Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Earlier today I had the honor of participating in the Business Stakeholder meetings being held in Seoul preparing for the OECD Ministerial Meeting on “The Future of the Internet Economy” that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

My input to the meeting was pretty straight forwards, the goal was to demonstrate that the evolution of services offered by software has been on a steady trajectory for some years now, and at every stage has offered an increased level of opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of the services offered by the network - then to go on to talk a little about what the future might hold and how government could support that future.

The evolution of the network and the increased level of opportunity that can be witnessed at various points in time is obviously interesting to watch.

Twenty five years ago the PC was a stand alone device offering little or no options for connectivity for the average user or business, as a result data was also stand alone and the effectiveness of your device directly related to the amount of data that you had personally spent time inputting.

Some fifteen or so years ago we moved on a step, the world started to talk about client-server computing and the PC began to integrate with services that were offered by an organizations data center - the PC suddenly became a lot more useful, but in many if not most cases that usefulness still ended at the boundary of your own organization.

Ten years ago the Internet began to become mainstream, some had been using the services of the Internet for longer, many had not. It does not need to be said that this was a pretty revolutionary point in time. Suddenly individuals could search for and obtain information on just about any topic they could dream of. At the same time huge opportunity opened up for business, allowing companies new and old to open store fronts that reached many hundreds of millions of customers.

Then the final stage I talked about was the idea of seamless computing, again a concept that is familiar to many in the technical world, a concept that allows diverse organizations to share data and business processes to build new services that were previously just not possible. This era includes many of the ideas that are still evolving around cloud computing and hosted services.

I chose to talk about the future in the form of three scenarios, looking at the future for the highly connected individual, the highly connected business and the highly connected society. In all three cases we can already see trends and expectations starting to emerge. Much of my presentation focused on extrapolating these trends, predicting the future is a dangerous game, who am I to say what will or won’t become components of how we live our lives in the future.

If you’re interested you can see the details of the presentation here, but at a high level the idea was to provide more empowerment for connected individuals, more opportunity for the connected business and to focus on an increased level of individual participation in the connected society.

The presentation closed with some suggestions for government policy makers around areas that need focus and attention as we create a secure and inclusive internet for the coming years,I outlined the following;

• Provide a framework and foundation for innovation and sustainable growth through the promotion of intellectual property rights, choice and interoperability and a competitive environment for software innovation;
• Promote the open and free flow of people, products, services, and ideas through free and fair trade, preserving freedom of expression online and supporting immigration policies that foster cross-border educational and professional opportunities;
• Create a more trustworthy computing environment by strengthening laws around cybercrime, online safety and privacy in accordance with global and regional norms including the Council of Europe’s Convention on cybercrime and the OECD and APEC Privacy principles;
• Transform education, learning and access to technology and promote innovative IT solutions for healthcare.
• Most important of all… move beyond “The Internet Economy” and return to “The Economy”

The final point is very important here in the Asia Pacific region, and probably other areas of the world as well. I still see many governments in the region segmenting their digital strategy and leaving it to be dealt with by an IT agency or individual technocrats.

The idea of the internet, and the benefits that it brings to individuals, businesses and society as a whole is no longer a new one.

Eventually I would like to think that we will stop thinking about “The Internet Economy” or “eGovernment”, and start thinking about “The Economy” and just “Government” - where technology plays a pivotal but tightly integrated role in the way that services and government business process are delivered.

I meant to talk a little about this last week, but got wrapped up in a customer event in Korea for a few days.

Two weeks ago the World Congress on Information Technology was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  It was a huge event bringing together technology and policy folks from all around the world to discuss the future of the industry that we work in and share good practices from around the world, I’m told that around 20,000 people turned up in total.

Two interesting stories that I enjoyed from the WCIT event.

The first was an appearance by Bill Gates, not in person but as a hologram. This is the first time Bill has appeared this way at any event, and it was fun to do it here in the region. Rendering work for the hologram was done by a Malaysian company called Fat Boy Records, and it came out really well.

My colleague Stephannie Chin has a video of it over on her blog, the hologram itself was near life size but looks a little smaller in the video!

For PR reasons we were not supposed to speak for the company but now that it’s almost a month over, I can now tell you that Bill did make his appearance in WCIT but only virtually.

Maybe in this increasingly green world this is a far better way for executives to present at events rather than burning jet fuel.  Hop on over and have a look for yourself.

The second story to share was an MoU signing with another Malaysian company called QubeConnect, they provide an open source based IP telephony platform that is garnering more and more attention here in the region.

The MoU provides for an agreement between Microsoft and QubeConnect to work together and share protocol information that will allow integration of their telephony platform with Microsoft OCS.

Edwin Yapp at ZDNet Asia carried the story;

Dinesh Nair, co-founder and CTO of QubeConnect, said Wednesday Microsoft OCS runs on the Windows platform and as such, its reach is limited to users and organizations on the same platform.

“Using our solution, users on either open source or other proprietary communications platforms will be able to communicate with Microsoft’s OCS seamlessly,” Nair said, during the deal-signing on the sidelines of the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) held in Malaysia this week.

Interoperability comes in many ways, while the world is very focused on the big announcements that come from Microsoft (for example, ODF support in Office), personally I find the smaller relationships like the one with QubeConnect a lot more exciting, there are an increasing number of those underway - especially here in Asia.

There are no shortage of press and blog stories this morning sharing the news that Microsoft has committed to supporting version 1.1 of the Open Document Format in SP2 of Office 2007.

As the announcement happened while those of us here in Asia were sleeping peacefully pretty much everything that could have been said on the topic has already been said, so I thought it might be more useful to present more of a round up of what I’ve been reading this morning.

First of all a little about the announcement itself.

There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.

The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats - including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.  

In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.

Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.

The Microsoft blogs that first carried the announcement were the usual folks.

Jason Matusow looks at this announcement in the context of the companies continuing commitment to interoperability as a tenant of the way we design products and collaborate with the rest of the industry. Jason and I share views on the issue of so called “single standards” and he eloquently explains that further in his post.

This is not about any one document format “winning” – it is about enabling customers to evaluate and use document formats that make the most sense for them. Just as the MS deal with JBOSS didn’t mean we were saying that J2 was better than .NET – it is that we want our customers to have the most positive experience possible when using our product.

Doug Mahugh talks about some of the more technical details of the announcement, as well as discussing what this means to existing initiatives. He talks about our continued commitment to the translator projects for ODF, DAISY, UOF etc. and links to the ODF Translator team blog where they have just kicked off version two of that project.

Finally Doug answers a question I was asked over dinner earlier this week… we’ll be adding APIs that allow third parties to intercept the ODF load and save paths so if anybody disagrees with our implementation then all the tools are available for them to write their own.

Gray Knowlton digs around the “Why?” question, again one that came up in my dinner conversation earler this week. Why now? Why when OpenXML just got approval? etc.

Success in our industry (like a lot of other industries) boils down to successfully addressing the needs of customers. By offering greater choice for file formats, our products address more scenarios and provide greater flexibility in enabling specific solutions. From a pragmatic standpoint, adding ODF to Office allows us to re-focus Office on product capabilities rather than a debate about file formats. We’re quite comfortable when we compete in the marketplace on these merits.

Looking around the blogosphere this morning the announcement appears to be very well received by just about everybody, as I said earlier in this post most people seem to be focused on the component of this announcement that talks about native ODF support in Microsoft Office, but it is important to recognize that this is bigger than just that one item.

The announcement, in my view, demonstrates a strong commitment to the Interoperability Principles that we shared earlier this year. As always there is still much work to be done, but this is a great step in the right direction.

If you want to read a little more then here are some links that you might find useful. There is a lot more out there, feel free to link anything addition that you find in the comments of this post.

Press: PC World NZ, Information Week, CNet News, SD Times, New York Times, itWire, Slashdot(!)

Blogs: Stephen McGibbon (MS), Jerry Fishenden (MS), Brian Jones (MS), Jesper Lund Stocholm, Richard Koman, Andy Updegrove, Bob Sutor, Ed Brill, GeekZone NZ, Joe Wilcox, Eric White (MS), Savio Rodrigues

On a final note, I feel compelled to pull one paragraph out of Bob Sutor’s (IBM) post;

There is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF. If you are not using ODF today, you should put adoption plans in place.

There is an area where Microsoft and IBM seem to disagree.

My own personal view on this, which appears to be shared by a majority of the customers I work with, is that mandating a single standard for anything IT related is generally not a great move for government.

IT standards, like any area of technology, move on.

Governments need to remain ready to move with the technology that is in use by their citizens and businesses, mandates for information technology standards often do little more than operate as a hurdle to doing this.

A couple of posts caught my eye this morning, representing very closely related discussions from opposite sides of the globe.

One from New Zealand, and a second from the United Kingdom.

Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, shares some insight into discussions taking place in New Zealand around how to encourage increased growth in the local IT industry by putting the right policy framework in place.

Some of the conclusions and ideas include;

Some of the general themes we’d like as an industry would be around

• Encouraging more people into the industry
• Certification programs
• Immigration
• Education

But what would be some specific and measurable things we could achieve if we worked together?

Here are some that I’ve been thinking of.

1. Establishment of an ICT procurement ombudsman, so that procurement issues can be raised without the vendor being penalized in the market.
2. A work visa program between New Zealand and Silicon Valley so that we can send our talented people up to work there for a few years and bring experts down here tightening the relationship between ourselves and the center of the tech universe.
3. R&D tax credits limits lifted if you are exporting products developed from that R&D.
4. The industry supporting Government initiatives on Online Identity Management for individuals and businesses facilitating electronic commerce. We could lead the world here.

Rod goes on to invite wider participation in this conversation, I suspect he is looking for strong voices from New Zealand, personally I think this is a good discussion to be having across the region.

There are some interesting ideas being raised in the comments.

At the same time my colleague Jerry Fishenden posted a list of sound bytes from NESTA’s Innovation Edge event that was held in the UK this week.

The final quote that Jerry picked up gives a lot of food for thought;

“In the 20 years to come there will be more innovation and disruption than in the last 100 years”

Every national government should probably be asking itself how it prepares for the significant change that will be driven by innovation in the IT industry, how it will position it’s local economy and how it will manage the social evolutions that these changes will bring.

The whole list is worth a read, and I think complements the conversation that Rod is having in New Zealand pretty well.

Much like the current dip in activity around eGovernment, discussions and policy that relate to how we create the right environment for a thriving IT industry in countries around the region seem to have slipped in priority over recent years.

It is encouraging to see these conversations appearing back on the agenda and bringing forth new thinking and ideas.

Several news organizations are reporting that the One Laptop Per Child project and Microsoft have reached an agreement to offer Windows XP as an option for countries choosing the OLPC platform for the classroom.

Fortune Magazine’s online site for example;

Making Windows available on the XO could make it far more palatable for developing-world governments to make the huge investment necessary to purchase large numbers of XOs for their children. “It’s a very big deal,” said OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte in an interview.

He has for three years unsuccessfully attempted to get governments to buy the laptop in lots of a million or more. Governments have so far put in firm orders for a total of 600,000 machines, and several hundred thousand are now in use. The greatest number is in Peru, followed by Uruguay, Mexico, with fewer in Rwanda, Cambodia, Mongolia and Haiti, among other countries.

Stephen McGibbon has linked a video demonstrating XP running on the XO, using a number of the unique features of the device, and performing well.

Here Bohdan Raciborski from Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group demos Windows and Office running on the XO, and mentions that performance seems reasonable - starting in a quarter of the time the original OS did. Bohdan also shows the electronic book mode.

And James Utzschnider has more details on his blog;

Following the Gates meeting and a series of conversations with Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, Microsoft made a key concession. It will enable what’s called a “dual boot,” which means Windows will work alongside the XO’s original Linux operating system. Users will be able to choose which one to use. That required a big change in Microsoft’s approach, given its longstanding aversion of open source.

From my own conversations with government folks around the region here in Asia, I think that overall this will be a welcome addition to the project, offering more choice to users of the device as they learn about the technology and use the device for education in the classroom.

First of all, Stephen McGibbon introduced me to FolderShare earlier this month and it has quickly become part of every PC we own… sharing information between home and work, between PCs at home, and photos between our family members in Singapore, Cyprus, England and America. 

The FolderShare team have started blogging and have kicked things off by announcing a new version, Windows Live FolderShare, with “better setup, a better system tray menu, and better performance on Windows Vista.”

www.foldershare.com has also been updated to makes managing FolderShare libraries and computers easier. It’s completely free, and available for Mac OSX too!

Second, recently I’ve been playing with a tool from ActionThis!, a New Zealand startup who are building upon the tasks capability in Outlook by sharing tasks out on the web so they can be managed by groups in disparate locations.

Some marekting blurb from their website;

• Use Microsoft Outlook to create and assign tasks to yourself, your team, your partners
• Organize and access these tasks from anywhere using Microsoft Outlook or the ActionThis! website
• Keep track of progress, projects, and workload with reports emailed to your email inbox
• Keep on top of overdue tasks with live alerts designed to help you take action quickly
• Export and analyse your progress with Microsoft Excel

ActionThis! has a free 30 day trial (the vote results will be in before it expires!).

If you’re interested in playing with it then you can sign up here.

It is a quiet day, post your favourite productivity tools in the comments section below… something that makes your life easier and more productive, regardless of OS.

(I’m aware that I’m a little Windows centric!)

A short while ago I mentioned that Microsoft had committed to releasing the file format specifications for the Microsoft Office Binary files under the Open Specification Promise and making them generally available, removing any of the complications that developers previously had to go through to get hold of these documents.

So, the only remaining question to answer is where you have to look for these documents. There are a few organizations stepping forwards to hosting and archiving these documents.

The first location is an obvious one, and it is Microsoft. The documents can be found on Microsoft.com by following this link.

There you will find;

• Word 97-2007 Binary File Format (.doc) Specification PDF | XPS
• PowerPoint 97-2007 Binary File Format (.ppt) Specification PDF | XPS
• Excel 97-2007 Binary File Format (.xls) Specification PDF | XPS
• Office Drawing 97-2007 Binary Format Specification PDF | XPS

Additionally, Microsoft also made specifications for a number of supporting technologies available, also under the OSP, these include;

• Windows Compound Binary File Format Specification PDF | XPS
• Windows Metafile Format (.wmf) Specification PDF | XPS
• Ink Serialized Format (ISF) Specification PDF | XPS

The other part of the announcement about the binary file formats was the creation of a translator project on Sourceforge that would look at the translation of older Microsoft Office documents from the binary file format to the new OpenXML format.

The project is now live, and can be found here.

At the same time there are two other organizations that have agreed to host these specifications. The first of these was the British Library, below is a small excerpt from the page that they are hosted on;

The British Library believes that it is essential to archive and, where possible, provide access to the specifications of digital file formats.  These specifications are important today for people developing applications that work with digital file formats, but archived copies will be even more critical in the future when today’s applications are long obsolete.

You will find the specifications on this page on the British Library site.

The second 3rd party organization who will host the documents is the United States National Library of Congress, and here is an excerpt from their site that that again highlights the intention to preserve access to these documents for generations to come;

Listed here are selected specifications made available for downloading by the Library of Congress with the permission of their owners and the intention of ensuring permanent access to the specifications for the digital preservation community and other users. Also listed are URLs for sources of freely downloadable specifications for digital formats from standards organizations.

You will find the documents on the Library of Congress digital preservation site here.

All in all this means that the documents are available for developers who want access to them today, and are preserved for future generations by a combination of the perpetual nature of the OSP and the effort of the Library of Congress and the British Library to host this specification documentation on an equally perpetual basis…

It has been a busy week on the OpenXML front, I have been travelling for the last few days and have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to catch up on the long list in my inbox. Three of the items stand out;

1. Accessibility. A group of accessibility experts have worked on reviewing Ecma-376 (DIS29500) and have produced a set of guidelines for developers wanting to use the rich set of accessibility features contained within the spec.

The report itself can be downloaded from the OpenXMLDeveloper site by following this link. The abstract from the start of the document reads;

This document is a guide for applications that support DIS 29500 (ECMA 376 Office Open XML) specification with the goal of encouraging the creation of accessible Office Open XML documents. Office Open XML provides a rich infrastructure for creating content that meets the needs of people with disabilities. This document’s guidance must be followed in order to ensure Office Open XML implementations are consistent with respect to their support for accessibility at both the application and output level. Authors and developers are encouraged to follow these guidelines in order to enable users with disabilities to consume content or to extract the full meaning of Office Open XML documents.

2. The Burton Group look at OpenXML and ODF. Mary Jo Foley covers this for ZDNet. The Burton Group have issued an independently generated 37 page report that looks at the state document formats in the context of OpenXML and ODF, the conclusions reached by the two authors are very favourable towards the work that we have been doing with OpenXML in recent years. The ZDNet coverage opens with;

Market researchers with the Burton Group have issued a 37-page study–not commissioned by Microsoft or any other tech vendor–that finds Microsoft’s OOXML document format to be more useful than the rival ODF format backed by Microsoft’s competitors.

The report is called “What’s up DOC?” and can be downloaded from The Burton Group here. (registration required)

3. DIS29500 Proposed Dispositions Complete. Finally, several blogs are reporting that Ecma International’s TC45 working group have hit their milestone of responding to all 3522 comments with proposed dispositions. The full report from Ecma can be found here, and Microsoft’s representative on TC45, Brian Jones, talks about the milestone here. From Brian’s blog;

It’s been a ton of hard work over the past several months, and it really feels great to move onto the final stage of this process (I need some sleep). It’s unbelievable how much work we’ve been able to accomplish within TC45. Similar to how we moved from a 2,000 page spec to a 6,000 in 2006, in 2007 we were able to respond to 3,500 comments and generated a 2,300 page document (a bit less that a page per comment) where I believe we were able to successfully handle the national bodies comments.

Doug Mahugh is a member of the INCITS V1 Committee in the US, in his review of the the proposed dispositions he characterizes them in the following way;

• Addition of useful information for developers, such as the thorough documentation of compat settings. Want to know what it means to “autospace like Word 95″ or “truncate font heights like WP6″? That’s all spelled out now, so that any developer can implement these behaviors.
• New flexibility in the formats, such as extensible page borders, support for new types of content, and new options for date handling. Want to use ISO 8601 dates in an Open XML spreadsheet? Now you can.
• Standards support. Dozens of international standards are normatively referenced in the proposed changes, making DIS 29500 a well-socialized and well-connected member of the international standards family. A good example is the use of ISO/IEC 14977:1996 (Syntactic metalanguage – Extended BNF) notation for spreadsheet formulas and fields.
• Structural changes to allow for selective re-use of specific portions of the standard. One of the proposed changes would make OPC (Open Packaging Convention) and MCE (Markup Compatibility and Extensibility) separate parts, so that other standards can normatively reference these useful technologies separately from the rest of DIS 29500.
• Clarification of numerous details, including conformance requirements, algorithms, syntactical details, and much more.
• Correction of errors and typos that have made some of the details confusing in the past.

The next six weeks will be spent preparing for the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva, which will be held at the end of February. Several delegations are attending from various national standards bodies here in Asia.

Last month in Phuket I had the honour of being asked to join a small panel and give an award for excellence in Technology Leadership. This is an awards process run by Alphabet Media’s Public Sector Technology & Management magazine that specifically recognizes leaders in the Asia Pacific region.

Government leaders and members of our civil service are, in my opinion, some of the unsung heroes of society today. Having asked many of my friends in these positions what the rewards are for doing these jobs I’m often told very personal stories about how a difference can be made that truly changes society as a whole.

Working in government can be tough for a number of reasons. In business you can quickly make decisions about shutting down or starting up business processes, moving staff into new roles, selecting particular technologies to solve ICT issues and or your customer will be for a service that you are building. In government these choices are just harder, the number of stakeholders involved is phenomenal compared to the business world and choices like who you want to serve and who you don’t is just not an option for many government employees.

Still, with all of these challenges government people just quietly get on with the job solving problems that business people would define as colossal in nature on a daily basis.

When Alphabet Media approached Microsoft and asked us if we would like to be involved in an awards program for excellence in Government we jumped at the chance. Awards, specifically in the area of technology use in government, seemed like a minor but worthwhile way of recognizing some of the great work that we encounter in government every working day as we work with customers and partners in the Asia Pacific Region.

Personally I have only been working in Asia for a little over a year, so being new to the region I am still learning a great deal on a daily basis. When I first arrived our local team gave me a copy of Public Sector Technology and Management as part of the reading involved in my induction process. Since then I’ve been reading the magazine on a regular basis, and it was obvious that this was the right organization for us to partner with for this type of award given the reach that they have around Asia and the way that they cover a broad range of projects, public sector issues and the focus that the publication has on influential people in our region.

As I mentioned, the specific award that I was invited to help judge was the “Technology Leadership” award; this had two meanings for me.

The first is around leadership itself. Making real change in the public sector can be a real challenge, and to get around the issues that any project will face takes real leadership. It takes a clear vision of where you want the project to end up and it takes strength of character to share your vision with others and expect them to support and follow you in whatever direction you are heading.

The second meaning involves kick starting the use of new technologies in the public sector.

A couple of decades ago a visionary technologist and marketer by the name of Geoffrey Moore wrote a book that many people in the industry still read today called “Crossing the Chasm”.

The premise of the book was a pretty simple one. Moore introduced something that he called the technology adoption curve, breaking down the time it took to adopt new technology down by five audiences. The five groups are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and finally a group that he called laggards. His book talks about how support and skills grow up around each of the audiences, the innovators having little or no support, through to a peek for the early/late majority when you would find the highest number of partners and other experts being available to support the adoption of the technology in question.

In the Public Sector it is sometimes hard to find innovators who will kick start this curve, showing the world how new technology can be used to help serve citizens and businesses better. Very often technology adoption in Government tries to begin somewhere around that early majority part of the curve, unfortunately the market has not been given the chance to grow the services partners and experts that are needed to make the technology work, so we sometimes see higher numbers of early failures than we would see in the commercial sector.

When evaluating the award for “Technology Leadership” we were looking for both leadership in terms of driving significant change through an organization, and an example of an organization that had done something truly innovative with technology in today’s market.

The choice was hard to make, as they often are in these situations. The reach of PSTM meant that the organizers had collected some very powerful examples of Technology Leadership.

We finally settled on the work that had been done by the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore. Their project goes by the name of the “Inland Revenue Interactive Network (IRIN)” which has been a multiyear project for IRAS.

At this point I have to admit to having a personal passion for the business of taxation, having worked at one point with the Inland Revenue in my home country of the United Kingdom. This personal passion means that I have been watching the truly innovative work that has been taking place in Singapore for a few years now.

The project kicked off a few years ago with the senior leaders at IRAS looking very carefully at the way that tax was collected in Singapore, and how those business processes affected local citizens and business. The decision at the end was to drive an almost complete redesign of the business process that managed tax in the country, and of course refresh the technology that supported those business processes.

The end result is the Inland Revenue Interactive Network that is designed to make it very simple for citizens and businesses to interact with IRAS and manage their own tax affairs. A number of studies over the last ten years have shown that simplicity of working with Government for mandatory filings makes for a better place to live and a better place to do to business.

IRIN was clearly demonstrating technology leadership by both of my measurement criteria, and at the same time continues to make Singapore a more competitive environment within our overall Asian economy.

On a personal note, given my passion for this area of Government business I will reiterate what I said on the night when the award was handed to IRAS. Having lived in Singapore for less than a year, I am genuinely looking forward to using IRIN early next year as I file my own tax return for the first time!

For computing today interoperability is probably as important to the industry as some of the longer running conversations around subjects such as security and reliability. In previous posts I have talked a great deal about some of my own experience and views in this area.

Interoperability itself has evolved for the computing industry and a growing challenge over the last thirty years. At the start of the journey the picture was a much simpler one than we know today with most systems being delivered by a small collection of very large single vendors, starting with the hardware and storage systems and working right the way up through the stack to the applications that directly serviced the needs of users. At this early point in time interoperability was often defined and resolved by a series of infrequent gateways between the vendors themselves, connecting their large managed customer networks together.

The advent of the desktop personal computer and the consumer operating systems from Microsoft, Apple and more recently the open source community brought with them a new world of consumer choice. Today your desktop system will contain an array of fully interoperable technologies from different vendors who are doubtlessly operating on different continents. The processor, the disk array, the operating system, your applications and your user input devices are all highly interchangeable, and regardless of the choices that you make for each of these components you will still be able to communicate with friends, colleagues and a range of information providers over the common network that we know as the Internet using common sets of applications.

Given the magnitude of these changes many will agree that they have happened in a relatively short period of time. Some questions around what interoperability is or how issues should be resolved are still the subject of significant debate within the industry. Sometimes those debates are driven by large multinational companies who have an interest in one model over another, and more frequently they are driven on a technical level by individuals or groups who can see conflicting methods of solving similar problems.

One of the measures of maturity of any area of science in the involvement of academia in managed research around well defined challenges and real world problems. Interoperability is one area where we are just starting to see academic projects focus on the technical, organizational and semantic language questions that interoperability brings. Every study adds to an evolving view of what the industry needs to do from here, along with delivering well researched data and real world case studies.

As a company Microsoft spends a great deal of time engaging with universities around the world, posing questions that help us gain a better understanding of many aspects of the industry including challenges that our customers are facing and how we need to develop our own plans to support a rapidly evolving landscape.

One such piece of research reached its conclusions earlier this month and was jointly published by the Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Centre for Information Law at  St. Gallen University in Switzerland.

The conclusions are interesting, and I would encourage you to read the report itself which you will find here rather than just relying on my own observations.

The study itself looks at three use cases for interoperability. DRM in the context of online and offline music, identity management systems and the interactions between web services. There of the key findings can be summarized as follows;

First, interoperability does not mean the same thing in every context. Nor is there the same need for interoperability in every situation. Highly secure systems, for example, will probably not have the same interoperability requirements as consumer systems.

Second, there is no one-size-fits-all method to achieving interoperability in the ICT context. Interoperability can be achieved by multiple means including the licensing of intellectual property, product design, collaboration with partners, development of standards (open or defacto), and governmental action. The best path to interoperability depends greatly upon context and which goals matter most, such as prompting further innovation, providing consumer choice or ease of use, and the spurring of competition in the field.

And third, the report comes to the conclusion that the private sector generally should lead interoperability efforts. The public sector should stand by either to lend a supportive hand or to determine if its involvement is warranted. Trying to impose universal answers can produce unintended consequences such as curtailing innovation, limiting consumer choice, or reducing overall competition.

Given many of the policy debates currently underway in this area across Asia, the third finding requires some more investigation particularly in the context of the joint regional objectives that the industry and governments share in the area of economic development and growth.