from the Age of Writing to the Age of Print.  Currently, education, from elementary schools to university, is based in the Age of Print’s Mass Production.

All children are offered the same education from the same books and taught by teachers that went through roughly identical class work of learn by listening. The problem is that people learn in one of two ways, by listening (which includes reading) and by doing.  The Mass Production education of the Age of Print focused primarily only on learning by listening (which includes reading).  The result is that many students are left behind.

These students are the ones that learn by doing.  They are the ones who looked down upon because they take “shop class”, “auto mechanics” or others of this ilk.  And these are the people that take the “blue collar” jobs, like carpenters, and plumbers; the ones that actually maintain portions of the infrastructure that everyone needs.

In the Digital Age, there will be Mass Customization of education will lead away from degree-based education toward individual certification on any topic.  There will no longer be bachelors, masters, or doctorates in any “discipline”.  Alternatively, with a certain level of certification the student could “earn” a bachelors, masters, or doctorate.

Apprenticeships

Actually, this is currently happening, though as a sub-culture of education.  And it is happening in two ways.  The first is the oldest method of education, apprenticeships and internships; yes, learn by doing.  The second is technology.

The “learn by doing” method never really stopped being used since before the dawn of human civilization.  However, with the advent of Mass Production education, it fell out of fashion, relegated to the backwaters of high school and college education.  It was turned over to “trade schools”; and the graduates of these programs and schools are considered inferior to “college graduates” and paid accordingly.

However, the best, not only in trades, like carpentry, painting (Yes painting, cars ,walls, and boats), plumbing, and brick laying, but also “fine arts”, dance, composing music, and so on, are trades and should not be treated as anything else.  In fact, even today most of the best composers, (best being defined as those that are most well known in their time, and made or make the most money, learned by doing. 

None of the great master composers of the baroque or romantic periods went to college.  Instead, “they studied under…” These composers were and are well known and made money during their life time.  In my opinion, the best symphonic composer of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, John Williams, studied composing privately.  Taylor Swift is one of many highly successful composers who never finished high school, yet made it because she learned her craft by doing within the milieu of a composing studio.  Like rap-poets of the 1990s through today, didn’t go to college and study poetry, they learned by doing.

Additionally, today there is a movement among some groups of parents to home-school their children.  Again, this has gone on since before the dawn of history, but, as I will discuss shortly, will be much more available due to the Digital Age Technology.

 So why not have publicly funded music academies, or better yet, music academies funded from the purchase of music; have dance schools funded by dance, and so on.  In fact, to some extent, we do.  So why can you get a Ph.D. in musicology, or an MFA in dance, but no masters or doctorates for plumbing, etc?  Getting rid of all of the “arts departments” in colleges would save a huge amount of public dollars in indirect costs etc, the same way getting “trades” out of colleges has.

Digital Age Technology

 Now the Digital Age technology comes into play.  Already there are hundreds of courses “on line” for every grade from 1^st grade to graduate school.  And this is only at the start of the Digital Age when only early adopters are trying these classes out.

As these become more mainstream and accepted these “classes” will become much more customized to the individual students, needs, wants, proclivities, and language, that is, mass customization of classes.  I envision a time when students in Tel Aviv, Teheran, Nairobi, Nantucket, Keflavik, and Kiev all take the same class across the Internet, interact with the “teacher” and each other in their own language, but understanding each other through a translation function built into the software.

I put “teacher” in quotes because a teaching function can be implemented using data showing what the student’s interests are, what type of learning they are best at, and so on.  So, for example, in teaching math, “the teacher” can choose “story problems” that interest the student.  If the student learns better with images, then “the teacher” can teach with images; if the student learns better by listening or reading, then “the teacher” can use those methods.

 

Students will be able to learn in group sessions, if that is the best way for them to learn, or in tutorial/coaching sessions, if they learn better (quicker with better retention) in individual settings.  So with technology, Mass Customization of education is possible.

It is impossible for me to describe all of the ins and outs of how I envision the functions of technology to be assembled for each and every student, even at a high level, because there are over 7 billion ways of learning by 7 billion bedroom biological experiments.  I may try in another post.

It will not be until all elementary, secondary, colleges and universities are disbanded that Mass Customization of education will take place—as radical as that sounds, because it will require a rebellion against the current educational system that produces “parts” for governmental and business organizations.

Mass Customization of Retailing

As described earlier, the clothing industry will change radically in the Digital Age.  Customers will be able to order almost any clothing and accessories custom-made for their bodies across the Internet.

Up to a point, this will serve all customer types better than “heading to the mall”.   As I describe in my dissertation, there are three types of customers, hunters, comparative shoppers, and shoppers.

 The Internet/web serves the hunter type (the ones that have a specific set of requirements) because they can find the part or component quickly and easily; even compare costs.  It serves the comparative shopper type (the ones that have a fuzzy or an incomplete set of requirements) well because they can comparison shop quite readily on “the Net”.  However, it will not serve those shoppers who treat shopping as a recreational or interpersonal activity.  This is at least in the near future, though it might be better in the future.

Already, today, Amazon, Google, and others are serving as the Internet’s concierge service, analogous to the concierge services in a hotel.  These inform customers of the products, systems, and services that best meet their requirements, in terms of function, cost, and schedule.

A little further down the line, necessary consumables like food, will come to the customer using one of two procedures or a combination of both.  The first is a method that could only be implemented in the Digital Age; having the person decide on a menu, having the “smart” cupboards and refrigerator check the inventory to ascertain that all of the ingredients are available, and order ones that are not for home delivery (by drone???).  Obviously this will include completely catered meals.  For many people this may mean a large reduction in the kitchen footprint.

The second is for customer’s that want to comparative shop.  They will still be able to “go to the market”.  However, “the market” will be like current “farmers’ markets” in the U.S. and markets in the rest of the world.  They will be filled with vendors instead of shelves.  These will be for “foodies” and other comparative shoppers that want to choose their fresh foods.

I suspect that in the next 20 to 30 years, town centers and most shopping malls will go under the bulldozer (Have a CAT D10 renovation?).  They will be replaced by these types of markets, by group entertainment centers of all sorts, and by barbers, hair dressers, auto service centers, and other services.  If you think about it, this is what applying SOA (Mass Customization) to the physical footprint of retail industry should look like.

This does not mean that “brick and mortar” stores will entirely disappear.  From the description above, it’s readily apparent that there will be a need for a town center.  I suspect that these town centers will have the physical architecture more akin to the medieval and current European towns than to the American sprawl of large and strip malls. And since, as discussed above, major cities will become cost ineffective and obsolete, there will be a return to a grid of small cities and towns.

Further in the future, I think there will be opportunities for customers to look at the products in virtual reality (already a customer may try out a system or service before purchasing).  But the concierge service provided on the Internet will be focused on understanding the customer’s requirements before recommending a product, system, or service.

Mass Customization of Entertainment

When broadband cabling came into vogue, before the real acceptance of the Internet, it was used to provide more television channels with higher quality video and audio.  So the “cable” companies combined the broadband cabling system (a utility and therefore using the Infrastructure Architecture) overlaid with content (using Mass Production Architecture).  And local governments treated the cable companies as utilities, not content providers, so they agreed to allow them to be monopolies.

Initially, adding content was to market the cable to potential customers; they could get more of what they wanted to see (e.g., sports) on cable in local areas.  However, small cable companies were “bought out” by other cable companies, which have turned into large cable monopolies that are only semi-regulated.

These companies provide their “customers” with content bundles.  This means that someone who likes history, science, and travel must also pay for sports and “news spin-doctoring biased” channels for which they have no requirements.  This means that to get the channels the customer wants, they must “rent” and upgraded bundle (or package).  This, again, has many channels the customer does not want, coupled in the bundle with the one or two that he or she does want.

Then, to add insult to injury, they added an increasing amount of advertizing on each channel, to the point that the actual program material runs about the same as a half hour program did in the 1960s and 70s.  Additionally, they’ve nearly doubled the cost of “the bundles” including the basic bundle.  One consequence of this is that the entertainer’s (e.g., actors, athletes) salaries have skyrocketed; but so, too have that of the content providers and the cable companies; all this defrauding at the expense of the customer.

There are two methods for resolving these monopolist behavior, laws and regulation, or market forces.  First, we could legislate the separation of content provisioning from the communications infrastructure, legislate against bundling of content, and break up large content providing companies, and communications infrastructure utilities.

The other alternative is to let economics take its course.  With the advent of the high-speed Internet and WIFI systems, allowing data streaming of video, and Netflix, Hulu, and especially YouTube the natural course of entertainment is toward Mass Customization of entertainment, rather than Mass Production of entertainment. In the process there will be many more “channels” to meet all types of customer interest (requirements); that is, the entertainment market will be a plethora of niche markets.

 A good example of this is the SV Delos channel on YouTube.  This series started out as a Video-log of the sail of SV Delos and because its creator did an increasing professional job with the assistance of the rest of the Delos crew has produced an income stream sufficient to enable the young crew to sail without the need to stop to make freedom chips (money).  They work at creating videos and subscribers support them because they enjoy the videos.

Eventually, maybe in 50 years, maybe in 10 years, the utility functions of the current entertainment empires will be separated from the content provisioning and the content provisioning will separate into services, some providing the actual content, some providing services (e.g., animation, editing, and so on) to the content providers.

A Look ahead to Part 5B

As you can see from my forecasts, Mass Customization is and will continue to drastically change the architecture of the industrial complex that creates value and thus wealth for humankind.  However, like the transition from the Age of Writing to the Age of Print, the transformation of industries and cultures during the transition from the Age of Print to the Digital Age will create stresses on the current cultures that will break out into war, destruction, and all sorts of problems, unless these are recognized early.  Putting too many rules and regulations in place, like the liberal religion wants, like the Catholics before, will create additional stress that will definitely lead to civil strife.

But at the end, and if we can make it, the economic world will have a much higher level of wealth for all people.  Please keep this warning in mind.  I will repeat this warning at the end of Part 5B.

In Part 5B I will forecast how Mass Customization will effect, transportation, housing (and cities), healthcare, and space.

The Digital Future: Services Oriented Architecture and Mass Customization, Part 4

From Previous Parts

Part 1 discussed the four ages of mankind.  The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by verbal communications.  It also transformed the hunting and gathering into an economic architecture of small somewhat settled communities over the course of 300,000 years.   Settlement produced first significant increase in economic activity, wealth per capita, and in the academics in the form of the shaman for tribal organization.

The second, the Age of Writing, produced a quantum leap in data and information that could be accumulated, communicated, and stored.  This was over a period of at least 6,500 years.  During this time, academic activity evolved from everyone working to survive to a diversity of jobs and trades and the economic stratification of political organizations.   Again, the total wealth of humanity took a leap of orders of magnitude as the economic architectures of city states, then countries, and then empires evolved.  The academics evolved from the shaman, to priests, clerics, researchers, mathematicians, and universities (e.g. the Museum at Alexandria ~ 370 BC and the University of Bologna, 1088) and libraries.

The third, the Age of Print, started with Gutenberg’s press in 1455, but blossomed with Luther’s radical admonition that everyone should “read” the bible about 1517.  Suddenly, the quantity of information and knowledge to a leap of several orders of magnitude as all types of ideas were accumulated, communicated, and stored.

 

Part 2 dealt with history of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as it developed hand in glove with computing architecture—a natural fit.

Part 3 A, deals with how SOA works with mass customization of products, systems, and services.

Part 3 B, discussed the three economic architectures, infrastructure, mass production, and mass customization will be employed in the Digital Age.

This part, Part 4 discusses how the Mass Customization (Services Oriented Architecture) will change the culture within which the individual lives.

Changes for the Individual in the Digital Age

As can already be seen the Digital Age and the Mass Customization (Services Oriented Architecture) will change human culture; and will likely change it as much as the cultural change with the discontinuity caused the move from the Age of Writing to the Age of Print.

Already children, those below the age of 21, spend as much or more time interacting with others through their informational interfaces, (smart phone) as they do in direct contact with their peers and elders.  They have little idea what a dictionary or an encyclopedia are, using a web browser and search engine instead.  Additionally, they no longer learn cursive writing, except perhaps to sign their name; they have little need for this artifact from the Age of Writing.  They will continue to shop online more and go to the malls less; with some exceptions that I will discuss later.

The Economics of the Digital Age

 The economics of the Digital Age will change drastically.  There is a paradigm shift with the discontinuity caused by the revolutionary changes of Mass Customization.  And it is a shift only whispered about in the financial markets and by economic gurus.

During the Age of Print, and especially with Mass Production, there was always a need for an increasing customer base.  This was based on the increase in the economies of scale as production increased.  At the time this increased the need for additional labor.  In short, the total wealth and the general wealth of a culturally/political/geographically cohesive organization increased with increased population.  This is with the caveat that the organization had access to the raw materials.

An additional factor, already discussed in this paper was the skill-level of the population, that is, the education by listening and by doing.

So in the Age of Print, the creation of wealth (the amount of value) of a country was linked to:

·         The population size and its increase

·         The integration of society (not its diversity)

·         The ability to have access to raw materials and  to transport the finished goods to markets

·         The Security of the country

So much for wealth creation in the Age of Print.

In the Digital Age the creation of wealth will have different linkages.  The reason for this is the overlay of Mass Customization (Services Oriented Architecture) Architecture over the current Mass Production Architecture and Infrastructure Architecture.  And it will replace them in much of the economy.  I will give a few examples in the next section of this paper.

One thing that will happen is that economies of knowledge will continue to replace economies of scale as I’ve already described.  What this means is what I’ve discussed in one of the later chapters in my Book, Organizational Economics: the Formation of Wealth, that a great many small firms will replace the Fortune 500 of today.

 

In the future, either confederations of small organizations (using orchestration as a guiding principle) or concierge-based alliances of small organizations (using choreography as a guiding principle) will create both giant and small products, systems, and services. Additionally, I would expect that in some or many instances, alliances of confederations to implement the greatest/largest projects and programs.

Both confederations and alliances will require standardization of contract laws, regulations, and business rules to operate effectively.  Knowing the government and the current power and lobbying power of Wall Street (financial firms), large corporations, and unions, the ride to full acceptance of this new economic architecture will put the most fantastic roller coaster to shame just as moving from the Age of Writing to the Age of Print did.

In the end, these current economic empires will fall, just like the political/economic power of King and Pope did.  And since this is a revolutionary change, (while I hope not), there may be revolutions, counter-revolutions, and strife caused by it.

The New Order

At the end there will be a new order of economic activities.  It will be very much more a meritocracy not caused by policy but by “the invisible hand” (in evolution it is called natural selection).  In totality, there will be much more wealth because the knowledge of individuals will be turned into value.

 Additionally, it will be a version of “Jeffersonian Democracy.”  There will be a great many small independent firms, and so there will be a great many owners of these firms, in the way Jefferson envisioned it for small farmers/land owners.  This means a resurgence of the “middle class” as small business owners.

These small businesses will need to fully understand the requirements of their customers and tailor their product, system, or service to meet those requirements.  Consortium/confederation and alliance program manage process will be wrapped around the customer’s product, system, or service requirements, instead of focusing primarily on cost, schedule, and the finance engineers bottom line.

It also means that the Mass Customizers will focus more attention on meeting the customers’ requirements than advertising to tell the customer what the customer should want, which is their product, system, or service.

Government will provide security and infrastructure (meaning physical, cyber, and basic research).  Everything else will change based on Mass Customization (SOA) Architecture.  This includes many industries that most people think of as infrastructure-based, including education and medicine.  These two among several I will describe in more detail in the next section.

In economic terms, the result could be that the GDP will fall, while the GDP per person and the wealth of people generally, will increase.  The reason is that knowledge of the steps in a process breeds tooling to make the steps simpler, easier, and faster.  Tooling is the economic equivalent of weapons being a “force multiplier” in the military.  In the economic case, tooling is a “process multiplier”, as first discussed by Adam Smith.

As a process multiplier, tooling enables the same number of workers to create orders of magnitude more uniform quality products, faster and therefore cheaper.  But tooling costs stored value (i.e., money).  This is the reason that the Mass Production Architecture and money are linked and called Capitalism. (Aside: It probably should be called something else like Value Creation because it isn’t a form of idealism or utopianism, like socialism or communism, and it isn’t a religion like Liberalism, it’s a proven model of the way things actually work, at least in part.)

Throughout the Age of Print tooling was constantly improved and refined.  In the early and mid-1950s, there was an ongoing controversy as to whether analog (mechanical) or digital computers were the wave of the future—that’s how good the mechanism became. (Aside: And it is a clear demonstration of the Superiority Principle: “The first instance of a superior principle is always inferior to a mature example of an inferior principle.”)

Then, in the 1960s to 1990s, enter the CNC machine, that is, the Computer Numerically Controlled machine.  At this same time robotics was being hyped as the way to continue to reduce costs for Mass Production in the future.

In the 1960s through the 1990s, the Mass Production Architecture (and paradigm) focused on a totally automated factory, with little or no warehousing because everything would be JIT (Just In Time).  I worked on two or three such projects during that time, wrote a number of articles the future of the automated factory based on my experiences, and worked on several national and international standards committees.

In 1985 and 1986 I worked on a paperless shop floor information system that became the information backbone of a state of the art factory.  It not only integrated the shop floor systems, but had communications linkages with the engineering and MRP (Materials Resource Planning) systems. It won the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Lead Award in 1987.

I read about the GM’s fully automated engine plant that built to produce a single engine.  The assembly line was a mile and a half long, but without a single worker.  I thought this might be a poor investment because I could already see the glimmer of the Digital Age on the horizon.

Subsequently, I visited The GM SATURN plant.  This plant was both state of the art and attuned to Mass Customization (SOA) Architecture.  It could produce multiple types of engines off a single assembly line and it could produce (within reason) multiple types of vehicles.  While it wasn’t totally automated, at assembly stations with workers, the stations were set up ergonomically so that petite or large workers could work at the station comfortably.  Unfortunately, the SATURN product either did not meet the customers’ requirements or was not properly marketed.

In the future, all manufacturing will be somewhat the same, but also quite different.  There will be two key differences.  The first is the standardization of contractual, requirements, and design interfaces among the various functions of the confederation and/or alliance. 

   

The second is that there will be standardization of highly business sensitive communications across a physical and logical network separate from the current Internet.  The interfaces for users will be locked down both in terms of communications protocols and data formats.  No documents or interpersonal communications (e.g. e-mail) will be allowed.

These two key differences will enable and support both business confederations and alliances the agility to act quickly to customers’ requirements, the heart of the Mass Customization (SOA) Architecture.

Changes to Habits (Cultures)

In the Digital Age there will be significant cultural change.  I will discuss two of these changes.

Home office/business

Beyond these two key requirements for the successful implementation of Mass Customization using Services Oriented Architecture, a third, only slightly less important is product transportation.  In the future, allied organizations are less likely to be collocated and therefore transportation of their output to final assembly and to the customer enables and supports Mass Customization.

In the Age of Print collocation was of seminal importance.  In a paper I wrote (Industrial Location Behavior and Spatial Evolution, Journal of Industrial Economics, Vol. 5 (1977) pp. 295-312.) I discuss how a region around Detroit MI became the center of the automotive industry, though initially there were auto manufacturers all over the country.  The reason was simple; it was the center of innovation, the way “silicon valley” has been for information technology.

Now there is no need for geographically regions to be the centers of innovation; I know.  By 1990, I had the personnel of the advanced data communication laboratory I managed, working from home most of the time.  By 2003, I was leading nationwide software development teams and producing software that met the customers “product” requirements and their “business” requirements (cost and schedule).  So, I know there is no need to collocate software development personnel in a high cost, high tax state where the environmental restrictions are such that houses can’t be built and people live in RVs.

In the Digital Age, centers of innovation will occur in virtual space.  Personnel can work from home, wherever home happens to be.  For example, this means that someone who wants to sail around the world, but has a high tech design job can do both.  That is he or she will be able to design the latest widget from the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Finance and work on various financial markets can already be done from anywhere, so there is really no need for the New York Stock Exchange being located in New York. It could be located in eastern Kentucky or in West Virginia, with backup systems in Mississippi.  This would mean a lower cost of living and lower taxes for all.

Additionally, this means that there will be less or no need for office buildings.  Since people can work from their homes in home offices, or from wherever and get the same tasks and activities accomplished, it’s pretty silly to spend money because of an “edifice complex”.

I would see the “great cities” and regions diminish in size and population, while small and medium cities and regions regain population.

Developmental versus operational/maintenance

That doesn’t mean that there won’t be all facilities, just that facilities will be sized for the product that the organizations are implementing; i.e., you can’t build an aircraft carrier in a bathtub.

Consequently, for the near-term future these plants and the infrastructure supporting them, supporting the communication, and the rest of the physical and information infrastructure will require maintenance personnel.

In the Digital Age there will be two general categories of jobs/workers.  Not White Collar and Blue Collar, but Developmental and Operational/Maintenance.

In fact, most jobs will be in the operational/maintenance category.  This will include plumbers, lawyers, electricians, nurses, auto mechanics, medical doctors, landscape maintenance, and so on.  Most of these jobs will be structured after the Mass Customization Architecture.

For example, when the doctor provides the analysis of an illness together with a customer’s DNA, the pharmacist will manufacture a dosage of one or several medicines (or drugs) in exactly the formulation that will best target the disease, heal the customer, with the least side effects.  While some of these “drugs” may be mass produced, most will be formulated at the pharmacy from various chemicals.  This means that every pill will be produced for just one person.  This is an example of the future in the Digital Age.

Relatively few people will be involved in development of new products, systems, or services on Earth.  These will be talented out-of-the-box thinkers and doers.  And they will not be what we think of today as “college educated”.  In all likelihood, there will be no such thing as a college degree in the future.  Education too will be on a Mass Customization basis, as I will discuss in the next section of this paper.

The Digital Future: Services Oriented Architecture and Mass Customization, Part 3A

From Parts 1 and 2

Part 1 discussed the four ages of mankind.  The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by verbal communications.  It also transformed the hunting and gathering into an economic architecture of small somewhat settled communities over the course of 300,000 years.   Settlement produced first significant increase in economic activity, wealth per capita, and in the academics in the form of the shaman for tribal organization.

The second, the Age of Writing, produced a quantum leap in data and information that could be accumulated, communicated, and stored.  This was over a period of at least 6,500 years.  During this time, academic activity evolved from everyone working to survive to a diversity of jobs and trades and the economic stratification of political organizations.   Again, the total wealth of humanity took a leap of orders of magnitude as the economic architectures of city states, then countries, and then empires evolved.  The academics evolved from the shaman, to priests, clerics, researchers, mathematicians, and universities (e.g. the Museum at Alexandria ~ 370 BC and the University of Bologna, 1088) and libraries.

The third, the Age of Print, started with Gutenberg’s press in 1455, but blossomed with Luther’s radical admonition that everyone should “read” the bible about 1517.  Suddenly, the quantity of information and knowledge to a leap of several orders of magnitude as all types of ideas were accumulated, communicated, and stored.
 

Part 2 dealt with history of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) as it developed hand in glove with computing architecture—a natural fit.

This part, Part 3 A, deals with how SOA works with mass customization of products, systems, and services.  Part 3 B, will show where the three economic architectures, infrastructure, mass production, and mass customization will be employed in the Digital Age.

Mass Customization Using Services Oriented Architecture

As I will attempt to demonstrate, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), while beginning its life as an architecture for computer applications, is really a new economic system that will supplant Capitalism as the economic engine.  That is to say, the prescriptive economic architectures of socialism and communism do not have the ability to create value; just redistribute it so that everyone is in the same economic class…destitute.

Mass Production Architecture

I’m positing that in the Digital Age mass customization will replace mass production for products, systems, and services.  This does not mean that mass production will go the way of the dodo.  In fact there will be three architectures, infrastructure, mass production, and mass customization.

Many times, many people may want and are willing to pay for the same or nearly identical items.  As Adam Smith discussed, the reason the mass production produced so much wealth is that mass production is cost efficient, or as many economists point out, there are economies of scale.  Economies of scale result from turning the process of manufacturing a produce into discrete steps or activities.
    

Adam Smith discussed this concept in the first chapter of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  He showed how the same number of individuals could make an order of magnitude more pins per day when each one performed only one step in the process and repeated that step of each pin.
 

According to Adam Smith, once the process for creating a product is divided into discrete steps, many individuals will “figure out” how to create tooling to improve their step of the process.  While Adam Smith did not document this step, he implied that the business owner, the one selling the product and employing the personnel, would then purchase the tooling.  Again, the productivity of each worker using the tooling increases. 

Since Adam Smith’s time, economists have been fascinated with these two concepts.  The first Adam Smith called the “Division of Labor”.  The second has no name so I call this effect “process multiplication”.  The reason is that tooling increases the effectiveness of labor the way a gun increases the effectiveness of a soldier—the military calls this effect “force multiplication”.

The more tooling that is used in the process, the more the tooling costs.  The more it costs, the more product is produce (hopefully) and more cost efficiently.  This cost efficiency means the product costs less to produce.

Because the production process has been tooling intensive, it has also become capital intensive—tooling costs money and a lot of expensive tooling costs a lot of money (capital—hence Capitalism).  Actually, there is no such thing as Capitalism; it’s really mass production architecture.  Since it is capital intensive, anyone who does not have the money to purchase the tools can’t produce the product as cost efficiently.  This leads to both the concepts of Economies of Scale, (i.e., the greater the quantity of product you make, the better the division of labor and process multiplication of more tooling), and the Barrier to Entry caused by the need to have the money to buy the tooling to produce the product cost competitively.

The reason for this brief recitation of a significant portion of the mass production architecture is that for the near and mid-terms there will be certain sectors of the economy where mass production will continue to make sense—it will continue to be the most cost efficient architecture for producing a certain class of products.

The Day before Mass Customization

In the early 1990s, I worked with the Strategic Supply Chain Management (SSCM) Project.  The goal of this team was to find ways to improve the cost efficiency of mass production systems.  This included the development and implementation of products.  The reason for the formation of this project was to counter the gains in market share by the Japanese and other foreigners.

The team came to several conclusions.  First, Just In Time (JIT) manufacturing was an imperative.  JIT means that the subcomponents of a product are manufactured as they are needed for the assembly of a product in response to a customer order—all of this in near real time.  JIT means that warehousing costs are completely eliminated.

I had already worked on two projects of this type.  The first in 1984 and 85 created a paperless product line for a major office furniture company (The design of this line won the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Lead Award in 1987).  In 1986 and 1987, I worked on a program for the US Navy, called Rapid Access to Manufactured Parts, (RAMP).  It too, was using JIT concepts.

The SSCM team came to two other conclusions.  First, that standardized contractual clauses should be agreed to by contractor and subcontractor before any contracts are bid on.  In other words, there should be a team, built by and around the contractor to “go after” proposed projects.

Second, that a better customer requirements identification and management process is needed to effectively and cost efficiently manage a supply chain.  These are two items that are required for the digital age and mass customization.  While the first has gained a very small amount of traction, businesses in the US, at least, have paid no attention to the second.  Sometime in the near future it will become self-evident that this is a problem.

While the static and dynamic architecture of mass production, as described by Adam Smith, and incorporated into the US Constitution, has served the United States and the rest of the world well, it will be supplanted by the mass customization using Services Oriented Architecture in the Digital Age.

Mass customization is creating products, systems and services tailor-made to the customer’s requirements.  Actually, this was tried by the US automotive industry after WWII with limited success. In the 1950s and 60s the “option list” for automobiles was quite long.  For example, you could order a car only with power steering but not power brakes, with an AM or with an AM/FM radio.  Every option was individually priced.  So each customer could get a vehicle that met their exact requirements.

However, the Japanese took advantage of the inherent costs in terms of time to fulfill orders, defects caused by not meeting the customer requirements, etc., by reducing the costs of their vehicles and decreasing the delivery time through offering bundled packages of options, among other things.

Now, customers could only order a sun roof if they accepted a power seat on the driver’s side, even if they didn’t want because the seat was part of the bundle or package that include the sun roof.  In the future, this will not be the case.

Mass Customization

In the 1990s, I became a member of several international standards committees.  The first was the Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum, at Lehigh University.  Their definition of agile manufacturing was “an organization that has created the processes, tools, and training to enable it to respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality.”  The team determined that this is accomplished by assembling a consortium of small organizations (businesses, consultants, and possibly academics).  This consortium would as a team on create products, systems, and services.

The next team that I joined, The Next Generation Manufacturing Project (NGM), elaborated on the consortium concept.  This project focused on how to create an agile manufacturing enterprise.  It concluded that there are two ways to create design/development/implementation/manufacturing consortiums.  These happen to be identical with the ways that programming languages were implemented in the 1960s and with the ways services are assembled in SOA.

The first method for assembling services into a program is called “Orchestration”.  Orchestration is gathering all of the needed software functional components together, then ordering and structuring them into the program that performs the task require by the customer.  In the older programming technology this would be called compiling a program; that is, converting all of the instructions into machine code before executing the program.

For mass customization, orchestration is assembling a team or consortium of small and entrepreneurial organizations, then creating the product, system, or service.  Because it’s mass customization and not mass production the team creates only one item.

Currently, one of the better examples of organizations that use the orchestration form of business architecture, are custom car shops.  In fact, there is one television channel where half its shows are of shops that create custom cars.  In these shows, a customer starts with something that was well used, badly abused, to complete junk.  The customer tells the custom car shop owner his or her requirements and the owner tells the customer the approximate cost.

When the vehicle, in whatever condition comes into the shop, the shop’s team disassembles it entirely.  They send all of the metal body components to a member of the consortium that functions as a “sand” blaster and epoxy coater, send the engine and other mechanical components to a shop that functions as the engine and mechanical parts rebuild center, send seats and other interior components to a shop that functions as the interior restoration and customization center, and tosses the parts that can’t be salvaged.

When the metal body comes back to the shop, generally, there is rust and damage, which didn’t show prior to the blasting that will need to be repaired.  Additionally, if the job is to “customize” as opposed to “restore” the vehicle a body shop function will need to change the bodies shape to enable the customization.    Frequently, this is the function of the shop.

If, for example, a fender is in too poor condition to be repaired, then the shop may go to a junkyard to find the part or may go to an organization that just manufactures metal components that are no longer available.  This is yet another function of the consortium.

When the body work is completed, the shop will send the vehicle’s body, sometimes it engine and mechanical components out to a paint shop; and if there are chrome parts, they may be sent to a shop specializing in chroming parts—two more functions of the consortium.  Frequently, for customized vehicles a new exhaust system needs to be constructed—yet one more function; and finally the vehicle is assembled in its restored or custom form.

Since these custom car shops (especially those with good to great reputations) have a fairly constant stream of customers, they can set up agreements (read contracts, with standard contractual clauses) as to who does what part of the work, the timeframes required, and the costs, prior to starting a job.  In effect, the consortium functions as a single unit, the way services assembled for execution function as a program.  So we could call this organizational architecture, the Orchestration Mass Customization Architecture.

The second method for assembling software services is called “Choreography”.   Choreography differs from orchestration in that the core organization—the one accountable to the customer for the product, system, or service—organizes the team on an as required basis.  At the start of the effort it does not have a consortium in place.  Instead, the core organization adds functional services as it deems necessary.

Most times, core organizations engaged in research and development or creative content activities use choreographic organizational architecture.  This would include research institutes, creation of exotic materials, the initial development of an entire new field of engineering, like ocean engineering or space engineering, and, most familiar to most people, the creation of entertainment content.

The motion picture and now the video content industry have long used choreographic organizational architecture.  To start, a “screenwriter” authors or adapts a story from a book to the “must meet” requirements for a video or movie; that is, that it fits within a time-frame, that much of the background of the story is told dialog and so on.

Once the screenwriter has a script, he or she will send it out to producers.  If a producer likes the script, that is, in general “make money”, he or she will assemble a team to produce the film or video.  This team is assembled as needed, not like the old studio system where a team has been preassembled. 

Actually, these days and going forward, more videos will be produced by “amateurs” using current and near future technology.  This is very likely going to undermine the entire “entertainment industry”.  This is the next step from the studio system, to customer centric entertainment.

The Three Economic Architectures of the Digital Age

In Part 3 B, I will describe how the three architectures that I have defined will work together in the Digital Age to provide unprecedented value to the largest number of people possible.

The Digital Future: Services Oriented Architecture and Mass Customization, Part 2

From Part 1

There have been four ages of mankind.  The first was the Age of Speech; for the first time humans could “learn by listening” rather than “learn by doing”; that is, data could be accumulated, communicated, and stored by verbal communications.  It also transformed the hunting and gathering into an economic architecture of small somewhat settled communities over the course of 300,000 years.   Settlement produced first significant increase in economic activity, wealth per capita, and in the academics in the form of the shaman for tribal organization.

The second, the Age of Writing, produced a quantum leap in data and information that could be accumulated, communicated, and stored.  This was over a period of at least 6,500 years.  During this time, academic activity evolved from everyone working to survive to a diversity of jobs and trades and the economic stratification of political organizations.   Again, the total wealth of humanity took a leap of orders of magnitude as the economic architectures of city states, then countries, and then empires evolved.  The academics evolved from the shaman, to priests, clerics, researchers, mathematicians, and universities (e.g. the Museum at Alexandria ~ 370 BC and the University of Bologna, 1088) and libraries.

 

The third, the Age of Print, started with Gutenberg’s press in 1455, but blossomed with Luther’s radical admonition that everyone should “read” the bible about 1517.  Suddenly, the quantity of information and knowledge to a leap of several orders of magnitude as all types of ideas were accumulated, communicated, and stored.  

This created for many changes in sociopolitical organizations and cultural upheaval.  After major wars (e.g., the 30 years, the 100 years, WWI, and WWII, with continuous warring in between) and “the age of exploration and exploitation (colonization)” which created the footings of globalization, in 1776 economic architecture was formalized into the mass production industrial architecture called Capitalism.  Capitalism, with its risk/reward, and mass production has created far more wealth for humanity, though several new religions have destroyed a significant percentage of this wealth; religions, like Fascism (a throwback to feudalism), Communism, Socialism, and Liberalism (All which replace “personal responsibility” with “social responsibility” as their major article of faith).

Now humanity is on the cusp of the Digital Age.  It too, will create orders of magnitude more data, information, and knowledge.  And, it promises another giant leap in the wealth, but with commensurate risks of barbarianism and wars, from all sides, unless there can be integration of cultures, not “cultural diversity”.  History graphically demonstrates that cultures always clash and that “diversity” cultures implode from the clash.  I will discuss these later, but first Part 2 will discuss the inception and gestation of the Digital Age.

Part 2: The Digital Age: A Personal Perspective of How Services Oriented Architecture Evolved

“Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away”.

A saying by computer software developers circa 1975

From its start to today, the Digital Age could be called the Age of Assembly.  I know because I was there.

Starting in earnest sometime in the late 1960s, humanity has entered a new age, the Digital Age!  And, as in the past three occasions, humanity has not realized the potential of this change in information technology.

Computing Power

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, observed that “the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.”  Effectively, what this means is that raw computing power doubles approximately every two years.

Coding Cost Efficiency

But, the digital age requires three technologies.  In addition to faster and more powerful hardware, it requires the same abilities of the other ages, the ability to accumulate and analyze the raw datum and to communicate both the data and store the results of the analysis.

The ability of a digital system to accumulate and analyze data is based on its programming.  In 1956, I played with my first computer, or what was referred to at that time as a computer.  This computer was programmed with a wire board—a board with a matrix of connectors; the programming came of wires connecting the “proper” connectors together.  Data was inserted using Hollerith cards (referred to as punch cards).

 By 1960, programming had graduated to computer coding using the punch cards.  I coded my first program in Symbolic Programming System (SPS), a form of Assembler—the first step up from coding in machine language (1s and 0s)—as a member of my high school’s math club.  An Assembler is little more than a useful translator of machine code to make it simpler of the coder to create code and to more easily identify bugs—both, greatly increasing the coders and codes effectiveness and also the cost efficiency of creating code.

By 1964, I started taking the first of three computer courses offered by the Math Department of the university I attended.  This class included programming in machine code (literal ons and offs), SPS, and Fortran 1.  The latter was the first use of the concept of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). 

Fortran 1 (Formula Translation 1) was among the earliest scientific programming languages.  These languages were made of a set of computer commands (functions), read (getting input), print (provide output), do mathematically calculations (add, subtract, etc.) and perform some logical step (loop, branch, and so on).  Actually it’s much more complex than this, but I’m not quite ready to take a swan dive into the minutia of computer software and hardware design and architecture.

By 1965, a coder could create hundreds of instructions per hour, rather than a couple of dozen like in 1956.  Since the computing power of the hardware was (and is) dramatically increasing, making the coder more cost efficient makes sense.  Additionally, it meant that computers could handle much larger and more complex tasks.

Data Storage and Data Communications

Between 1964 and 1980 two other technological developments occurred that have led to the start of the Digital Age, data storage devices, and data communications. 

In 1964, I first saw, wrote code for, and used a storage device called a disk drive.  Prior to this data was stored either on cards or on tape drives.  Like the CPU, data storage hardware has continued to follow Moore’s Law.  Today, the average smart phone has 100 to  1000 times the storage that the “mainframe” computer had when I was working on my Ph.D. and that storage 300MB costs tens of thousands time more and took up more than a basketball court sized room.

So the abilities to store and analyze data and information have become much more effective and cost efficient.   So has the technology’s ability to communicate data, information, and knowledge.

In 1836 Samuel Morse demonstrated telegraphic communications, the first machine language method for communicating information.  It took until the mid-1970s telegraphic communications to evolve into a wide variety of data communications hardware, software, and communications protocols.  Then it took the next 20 years to coalesce into the hardware, software, and communications protocols we know as the “Internet” and the “web”.

During the same 20 years the final element for the digital age evolved, Services Oriented Architecture. 

Services Oriented Architecture

At the dawn of the digital age programming, all programs were simply an order set of machine instructions, no loops and no logic.  When computer languages, like FORTRAN 1 first evolved, they were created with a good deal of branch logic to allow code to be reused.  Why: because the memory and data storage on the machine was so small.  So, at the time it made sense to reuse sections of code that were already in the program, rather rewrite the same code.

Inevitably this led to what “computer scientists”, people that taught programming rather than writing programs for a living, called officially “unstructured” programming, or in the slang of the day “spaghetti code”.  In production at the time, unstructured programs were much faster in execution on the hardware available.  However, they were also much more difficult to understand especially if they weren’t properly documented. This meant that they were hard to debug and hard to update or upgrade.

According to the computer scientists, the chief culprit of unstructured programming was the unconditional branch, called the “goto” statement.  This statement indicated the location of the next coded statement that the computer should execute, and this, in general, was back to some location earlier in the program.  This meant that in following the program, it jumped around, rather than going from top to bottom, making it easier for the inexperienced to follow.  So, like all liberal bureaucrats they outlawed unconditional branching.

Then they replayed the goto statement with an unconditional branch to another program, initially called a subroutine.  This fragmented the program and intuitively created what could become the services of SOA, but didn’t.  Instead, they became the Dynamic Link Library (DLL) of computer functions; utilities of the operating system that can be used to support all programs on a computing system.

Instead of structured programs, I opted for modular programming.  These were programs that performed a given function for the program.  For the application that I wrote as part of my Ph.D., I used this architecture; and I submit that it’s the basis for the SOA-based applications.

Be that as it may, I’ve described how I see by the concepts for SOA evolving from machine language of the late 1950s, to assembler, then programming languages with DLLs, and then modular programming.

Each time, the number of machine instructions increased by orders of magnitude, meaning that a single instruction to call a “subroutine” or function could generate 50 to 500 or more instructions and each of these instructions could generate 1000 to 10,000 instructions.  Actually, one time I did some research and found that one 20 line program actually generated 63 mega-bytes of code.

There was still a problem.  It really helped the cost efficiency of the coder to be able to create massive amounts of code fast, but many times the customer for whom the program was being created wanted to interlink that program with other programs.  Most often these programs were created in different computer languages (e.g., FORTRAN, COBOL, PL1), and on various brands of computers (e.g., IBM, DEC, HP, Sun, Silicon Graphics).

Obviously, the problem was that all of these various software and hardware suppliers were competing for business and therefore making it hard to interlink their products with competitors’ products.  The reason was simple; to force their customers to buy only their products.  Today you can see the identical strategy, with Apple, Microsoft, and others building their own “ecosystems” to ensure their customers stay their customers.

In the early 1980s, customers began to recognize this, especially with the advent of data networks.  This set off a series of international standards committees for all components, from data and how to store it, to data communications.

For example, I was on a number of Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) data communications committees starting in 1982.  One of the team members of the team I led had been a coauthor of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).  Both HTML and XML, the languages of the web, were derived from SGML.  I was peripherally involved with STEP (PDES) for engineering data, X.400 for e-mail and X.500 Directory Services from which LDAP was derived.  This was all between 1982 and 2009.

Another step in creating SOA for information and knowledge-based system (the so called “Big Data” systems) is a standardized interface for the Services (i.e., components or functions).  Various organizations including the W³C worked on this issue and came up with Web Services.  Web Services uses XML in a defined and standardized manner to enable the software functions to communicate without having to write an interfacing routine between and among functions.\

The final step in creating SOA was the design and development of a reference architecture or model denoting the components of its supporting infrastructure, assembly process, and functions needed to create a robust application using SOA.  I was a team member on the OASIS Team the created this model.

So from personal experience, I’ve seen the international standards for data formats, and data communications develop.  All of the above are the precursors for Services Oriented Architecture as used for a new economic architecture.

Mass Customization Using Services Oriented Architecture--Part 3, Coming Soon

Part 3 will discuss an economic version of Services Oriented Architecture and how it will reformulate business organizations in the Digital Age.

The Digital Future: Services Oriented Architecture and Mass Customization, Part 1

Part1: The Digital Future

I was challenged to forecast changes in economic systems based on both my knowledge of spatial economic systems and on my experiences with computers, data networking, and automation.  What I have come up with is a four part article on the digital future.

Since I normally tend to build to a thesis like any good engineer designing a product, instead of stating my thesis and then defending it, like lawyers, and journalists normally do, I will take a shot at the thesis of this paper first.

 

We have entered the Digital Age in which Capitalism, which describes the economic system of the Age of Print will be succeeded by Economic Services Oriented Architecture producing Mass Customization.  It will be an age where consortiums are formed small and entrepreneurial organizations to produce products, systems, and services the customer wants.  This architecture will replace the current organizational architecture of a single large organization producing a large quantity of products that “satisfice”, that is, they come somewhat close to satisfying the customer’s requirements—they suffice.

The article is constructed in five parts.  This part, Part 1, discusses the economic history of humankind based on how they have communicated and stored data and information.  I feel it’s important to provide the context for my forecast.

The Second Part is a discussion of the coming of the Digital Age based on my experiences seeing it over the past 50+ years.  I’ve found a structure in pattern in the seeming chaos of change in data and information storage.  This pattern leads me to architectural pattern changes that lead to my forecast.

The Third Part is a more detailed discussion of this new architectural pattern called Services Oriented Architecture (SOA).  I will give a couple of examples to demonstrate how SOA will work economically.

The Fourth Part will consider how SOA and the Digital Age will change an individual’s life by giving three examples.

The Fifth Part will show how converting to SOA will create changes as drastic as the changes from the feudal economic architecture to the Industrial architecture.   In this part, I will forecast the change to a number of industries.  Most of these changes are already starting to occur, though in a very minor way.

An Exceedingly Brief History of European and American Civilization

There have been four ages for humankind. 

The Age of Speech

The age of speech (verbal communication), from circa 300,000 BC to circa 6,000 BC  was when for the first time data, information, and knowledge could be transferred and store within and between generations.  This was the first time when clans and tribes formed.  And, according to archeologists, there was a glacially slow revolution from hunting and gathering and stone to agriculture and metals.  This was the economic architecture of the time.  During this period, the shaman, or priest was holder of the tribal information base.

The Age of Writing

The age of writing (written communication), from circa 6,000 BC to 1455 AD, was when data, information, and knowledge could be more accurately transferred longer distances and stored for much longer time periods (in fact, there are documents and records over this entire period).  Political institutions increased from tribes migrating all over the landscape to settled (or at least apparently) settled city states, and then to regional and national states.  This was the second form of an economic architecture.

During this age the first known libraries and colleges formed; for example, the library and museum (college/research center) at Alexandria.  And again, more than 600 years later, after the various barbarian tribal invasions sent Europe back to the talking age, (during the dark ages) up to 900 AD when Carolus Magnus (or Charlemagne) manage to very slightly reintroduce writing and then colleges were formed in what is now Italy.

The Age of Printing

 The age of printing, (printed communications), from 1455 AD to between circa 1942 to 1992, data, information, and knowledge, became much more readily available to humankind.  Thanks, in large part to Martin Luther insistence that everyone should be able to read the Bible, Northern Europe learned to read and read ideas and concepts that were not part of the Catholic Church Doctrine.

By 1776, Adam Smith had described how wealth was created, together with the growth of engineering knowledge, and the ability of individuals to take risks and fail or succeed, Humans entered the era of Mass Production and Liberty.  This is the basic economic architecture of the Age of Printing.

Included in the mass production was mass production of education, based on a school for all teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.  This has led to the mass production educational systems of today.

Knowledge and Wealth

You should note that with the speech, humanity grew significantly wealthier than other animal species.  The reason is that they could accumulate more and better data, information, and knowledge through speech.

With writing, humanity accumulated a much more wealth.  This wealth was exceedingly badly distributed. Nonetheless, looking at places like Pompeii, even some of the slaves could accumulate small wealth (while “the bread and circuses” form of socialism led to the eventual destruction of the Roman Empire).

With printing, a much large chunk of humanity created orders of magnitude more wealth.  The accumulation of knowledge of how the Universe works has led to mass production, which meant mass wealth.  For example, if there is a disaster now, people expect the restoration of power, water, fuel, and communications immediately; this was never true for even the “wealthiest in the age of speech, writing, or even for most of the age of print.  This demonstrates how exceedingly rich even the poor are today, when compared with the rest of human history (This is something the liberal entitlement generation has forgotten).

The Digital Age: The next Age

The next Age has begun.  It began, in a real sense with WWII.  It gestated throughout the 1950s to the mid-1960s.  I will discuss this period and beyond in the next part of this article.

Functions Required in the Cloud PaaS Layer to Support SOA

The Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Whether a Private or Public Cloud is built internally, or contracted for, to support SOA, its the "Platform as a Service (PaaS)" layer will be required to have certain functions essential for the support of SOA-based Composite Applications/Services.

The PaaS Layer is "the second" layer of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Cloud Computing Architecture.  It is the middle layer of the architecture, between the Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  In fact, the PaaS is the first complete actual layer (as opposed to virtual) of the Cloud Computing Architecture.  The only actual functions supported by the SaaS are the user interface functions, which will include the security interface(s) (see my post SOA, the User Interface Service Components, Apps, and Validation before Registering).

The PaaS contains all of the functions needed to run the applications (Services), as well as the actual repository containing the code for the application--for Services, the Service Components.  For a SOA-based set of applications, there are two functions that they require in the PaaS.  First, is the Service Component Registry.  The Service Component Registry is a virtual catalog of the location of Service Components.  It enables the orchestration and choreography processes to find the Service Components, which create Composite Applications.

Second, the PaaS must have Orchestration and/or Choreography Engines with associate Rules Engine and Rules Repository.  I have discuss the difference between orchestration and choreography in my post "SOA Orchestration and Choreography Comparison".  These functions (engines) are based in the PaaS.  The rules engine and rules repository enable and supports automated business rules,which, in turn, enables and supports the organization's policies and standards.

Private versus Public SOA Cloud Architecture

As commonly used, a private cloud is a system within one ownership domain; while a public cloud is a system that crosses ownership domains.  In the language of SOA, private cloud is an Enterprise SOA, while a public cloud is an Internet SOA.  As I discussed in the post on orchestration and choreography, Enterprise SOA uses orchestration (mainly) to execute its composite applications, while Internet SOS always uses choreography.  However, I suspect that most Enterprise SOAs will include both orchestration and choreography, as they will use Service Components outside their ownership domain for occasional ad hoc composite applications; for such things as research and risk reduction.

Another key difference between Private and Public SOA Architectures is that an Enterprise (private) SOA will use an application layer communications system called an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to enable the Service Components of the Composite Application to communicate.  On the other hand, the Internet (public) SOA will use the Internet to enable the Service Components to communicate.  For the Cloud Architecture this means that the PaaS of the private cloud will include ESB functionality, while the public cloud will use the interconnectivity of the Internet provided by the IaaS for these functions.

Using Enterprise Architecture to Reduce the Federal Debt

The Federal debt is caused, in part, by laws and regulations that are cumbersome, obsolete, and conflicting with other laws and regulations and with the charters of the enforcing departments and agencies.  These are the "Catch 22's" that infect all governments.  This problem makes the departments very cost inefficient.  In my experience as a process engineer and from observations of organizations in operation, an organization uses a minimum of 10 percent of its resources in causing and fighting this process friction (sometimes it can be much more). 

There have been many times when the US Federal government has "addressed" this cause with one time programs over the years, with varying degrees of success.  The unfortunately the operative phrase is "one time".  To be successful, all laws, regulations, policies, and standards have to be structured and there must be a process to revisit each to ensure that the are measurably performing as expected.

If properly used an Enterprise Architecture process and repository in the form of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) can reduce or minimize the conflicts among laws, regulations, policies, and standards over a 2 to 10 years period--depending on the size of the organization.  This does not mean that there will be no benefits for 2 to 10 years, in fact management may notice some within 3 to 6 months.  What it does means is that the complete transformation and acceptance of the the Enterprise Architecture process to help with investment and policy decision-making will take that long to be fully accepted by and inculcated into the organization.  Unfortunately, without a champion at the top of the leadership, working with a top-notch transformational enterprise architect, it will never happen...due to the many reasons, excuses, and loss of influence by various levels of management and their constituents.

A second cause is that the departments, bureaus, and agencies are running more on their management's agendas than on the organizations' charters.  This means that a single organization may have many duplicative processes procedures and tools, which greatly reduces the cost efficiency of the organization.  These are cause by private managerial agendas.  Private managerial agendas are caused by conflicts of policies/regulations, the NIH (that is, the Not Invented Here) syndrome, or the manager's personal empire building.

Sometimes the managers' private agendas are caused by conflicts in or obsolesence of regulations and rules preventing the managers from achieving their mission.  A good Governenace and Policy Management process coupled with a good Enterprise Architecture process will greatly reduce this cause for private agenda's.

Other times, the sub-organizations of an organization will decide that the organization does not understand their requirements for a particular function and therefore, they feel the need to create their own. Or, it may simply be that they do not trust the organization designated to perform the function to perform it in the manner they would prefer, and therefore, it needed its own.  A more malicious version of this, is managerial empire building, where the manager wants to enhance his or her own status by controlling all of the functions required to perform a given process, and additionally, takes a very wide interpretation the his or her mission or charter, and strategies, policies, procedures, and tooling.

In all of these instances the manager has a case of the NIH syndrome; which causes much waste of the organization's resources.  Enterprise Architecture can ameliorate the cause by mapping all strategies and processes to the organization's mission as recommended by the FEAF, providing measurable line-of-sight from the mission to the processes and tools.  For example, one in US Federal department, one organization had been charter to perform the reservation function for the entire department.  As of 2007, team of Enterprise Architects had found at least 50 sub-organizations with independent reservation functions.  Simply, by consolidating many of these functions into a single system, the department was able to save 10s of millions of dollars per year in development and operating costs.

A third cause is "Political Correctness" (PC).  This boils down to various political constituents getting a piece of the pie, irrespective of their knowledge, skills, and capabilities.  Part of this is due to organizational networking (which "PC" lobbists characterize as the "good ol'boy" network--which may have some validity).  DARPA, NSF and other Federal R&D organizations tend to award contracts to organizations that have performed well in the past--not a bad way to chose.  But, it leads to these agencies overlooking organizations with no track record; thus, they may miss good ideas.  Therefore, it stratifies organizations, giving organizations with a track record an advantage--their abilities are known--over other organizations--whose abilities are unknown.

Therefore, the US Congress, in its inimitable wisedom mandated that various "special constituents" get a piece of any large program irrespective of competence to ensure "fairness", and "equality."  However, requiring all large programs, especially those with high knowledge and R&D skills to include "PC" firms simply to win the contract, whether or not these firms have any skills at all, is very costly and frequently causes major cost overruns and program failure.

While Congress's objective was noble, the unintended consequences causing negative externalities have been very expensive to both the government and the long-term ability of the United States to compete in the global economy.

Layers of management, problems of coordination, and private agendas among the "teaming" partners--each vying for a larger piece of the project, even after it's been awarded.  When these "disadvantaged" firms fail to perform, there is a major risk of a cascade affect, that without quick transference or mitigation cause the program to fail.  But, process of transferring is tangled in contractual and inter-organizational political problems that slow the process to a creep or stall it altogether.

The "PC" regulations together with their affects creates dysfunctional Virtual Extended Enterprises (VEE).  Note that VEE's are business versions of SOA's Composite Applications, in that they are composed of many small, but highly skilled and knowledgeable organizations.  Through the life cycle of a product these component organizations can be introduced into and let go from the VEE in a manner similar to that of Service Component replacement for purposes of technology insertion.  The "PC" regulations militate against these changes, creating a high risk of failure for programs trying to produce unprecedented complex systems.  This adds greatly to waste of Federal resources.

Enterprise Architecture can provide a method for sorting out the best and brightest organizations from both "advantaged" and "disadvantaged" but incompetent organizations, if the enterprise architecture processes and repository are properly organized and the processes are correctly executed.

Longer term, this waste of resources from all of these causes will cause the US to both lose its competitive edge militarily and economically.  Again, over time, the proper use of the enterprise architecture processes and repository will enable a competitive advantage.

Also see the post entitled "Thoughts on Solving the Federal Debt Issue", and "Rebuilding Jobs in the United States".