Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Interoperability this, interoperability that… it is clearly an important conversation in our industry today, and one that spans the whole range of vendors, technology areas and end users.

Frequently conversations around interoperability get pulled in the direction of the technology that is in use, but while there is clearly work to be done here it is important to recognize that solving this problem also means tackling a number of other dimensions of the issue.

In 2004 the IDA in Europe issued their first version of the European Interoperability Framework, several IF documents had proceeded it but as far as I remember this was one of the first documents to look beyond the technical issues of interoperability and begin to examine other challenges that would need to be dealt with to provide truly interoperable systems across agencies in Europe.

On a very simplistic level the document broke the interoperability challenge down into three distinct layers;

Technical Interoperability - lets move on…

Semantic interoperability - this involves looking carefully at the language that is in use between agencies and business processes and lays down a goal of harmonizing elements where it made sense to do so. The goal being that a descriptor that might be used to define a part of a process within one agency would be understood to mean exactly the same thing in another agency. If I am tagged as an individual receiving child support benefit in one system then all other systems should know exactly what that means.

Organizational Interoperability - this section talks about something that is clearly a huge challenge for any organization, looking at how business processes intersect and what type of organizational changes need to be made to ensure that those processes work seamlessly together, at least when viewed by the consumer of any resulting service.

 So, with the history lesson over lets get back to the point of this post. Over recent months I have been rolling the IDA model around in my mind, and keeping an eye open for examples of interoperability where only the semantic and organizational layers of the problem have been dealt with to fix a particular business challenge.

Two weeks ago I was at a Microsoft global get together in Thailand and happened to bump into another blogging friend of mine, a chap that some of you will know by the name of Doug Mahugh. Doug has been in the industry for a number of years and has seen several sides of it, as a result he is a great guy to pose questions like this to, and invariably he will always have a smart answer to hand. This time was no exception.

Doug pointed me to an example on ushero.org that talked about the way that the emergency services work together when they are jointly searching disaster zones for signs of survivors or those in need of help. During the conversation Doug talked pretty extensively about the work that took place straight after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and presented a very simple model designed by the US emergency services to allow several different services to work together without duplicating efforts, and at the same time providing very clear communication about the status of the searches between teams on the ground.

As I say, the model is a straight forward one. As a team enters a building they draw a simple stripe on the outside by the door from top right to bottom left, this tells any other team that comes by that the building is currently being checked. When the team is done they draw a second stripe from top left to bottom right that completes an X and then use the four quadrants of the graphic to convey important information about what they found in the building.

Click on the thumbnail above to enlarge the picture and take a look for yourself.

In my view there are lot of lessons to be learned from this by the information technology community. As a community we get very involved in the technical challenges of interoperability when sometimes, as in the case above, a simple change in the design of the business process or the language used to communicate between teams might have been all that it would take to solve the problem that we’re faced with.

Making changes to business process can frequently meet resistance due to a need to involve senior management or other cross sections of the organization, but as the team looking at interoperability of government services in the European Union had already worked out some years ago this is sometimes the quickest and most cost effective way of tackling a given problem.

If you are aware of more examples like this then I would love to hear about them!

We cannot dismiss the technical work that need to be done, and is being done in the area of interoperable systems. 

While it might sound obvious, we often seem to miss the fact that there is great benefit for all involved to look at these issues in the context of the wider business challenge that is being solved.

In my last role for Microsoft I was based in Redmond and I was no stranger to long haul flights. Flying from Seattle it was always around five hours to anywhere on the the east coast of the United States, or the first leg of any international flight would be around ten hours.

I’m currently heading back to the USA for a few days, and the journey back has left me pondering the life that was, and the one that is just beginning.

Living and working in Singapore has brought some unexpected side benefits, not least of which has been the fact that most of the countries in South East Asia are either right on my doorstep, or at worst only a small number of hours away. The result is much less time spent waiting to be somewhere else, along with the counterbalance of much more time being available to engage directly with people or projects.

The change in travel patterns are dramatic, but not the only change in lifestyle that comes with a move half way around the globe.

It has been fascinating to see how the patterns of technology adoption differ just as significantly between my old home and my new one. Of course, anything I write from here will be a disputable generalization.. so take the follow text as nothing more than my own observations.

In the United States the demand for personal technology, in my personal view, frequently seemed to be driven by the demands for entertainment in the home. As a general rule homes built in the USA today will probably have CAT5 or CAT6 points in every room, and the occupants will plug an array of devices into those points that deliver common media platforms that serve voice, video, data, music and other communications to the entire home.

After less than a year in Singapore I would describe the demands of technology users in Asia as having a different focus, and I’ll give it a high level banner of “social efficiency and productivity”.

First and foremost the mobile phone (or hand phone) plays a much more significant role in day to day life, text messaging is only just gathering momentum in the USA, while in Singapore it is the general rule that somebody will walk into me as I come off the MRT due to their single focus of tapping out a message on their phone.

The services that emerge as a result of the focus on the smart phone are pretty much taken for granted by the average Singaporean, but have been exciting to discover for somebody just arriving in the country. The idea of being able to order a meal, summon a taxi or check in for a flight using just a text message was an amazing revelation to me - while I watch many around me take these types of service for granted. 

The net result is that advanced technologies are probably a much more pervasive part of day to day life in Singapore than they have been in places I have lived in the past.

The array of devices that people carry in their pockets, the amount of data that the average member of Singaporean society can summon up from from those devices along with the speed at which people exchange information and communicate is nothing short of amazing.

Of course folks in the US get excited about cell phones and the technology that you can find there, and of course folks in Singapore build common media platforms in their homes. However, the technology that you find in stores and in pervasive use appear on the surface to represent different core contexts and use cases.

What does all this mean.

Well, the obvious point is that we live in a diverse world, where people will always use technology for whatever drives society. A more complex point for me personally really involves watching and learning over the coming few years as I settle into the region, and working out how I represent these significant differences to the many product groups that I work with at Microsoft.

There probably are no significant revelations or world changing ideas in these observations, but they are an interesting overlay to decisions I get involved with on a day to day basis and in my interactions with people in the region.

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the world is not quite as flat as I was led to believe…