Here's your big-think for the day: A guest post at John Roese's Nortel blog by Andrew Lippman, who was a founder of the MIT Media Lab. Some really interesting musings on the concepts of identity and context, how they interact, and how these concepts, which are continually changing throughout the course of each person's day, might be embodied in our communications.
Here's your big-think for the day: A guest post at John Roese's Nortel blog by Andrew Lippman, who was a founder of the MIT Media Lab. Some really interesting musings on the concepts of identity and context, how they interact, and how these concepts, which are continually changing throughout the course of each person's day, might be embodied in our communications.Among other things, Mr. Lippman describes how location services, as a sort-of proxy for context, can be used to create mashups for phones. He describes the results of some work done in an MIT class:
One student made his phone vibrate in the theater and ring loudly elsewhere (i.e., the phone changed the volume because it was aware of its location). Another student buzzed a reminder to get milk as he passed a food store.
My first reaction to reading this was that details like this make it clear that the "consumerization" of enterprise technology is irreversible, and that this is almost entirely a good thing--a reaction that was confirmed when I looked up a PPT Lippman recently posted on his website. He notes in that presentation, "Consumer systems outnumber specialized solutions," a simple statement that has some pretty profound implications.
With workers being mobile and using mobile devices to communicate, and with work days spilling over into the evenings but getting interrupted in mid-afternoon for kids' Little League games and the like, the only reliable parameters for a mobile worker's availability in a job context will be the one he or she configures--or has configured for him- or herself by automated systems. I don't see any way that such comings and goings could be configured into enterprise servers and databases, or incorporated into enterprise-issue devices.
Certainly there will be the need to overlay enterprise policies and permissions, which is why the technology will not desert the enterprise infrastructure altogether. In fact, if you had to buy futures in either office space or policy-server space, the latter would seem much the better bet.
And if you think these concepts are remote from enterprise communications networks, think again: That cell phone ringing/movie theater example is little more than a consumer rendering of a location-based service that Agito Networks, the FMC company, already provides. The technology is different but the goal is the same: The student's cell phone experiment used GPS (I'd imagine) and the cellular network to adjust the phone's volume based on location; Agito uses WLAN triangulation to determine when a dual-mode cellular/WiFi phone crosses a location threshold, at which point Agito's system switches the call from the WLAN to the cellular network or vice versa (depending on where you've been and where you're going) in order to place the user on the most cost-effective network.
In his Nortel post, Lippman also discusses the idea of permissions and negotiations. He relates an anecdote about "carding" young people who want to buy alcohol, suggesting that the kinds of mashups he's talking about--which are sensitive to the person's identity and context--would allow for a world where things like drinking don't have a hard-and-fast age limit. Instead, it would depend on your context. The parents of a 20-year-old could electronically grant permission for their responsible young son or daughter to have a glass of wine with family, while obviously denying permission in contexts that are more, shall we say, freewheeling.
Lippman goes on to discuss permissions and negotiations for access to, say, buildings, and he drops an provocative little remark in the comments, after discussion has turned to the ways that such mashups can be used to negotiate permissions or access. He critiques the binary approve/deny kind of permission structure that RFID enables:
RFID's are a technology who time has passed. They are neither robust enough to negotiate nor cheap enough to be pervasive, yet we use them for identity all the time.
You really have to read the whole thing to get the, well, context, of that comment, but then you should really read the whole Lippman post anyway. Very thought-provoking.
