Enterprise Info

Electronic IDentity - It's Time Has Come?

Citizen identity cards have become a big deal in Europe. Currently 12 countries have E-ID programs and have enrolled over 160,000,000 citizens.  By 2010 it is expected that this number will rise to over 450,000,000. (Source: epractice.eu, Eurostat, Wikipedia)

In nearly all of these cases, or countries, some form of identity card and/or Passports are compulsory.  In some countries, such as Belgium and Germany, citizens are not required to carry them.  In others they are.  Belgians above the age of 12 are required to carry some means of identification at all time.  People's Republic of China requires every citizen above the age of 16 to carry an identity card, and is now instituting biometric ID cards. The card will document data such as work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status, landlord's phone number and personal reproductive history.  A number of countries do not have national identity cards. These include Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, India, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.

There seem to be two fundamental approaches to identity:  citizen-centric for access to services and identification for law enforcement, and security-centric to limit access to data/facilities and verify transactions.  In the US we have gone down the security-centric route.  But given the concerns over cyber warfare, terrorism, fraud and misuse of Government funds, crime, and failed responses to natural disasters one wonders if there are not cracks in wall of resistance to a US national ID card.  Will we see a convergence of European style citizen identity with US style security?

Complexity and the Unabomber

“[As] machines become more and more intelligent people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones.” - Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber

The quote, taken from a footnote on page 226 of the Big Switch (Nicholas Carr, WW Norton & Co, 2008), is typical of many from people who believe machine-based intelligence will one day equal, and even surpass, that of humans.  The day is coming, they say, when machines will be in control. (Beware the Borg! Assimilation is inevitable,so enjoy the hive.)

But I wonder if any machine could have made the same decisions, in the same time frame, and with the same precision, as Captain Sullenberger did when he guided his A320 to a safe "landing" in the Hudson, saving the lives of 155 people.  He was able to deal with the complexity of the situation because of his training, education, experience, and attitude.  Sullenberger was able to quickly assess the situation, balance a myriad of inputs, process all of the observed data, compare it against what he already knew and perceived, make instant decisions, with precision, and give control inputs to a "dead stick" aircraft that resulted in the best possible outcome.  No computer will come close to being able to do that in my lifetime.

  AP photo/Trela Media

Circled in white, US Airways Flight 1549 is going down toward the Hudson River - The Jersey Journal Friday January 16, 2009, 12:36 PM

Mr. Kaczynski's theory only works for certain circumstances.  When dynamic complexity enters the picture, decision support systems simply fail.  Dynamic complexity involves non-linearity in multiple relationships amongst numerous factors.  A good example is the stock market. Throw a few trillion dollars into financial companies and the stock market should go up, right?  Price of a barrel of oil goes down and the price of a gallon of gas should follow.  When situations don't follow logic, you can assume complexity is at work.

Social Media & Bad Behavior

Our association, like most others, is looking at the phenomenon of social networking. My observation is that the medium will eventually be a useful tool for professional interaction, communication and engagement. LinkedIn is already there. Social media clearly has the great benefit of discovering and connecting people to each other. But it seems also to have a dark side, derived from the anonymity one can possess on the Internet.

We are experimenting to some degree with providing on-line content and individual use of social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and we will move carefully but assertively into this space during the coming year. I think some care must be exercised in how a corporate entity embraces what are fundamentally populist technologies. Getting burned is only a few key strokes away, as can be seen by this blog post by Jeff Hurt (post).

I'd be interested in your observations.

Why all the fuss about "enterprise?"

"Everything flows, nothing stands still." -  Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535 BC - 475 BC).

The IT literature contains myriad uses of the word “enterprise.”  Mostly it is used as a modifying adjective that qualifies a specific phrase or term, such as “enterprise service bus, enterprise system, or enterprise architect.”  This practice seems to have its origins in Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.

ERP grew out of Manufacturing Resource Planning II in the early 90’s when software vendors such as Baan, Oracle, JD Edwards and SAP expanded MRP II solutions to include other functional areas of the enterprise such as engineering, finance, human resources, and project management. 

By the end of the 90’s, ERP was being adopted with great enthusiasm as the right solution for Y2K problems.  (See ERP and More for a nice summary).

Today we are inundated by enterprise “things.”   We have enterprise application integration, enterprise architecture, enterprise information integration, enterprise meta-data, enterprise content management, etc.  Why? 

The first reason why enterprise has become such a familiar term is - economics.  When it comes to IT, the private and public sectors have behaved like prospective brides at Filene’s basement sale.  This increased reliance networks, computers, mobile devices and databases comes with a price tag, a very big price tag.  In each of the last three fiscal years the Federal Government IT budget has topped $60,000,000,000, per year. (1)

Redundant, unconnected and incompatible information systems grew up like weeds in an untended garden.  Remember “islands of automation?”  This phenomenon was clearly understood in 1984 when the Department of Defense recognized that the military services each had logistics information systems that were not interoperable and could not exchange data, mostly because they were never designed to do so in the first place.  Why not?  Because they were bought by different people, with different funding, for different purposes, but with similar objectives.  The notion that information might need to be moved to other organizations for valid reasons never found its way into the requirements because to do so might jeopardize programs and funding streams.  There was no overarching enterprise perspective, and no clear need for enterprise-level efficiencies.  Today we have a different perspective. Organizations such as US Central Command are working hard to reduce, eliminate, combine and consolidate systems. CENTCOM has has gone from over 2,000 distinct applications down to less than two hundred, and is not stopping there.

The second reason is that over the last couple of decades we have slowly come to recognize that information is an asset that has as much strategic value as investment in modern production facility or a long range, stealthy precision-strike platform.  The problem is that we have stored it away in beautiful cylinders of excellence that can’t communicate across the enterprise, and we need that in order to be more agile and resilient in these fast-moving times.

(1) Fiscal Year 2008 Information Technology Budget, Updated May 24, 2007

About this Weblog

This is my professional weblog site, where I intend to write about my observations on enterprises and their dealings with information from my vantage point running the Association for Enterprise Integration.  In this role I get to look at all aspects of information in, around and across the enterprise.  These are the topics I am writing about.

I intend for this to be a reasoned discourse and discussion.  Your comments are welcome.  Be advised I am censoring comments for "bad behavior" to protect you and me. Your e-mailed inputs to me are welcome as well.

This is my third venture into “blogging”.  My experience tells me that it takes real effort to keep a blog “on message”, not to wander off into irrelevant or unrelated topics.