Oliver Bell’s weblog

Over the last few days there has been a lot of discussion in the press and on blogs about some so-called fragmentation in the world of ODF, or the Open Document Format.

Much of the press is centered on the evolving views that members of the Open Document Foundation have around what it means to be a document format in today’s world, and what the future looks like for ODF under current management and maintenance regimes.

The Open Document Foundation would like to see some significant changes made to ODF that will enable compatibility with the billions of office automation documents that exist in the world today, while the powerful corporate forces that sit behind the format in the OASIS ODF TC are not so keen, presumably because of the cost that these significant changes would force upon their development teams.

From a recent NewsBLOG post on News.Com;

“We can’t meet our market requirements with OpenDocument,” said Gary Edwards who started the OpenDocument Foundation last year. “The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements.”

Instead Gary and the team at the Open Document Foundation are advocating focusing their efforts on the W3C Compound Document Format which is still in early stages of development, to quote Gary again from the same article;

“The thing you notice about CDF right away is that you are not working in the confines of how OpenOffice implements lists and tables. ODF directly reflects how OpenOffice does things,” Edwards said.

So, for me the question then comes back to what this all means for policy makers across the Asia region that I have spent time discussing this topic with over the last year or so, and frankly my view is that it doesn’t really mean a great deal, if anything at all.

There has been a lot of focus on ODF in recent months, mainly because an earlier version of the OASIS led format was pushed through the ISO standardization process, then as Open XML was presented for standardization a debate started to rage over which format should be the one true format for storing office automation files. My view and Microsoft’s official position has always been that there is a need and space for multiple document formats in the market place, supporting different users needs.

In reality the push for one true format is a simplistic view of a very complex world, and it denies the lessons of that we have been taught many times by history around such single standard choices in the rapidly advancing world of information technology.

Wikipedia lists 40+ XML based document markup languages, some for specific purposes and some designed for more generic applications. Not one of those file formats will meet all use cases as we know them today in the office automation world. Even with the number of entries documented by Wikipedia editors it is not an extensive list, and we all know that the future holds additional document formats that have either not been written, or not been published as yet.

History teaches us that standards come and go as technology advances, especially in areas where significant and rapid advancements are being made. 

ODF in itself is a pretty tight and elegant standard, but in its current form it does not meet the needs of the vast majority of users of today’s office automation tools. There has been a visible but limited market adoption of the standard. To go further, as Gary very rightly points out, there is still significantly more work to be done before the ODF specification meets the broad generic needs of the 600+ million office automation application users in the world today.

Nobody can predict what decisions will have been taken and what directional changes will have been made in the world of office automation technology by the time this work is complete.

So, what does this drama really mean for the world of open documents? As I say, in my view not a great deal really, this is just the way of things.

What is important for governments and enterprises is that the way that they store their data is well documented , and that there is an assurance that they will be able to access that data many years from now using a range of implementations.

Given the repetitive lessons of the last several decades of computing have taught us, wisdom frequently involves leaving options open whenever possible. Indeed examples that I have discussed before such as x400 email or the TP4 ethernet transport protocols should lead us to be wary of writing any policy that commits to a single standard for anything.

If you cast your mind back just over a year or so you might remember this agreement that Microsoft announced with Intel and RosettaNet to develop the next generation of their supply chain standards around Ecma Open XML.

It turns out that RosettaNet do a lot of their development work in their labs in Malaysia, and we are starting to see fruits of their efforts appear in the market.

This week there have been several stories in the press in Malaysia about the development work that has been taking place, and this morning you will find a regional article on ZDNet Asia.

From the article;

“Having proven itself to be a successful standard with large enterprises and multinationals operating in Malaysia, RosettaNet is now moving into its next phase of encouraging local Small Medium Industries (SMIs) to automate their procurement processes,” Foong said.

“Open XML opens up exciting opportunities for RAE based solutions, such as its support for custom defined schemas which facilitates wider success of e-commerce, while assuring users of long-term preservation of data.

“Another benefit of Open XML for the SMI community is its capability of storing and managing business data in documents, resulting in lower costs for implementing business process automation that enhances global competitiveness,” Foong added.

Foong Heng Huo, is the director of RosettaNet Malaysia.

This work with RosettaNet very clearly demonstrates the value that the Ecma Open XML draft brings to implementation of business process systems, something that you just can’t do with “other” formats.

Over the last decade or more I have been involved in a large number of eGovernment projects, some at a national level, some regional and some local government projects.

At the Government Technology Summit in Phuket earlier today we were discussing what to look for in a project to help decide what sort of outcome there will be once it reaches maturity. I have tried to commit a few of those thoughts to this post, some are obvious statements in here (and for that I apologize!) and some that are maybe not so obvious.

As the reader I would ask you to note that at best this these comments are a guide, every project is different and every government is different - the outcome of any project can be affected by the passion of the individuals involved, the desire of citizens or businesses to support the new service or any number of other factors.

So, some things that might be worth while looking out for when you’re assessing chances of success;

• It is never about the technology. I have seen many eGovernment projects have started out as an effort to embrace technology in one form or another without any clear goal to redesign the process that the technology is supporting or a clear policy mandate that supports the end result. Very often these types of project fail. The technology in itself rarely does anything useful if it does not have a really clear business objective to follow. Look for the policy and business agenda.
• It is always about the leadership. Like any process reengineering project, a great eGovernment project has to have a we defined and empowered leader, and that leader generally has to be somebody who is accountable for the business change that the project will bring. Looking back on the many eGovernment projects that I have been involved with success is often driven in association with a committed minister or mayor. The policy mandate has to support the change and the technology that will be necessary for any project to succeed. Look for the leader and listen to what they have to say.
• Policy and Technology in perfect harmony. Technologists and policymakers rarely “connect”. They usually talk two different languages and therefore often their objectives do not align in the way that the project needs. In any project there has to be a component that will ensure that technologists and policy makers talk – before policy is made. Look for the communication plans that bring policy and technology people together in a fruitful manner.
• Knowing the target audience. Knowing exactly who your target users are can be hard for government entities, they generally have to deliver services that reach everybody regardless of disposition. Unfortunately this does not make this point any less important that it would be for any other project. You have to be able to ensure that your end result reaches the constituents that it is designed to assist, and that they can access it on devices that they choose to use. Very often eGovernment projects target the web as a primary delivery channel, in many project it may be better to consider a kiosk, the mobile phones that are in most peoples pockets, digital television services or one of the many other devices that exist in society today. Look for clearly defined and articulate demographics for the target user base along with an analysis of how they want to consume the service.
• Where is the user? All too often technology seems to be the starting point rather than the user (think through some of the current debates that we’re currently having in Asia). Good technology design needs to place the user at the center or it will most likely fail. As with most large projects, focus groups and other ways of gathering feedback from your target user base will be a guiding light as project plans are executed. Look for a clear articulation of the benefit that the user will get from the project once it is complete. Think about how useful your target group of users will find your final project deliverable.
• It isn’t about the Web. eGovernment is rarely about building Web sites or using technology purely for administrative and operational purposes. It’s more often about fundamentally rethinking the way public service delivery happens. For example, would a policymaker commence a new hospital building program if they understood that pervasive healthcare technologies mean that in the near future patients will be able to self-medicate and control many conditions in the comfort of their own home? Look for the pervasive impact that the Internet enabled project is making on policy development and service delivery.
• Measuring success. As with any endeavor, knowing what success looks like makes it much easier to define goals, targets and plans that will get you there. I have seen many eGovernment projects start off as entertaining technology experiments with no specific end goal in mind. Again, these projects rarely seem to get very far! Look for a clear definition of success, make sure it is clear how you will recognize when you get there.
• Embrace the legacy, be ready for tomorrow. Government data centers can at best be described as complex. Over the years business processes are designed and built on whatever the best of breed (or sometimes just the lowest cost) technology of the day is. Any new project needs to be able to be make use of existing components of the data center while providing support for devices and delivery channels that don’t exist yet. In past years when government technology was often designed in a bespoke manner for a single purpose this would have been a near impossible objective, today we can select technologies that are designed to deliver applications over the Internet to huge numbers of people. For government this provides both a clear view into which technologies and standards will be useful today, along with confidence that following the market will provide an evolution path into the future. Look for the plans that adopt technology that is in the market today, then clearly analyses market trends to provide a roadmap around what comes next.
• You’re going to need your people, bring them with you. Very often eGovernment projects involve consolidating service lines to provide seamless services to business and citizens. Naturally this is threatening to some who are measured on delivery of their own service or efficient running of their department. Think about how staff are measured and rewarded, make sure that there is a clear safety net for their careers in a new framework that provides more efficiency, collaboration between departments, and simpler services for citizens and businesses. Look for a framework that supports the people involved and ensures their involvement and commitment to the project.

So, there you have it. This isn’t anywhere near being an exhaustive list, as I said at the start of this post every project is different so the most you can derive from this text is a little helpful guidance. I don’t for a moment believe that I’m an authority on this topic, every project I participate in teaches me something else that eventually needs to get added to this list.

I add that I frequently feel humbled as I watch the complex machinery of government solve process and technology problems on a near unimaginable scale.

If you have additional points that should make it into this list I would love to hear them.

When I originally joined Microsoft in 1995 my plan was to stay with the company for about two years, learn what I could and then move back to the financial services industry and work out how to capitalize on what I had discovered.

Two years later, after significant changes brought by products like Windows 95 and the way in which the company embraced the Internet at that point in time it felt like I was working for a very different company, so I stuck around to see what would happen next.

The speed at which the company changes internally and externally is not the only reason that I have continued to work for the same company way beyond the simple goal that I set myself.

As I have mentioned before, some of the early projects that I got involved with were focused on the implementation of electronic government in the United Kingdom, and it was exciting to think about the positive social impact that some of those projects were designed to deliver.

Over the years I’ve been involved with many projects of a similar nature, some of them were customer projects, and some of them more product related in fields such as language support, accessibility and helping bridge the digital divide.

About eight years ago we started to look at other aspects of Microsoft’s role in society, one of those activities involved working with International Data Corp (IDC) and looking at the economic impact of the company in a number of countries around the world.

These studies looked not only at Microsoft as a stand alone company, but also examined other elements such as the number people employed by partners, revenue generated by those companies, tax paid to national treasuries and so on. Basically looking at the entire ecosystem around Microsoft and the positive role of the company in economies where it trades. The interesting headline number that I remember coming out of the original study was the data explaining that $8 of revenue that was generated within the ecosystem around Microsoft for every $1 of direct revenue earned.

On October 18th IDC released the set of reports for 2007 and I have spent the last couple of hours looking through some of the data for Asia, it is pretty exciting to see. Starting with that same headline number for Asia alone now being $11 of revenue for every $1 of revenue directly earned by Microsoft. The data shows that Microsoft’s business model creates a great deal of local wealth along with millions of jobs in countries across Asia.

Let me share some of the headlines with you from the information in my inbox;

Growth in IT investment has generated 3.5 million new jobs in the period 2002 to 2006 and it is projected to add an additional 2.8 million jobs in the Asia-Pacific region alone by 2011. This represents a growth in IT-related employment of 5.5% (CAGR) during the period.

Total IT employment in the Asia-Pacific region is 11.9 million, of which 40% are Microsoft-related jobs.

The market with the highest percentage of Microsoft-related jobs is Korea, where 49% of IT industry jobs stem from selling products that run with or on Microsoft software, or that service and distribute Microsoft software. The greatest numbers of Microsoft- related employees are in China and Japan (1.6 million and 1.2 million, respectively).

The percentages of Microsoft-related employees are significant in all countries, although the lowest are Indonesia with 29% and Vietnam with 19%.

Microsoft itself employs 78,565 people globally, or 0.2% of the world’s total IT workforce, underscoring the importance of the Microsoft ecosystem to job generation.

It is projected that 35,211 new IT companies will be created in the Asia-Pacific region between 2006 and 2011, representing a 2.4% (CAGR) increase over the period. This predicted growth will remain broadly consistent with the 2002 to 2006 period.

In the Asia-Pacific region, for each dollar Microsoft earns, the ecosystem earns $11.18 – including $7.80 in hardware, $1.42 in software and $1.96 in services. The ratio is greater for the BRIC+M (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Mexico) countries at $15.91 – including $12.52 in hardware, $1.43 in software and $1.96 in services.

The highest ratio in Asia-Pacific is in Vietnam at $20.76 and the lowest in Japan at $8.42.

In Asia-Pacific, the Microsoft ecosystem will invest $15.4 billion in 2007 in their local economies on infrastructure, people, marketing, and business development.

Tax revenues to governments from the Microsoft ecosystem will be approximately $132 billion in 2007. Tax revenue includes value-added or sales taxes, personal income taxes, social taxes, fees and levies, and corporate income taxes.

Total IT tax revenues across Asia-Pacific in 2007 will be $172 billion, or 1.45% of regional GDP.

When I joined the company in 1995 the technology industry was only just beginning to morph into the form that we know today, at that point in time a small number of very large companies dominated every part of the sector and the concept of local partners just did not exist for most of these companies.

Today the success of the information technology industry is really in the hands of local technology providers who take software that is available globally and work out what the local solutions need to be built, which services need to be offered and in turn how best to serve those local markets. As a result of that, as the IDC data shows, these companies play an extremely significant role in any national economy.

There is a lot more to read in the study, if you’re interested follow this link to have a look for yourself.

InfoWorld carried a story earlier this week about the interoperability lab that we have established in India, this adds to the labs that we now have in several countries across the region.

The Lab will be focused on both testing interoperability between products from different vendors, and also looking at issues of interoperability between different versions of products from the same vendor.

You can read the article here;

Microsoft has set up a lab in Bangalore where industry, government, and educational institutions can build [and] test applications for their interoperability with open-source and other technologies.

The company also announced Thursday an Open Source Technology Program with four Indian academic institutions. The program will encourage student projects across diverse areas including interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms, said Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft India. Venkatesan spoke at an Interoperability Enclave in Bangalore, which representatives of government, academia, and industry attended.

The article is worth a quick read, it also talks briefly about a program that the subsidiary in India have established to support new Independent Software Vendors, and an Innovation Center that has been opened in Pune. (Western India)

As I start writing this post I have to say that I am unsure if it will result in something positive or if it will just turn out to be a rant. My intention is really to talk more about what a growing group of people see as a potential next big step for CRM, I’m going to use the airline loyalty programs as an example, and after a truly terrible week of travel I’m not sure where that will take me. Here goes…

I travel too much, I know that, my friends know that and my family know that. Of course Singapore Airlines, our national airline, also know that although for them it isn’t too much, for them their CRM systems tell them that I fit into the category of being a valued customer.

SIAs customer relationship management system is second to none, their PPS program rewards me in all sorts of ways including personalized check-in, priority boarding and some great touches while I’m on board a flight. Speaking as a customer of SIA I obviously have no objections to any of this, but for SIA themselves it is a huge investment for what I sometimes think must be very little return.

For SIA I am already a captive customer, I’m going to fly with SIA regardless of how far out of their way they go to look after me. The general service that they offer is attractive, they fly to all the destinations I need, they have a great track record for on time service and so on. Of course I’m not complaining in any way about the extra touches, I’m just not convinced that they are the key to why I will remain a loyal customer.

The problem occurs when I use another airline, which on a number of occasions I really have no choice about. As an example I have been back in the United States this week and have had cause to use American Airlines a couple of times, another fine airline, but one that I have no status at all with.

My experience with American Airlines is of course a degraded one as a result of this, something that is additionally impacted by how spoilt I am when I travel with SIA. I joined a long line at check-in, trekked through security and queued for my seat which was situated in row 89W.

I’m starting to notice that I’m sounding a little like a spoilt brat at this point, I’m really not complaining though and somewhere in here I have a point to make, I’ll continue…

The Customer Relationship Management opportunity here is relevant to both of the airlines that I have traveled with this week.

First of all it is for Singapore Airlines, and for them the question revolves around when and how they see value in looking after their travelers, this proposition is a tough business decision for them and I am glad that my responsibility here ends with just writing something random on the Internet.

Ostensibly the decision is to either look after their customers only when they’re traveling with SIA, or will they at some point step up to being an airline that looks after their customers  regardless of which airline that they’re traveling with.

I’m sure that travelers like myself could be easily profiled into a category where it was obvious that additional carriers are frequently necessary, and a higher tier of PSS (which I would work hard to attain) could throw me into a complex set of managed partnerships and inter-airline agreements that ensured that customers are always looked after providing that SIA remain the core carrier whenever possible.

Speaking as one traveler, I would be happy to see SIA invest less in the services they offer me when I’m aboard their own planes in return for this service.

The second opportunity is for the other carrier in my scenario, and is probably an easier business decision but a more complex technological challenge. At no point during my travels this week did American Airlines try to collect my Star Alliance membership details, and why would they, it isn’t their network and I am therefore not their customer.

The opportunity though is not to just track the customers that you have with CRM, but to think about the customers that you could potentially have.

American could learn a great deal about me by capturing and in someway rewarding details of frequent flyer programs that are not theirs, maybe they could offer me a more rapid route to earning status with them with the goal that I will become a customer in the future, choosing American on my next trip to the US, or choosing to make them my default carrier if I ever relocated back to the States on some future date.

In short, CRM today is very much about how you look after your own customers when they are consuming services offered by your own company. In the future CRM has to evolve to give you ways to ensure you retain your customers even when they are choosing a different provider, or to track other companies customers with the goal of making them your own.

Back to my airline scenario, around ten years ago the One World and Star Alliance partnerships were created between a limited number of airlines with some of these goals in mind, but the evolution of these programs seems (speaking as a customer) to have stopped there. Technology offers us so many more opportunities today, and it is probably time to revisit some of the network programs that exist in many industries with today’s possibilities in mind.

I am confident that this opportunity is not confined to the airline industry, and I apologize for having picked on that single industry as an example in this post, I’m sure you get the point…

A few days ago Jerry Fishenden added a post to his site that talks through how he thinks about Interoperability.

I’ve worked with Jerry on and off for the last ten years or so and I know that a lot of what he has written in this entry is based upon the many discussions and projects that he has been involved in over this time. (and before!)

From his article;

But when the debate moves onto the related subject of “standards”, the discussion becomes more opaque. After all, standards alone do not equal interoperability. It’s looking at the problem from the wrong end - standards are one of several means to an end, not an end in themselves. The equation I always hold in the back of my mind runs along the lines of:

_{interoperability = standards (de facto, de jure) + licensing + partnerships + the real world + (x)}

This is a complex area, unique in that it tends to be complex not because of the technology but more often because of the huge array of ways that people define and use the word “Interoperability”.

The word can carry different meanings depending upon which part of the problem you are most closely connected to or which audience problem you’re trying to solve. For example, interoperability needs for the consumer can be very different to the interoperability challenges faced in an enterprise data center.

When it comes to raw interoperability between technologies the industry has a pretty good idea around how individual problems can be solved, or in cases where the industry has not got it right then you will often find solutions from small software vendors or independent developers.

It is more frequent that you will find the other components of Jerry’s equation are the ones that consume available cycles when working to solve an issue of interoperability, or in many cases they are the components that just get overlooked.

I’m sat here with a huge pile of paperwork preparing for the Government Technology Summit in Phuket later this month. Microsoft is sponsoring an award for technology leadership and the paperwork represents the amazing array of submissions put forwards by governments in Asia and elsewhere in the world. 

Fifteen years ago I was involved in some very early experiments in the United Kingdom to look at smart forms and identity management, it has been astounding to watch technology and policy evolve to deliver the projects that we see today.

Looking at the submissions in front of me I would describe many of them as Phase 3 projects. I’ll explain…

I have watched many eGovernment projects evolve over the years. When it comes to thinking about what comes next for each of these projects I tend to think about their evolution in three phases.

Overall this is probably about as simple as models get, but it does give some clues around how to build a road-map for the delivery of an  online Government service, along with some introspective guidance that relates to the services that you are delivering today.

Phase 1, Presence. Most governments are past this phase these days, but many began here. Early eGovernment projects had the goal of providing basic information about a department of a service through the medium of a web page. Very often these pages would provide a form you could download and print, maybe an address for your local office, or other guidelines around how to work with the department.

Phase 2, Transactions. Today there are a large number of completed and evolving projects in this category. These phase 2 projects very often take an existing business process that has been working for years and set about digitizing it in one way or another, frequently a web form is put online and citizens or business are invited to come and fill it out in this new environment.

In themselves these projects are useful, they make government more accessible and they decrease the amount of paperwork involved in getting something done.

Phase 3, Seamless Services. Ultimately every customer I talk to today about their eGovernment objectives has some element of Seamless Service delivery in their plans. Technologists might describe this as the Web 2.0 goal for government services. To deliver these types of service government has to be ready to think about the business processes that exist today and be ready to redesign them around a model that will deliver a new level of flexibility and openness.

In society today citizens and businesses have access to a wide range of devices, upon which they manage a wide array of data. In the world of Seamless Services those devices play an integral role in engaging with government as part of their everyday purpose, often they will complete government transactions transparently as part of a commercial transaction or another everyday activity. An example might be applying for an electronic visa in your destination country as you purchase the ticket to travel there from an online travel agent.

Doug Mahugh has a short post this morning that highlights some resources for the “Office Migration Planning Manager” on Channel 9. This is a great set of tools for anybody looking at mass migration of their older binary office files to the Open XML file format.

The post is short, so I’ll make it easy and quote the whole thing.

As more organizations are moving to Office 2007 and the Open XML formats, I’ve started to hear more questions about how to work with the Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM), the set of tools that helps manage bulk conversion from the legacy Office binary formats Open XML.

Here’s a resource on Channel 9 that I just learned about: the “Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) Contributions” page. It covers some tips about how to determine which documents have macros, by directly querying the OMPM database. Check it out if you’re planning to use OMPM to manage your deployment of Open XML.

Over the years the industry has learned a great deal about the cost and pain that is inflicted through the introduction of a change to an existing file format, or the introduction of an entirely new format.

With the introduction of Ecma Open XML support in Office there are a couple of important sets of tools that have been made available to help make it easier and more cost effective to migrate to the new XML based format.

OMPM is one, another tool that is worth looking at for any organization considering using the Open XML format is the Office Compatibility Pack which allows earlier versions of Microsoft Office to read and write the new file format without the need to upgrade to a later version of the Office software.

As some of you may know, today is designated by UNESCO as World Teachers’ Day and this got me to thinking about some of the teachers who were influential during my own education.

Obviously many individuals and groups play an important role in the education of any one person, but every now and again one of them stands stands out as really making a difference in someones life.

For me it is my High School Computer Studies teacher. My High School was St. Wilfrid’s in Blackburn, Lancashire, not a wealthy or well resourced school by any stretch.

During the mid 80s when I was attending the school computers that could be used by individuals were still a pretty new concept, and the availability of skills that could teach students anything about them was probably a tough challenge for any school.

My school (St. Wilfrid’s Church of England High School in Blackburn, Lancashire) stepped up though, with the limited resources available, and a small number of existing teachers who had an interest in the field became the part time computer studies department.

My computer studies teacher was a chap by the name of Mr. Abell (Roger Abell, I later came to learn). Previously I had known him as a Physical Education teacher, a class that those who know me can probably guess that I didn’t have much interest in, and as a result the relationship with my new teacher kicked off with a pretty rough start given my lack of interest in things he had previously tried to teach me.

Outside of school I loved tinkering with computers, an uncle of mine worked for IBM at the time and turned up on the occasional weekend with early XTs and the like, I would write simple games and other programmes in Basic, I’m not sure I fully understood what I was doing, but I enjoyed it all the same.

What Roger Abell did for me was to bring my passion for tinkering together with the knowledge that he had obviously gone out of his way to gather around this emerging field. He taught me about Boolean logic, binary math, the role of the micro-processor, early development language skills and so on.

Most importantly, he gave me a grounding in computer science that I still draw on today, managing to give me a new level of understanding of the tinkering that I enjoyed so much along with a set of skills that I still use some twenty years later.

So Roger, I owe you a great deal for the commitment that you showed to a very complex and young field, and for the skills and the time that you put forwards in working with your students. I’m pretty sure I was a very frustrating student, but I was listening!
For all of that I am very grateful! Thank you.