Asymmetric Design

by Philip Boxer

Social Flights, like airlines, provides flights. Except that Social Flights, unlike the airlines, has defined the demand they are responding to as asymmetric, developing a platform that can support the multi-sidedness of this demand. This is an early blog by them:

“Social Flights starts by enabling consumers to consider flying on private aircraft vs. commercial airlines. Our original theory was that “selling seats” and enabling consumers to create on demand flights would bring value to the market of travelers. We tested our theory, finding ways to lower the cost and present the better way to travel using social technology as the backbone for communicating with multiple markets of interest.”

Thus Social Flights is providing a business platform that can support a two-sided market: on the one side are travellers with particular routes in mind, and from the other side are the owners of private aircraft selling capacity on particular routes ^[1]. What makes it two-sided is the different relationship that Social Flights has with each side.

In describing the multi-sidedness of a market, we can usefully distinguish the following:

• Customer situations – situations in which there is a need for a particular form of collaboration between customers and complementors. In this case, the need (for example) for members of a team to travel together to play an ‘away’ match.
• Customers – the end-users within a customer situation i.e. the team members.
• Complementors – the suppliers whose product/service offerings are needed within particular customer situations i.e. owners of private aircraft offering lower overall costs on the particular route.
• Platform – the means by which customers and complementors are enabled to come together to form a collaboration i.e. the capability of Social Flights to bring customers and complementors together.^[2]

Other multi-sided examples are shown below:

From the perspective of any one complementor, say an airline or a clinical specialty, the market is one-sided: they are there to provide flights or operations to the market.  This one-sided view of demand defines demand as symmetric to their service offering of a direct benefit.

But if they define their market as multi-sided, they must take an asymmetric view of demand, identifying the customer situations giving rise to the collaborations that include a demand for their particular service offering – the types of travel situation creating demand for their routes, or the types of patient condition creating demand for their clinical services. And they must organise their propositions to extract indirect value from these (asymmetric) customer situations, not just from particular (one-sided) direct demands. Code-sharing airlines or hospitals are the result ^[3].

Thus what makes the demand asymmetric is the competitive need to consider the larger situation within which the particular demand arises, and to take into account the way the interactions within that larger context affect the particular demand.^[4] How does the business platform ‘extract value’?  It has to be able to support the greater social complexity involved. And it has to be able to support it in a way that creates value for the customer by reducing the customer’s costs of alignment of the various complementors to their particular situation.^[5]

The take-home?  We have to be able to understand the relationship between the platform architecture and the variety of forms of indirect value it can

Footnotes
[1] See also Richard’s earlier blog on two-sided markets using the example of retailers.
[2] The platform approach thus enables the tension to be managed between rings and wedges (i.e. between the economies of scale & scope of particular services provided by complementors, and the economies of alignment involved in bringing them together as a collaboration responding to the customer situation as a whole).
[3] What is challenging in this, of course, is that it involves a change in the way the business defines its competitive identity – from a supply-side definition of itself (we fly these kinds of route or we perform these kinds of surgery) to a demand-side definition (we can organise your travel or we can manage the treatment of your condition). But this change in competitive identity also drives innovation and transforms industries.
[4] In terms of rcKP services at the edge, only the r-type proposition treats demand as one-sided, all the others becoming increasingly involved with the larger customer situation within which demand arises.
[5] This value for the customer is indirect value from the perspective of the platform.  The need to establish economies of alignment is currently a major issue in public services, where the government ultimately pays for these indirect costs arising when citizens fall into the gaps between direct public services. This kind of analysis was used in a Swiss e-Government case (also outlined in this blog and published here).

by Philip Boxer
Richard’s presentation at the UNICOM Enterprise Architecture Forum was on Next Generation Enterprise Architecture (EA).  In it he distinguished two agendas:

1. Simplify and Unify systems to align them with the business, and
2. Differentiate and Integrate systems to help manage complexity.

In the first case the drive is towards a single unified system supporting the enterprise, while with the second it is towards differentiated systems brought together under a central authority as a system-of-systems.

He then introduced a third agenda in which the forms of integration could themselves be differentiated, enabling systems to be brought together in varieties of ways forming different systems-of-systems.  This third agenda he associated with enterprises that were having to form collaborative alliances with other enterprises, working within business ecosystems ^[1] to meet multi-sided demands ^[2].

My own presentation on supporting social complexity in collaborative enterprises addresses this third agenda. It describes multi-sidedness and gives a number of case examples, including e-Government and Healthcare.  It makes the point that with this third agenda, the architecture of the enterprise is not longer the primary concern.  Rather it is understanding the variety of ways in which the social complexity of collaborations create value for the customer, and therefore how, from the perspective of the supplier, platform architectures can capture indirect value.^[3]

Footnotes
[1] A business ecosystem is made up of numbers of operationally and managerially independent suppliers and customers interacting with each other in support of many different kinds of demand (e.g. the suppliers of the products, applications and services clustering around customers’ uses of Apple’s iPhone platform).
[2] A one-sided demand is one that the supplier can define its product or service in a way that is independent of the context within which it is used by the customer (e.g. the demands met by a retail outlet).  A multi-sided demand is one in which this is not possible, so that the supplier must take account of how the customer uses its product or service in combination with other products and services (e.g. the multiple interacting services involved in treating a complex medical condition).
[3] A platform architecture is the means by which East-West accountability can be delivered, providing a way of managing the tension between rings and wedges.

by Philip Boxer

Some papers sent to me recently by James D. Smith, II at Carnegie Mellon’s SEI set me thinking about how demand asymmetry might be expressed in Category Theoretic terms. Work by Nick Rossiter et al uses category theory to establish a natural basis for interoperability, comparing functors representing the constructs under which an enterprise organizes its data.    This work argues that the conditions for semantic interoperability between systems depend upon their functors commuting at all levels.  Heather et al use this to argue the need for a global enterprise (my italics):

Modern information systems operate at every level: from data held in a single purpose fixed device, through common PCs at home or mobile computing with business systems of an SME, to databases, intra-acting locally and at national level, inter-acting between nation states and even then open to wider global systems outside of Europe. This interoperability requires global coherence which in synecdoche correlates with the interoperation of the EU itself.

Semantic interoperability defined in this way cannot accommodate the pragmatics of demand that involve going beyond the perimeter of a single sovereign enterprise.   The enterprise may be forced to deal with demand asymmetry.

Let us say that an enterprise is an enterprise context, defined by the existence of a natural transformation between the functors representing its sub-contexts i.e. its functors commute at all levels. These sub-contexts may be further refined by defining sub-sub-contexts etc in terms of sub-functors.  In these terms, the hierarchy of the enterprise can be expressed in terms of the ‘is-part-of’ relations between the enterprise context and these subordinate functors representing subordinate enterprise contexts.

Let us now say that a customer situation (the experiencing of a need) is also defined as a natural transformation between the functors representing its sub-situations. These sub-situations may be further refined by defining sub-sub-situations etc in terms of sub-functors. In these terms, an effects ladder for the customer situation will be expressed in terms of the relations between the customer situation and its subordinate functors representing subordinate situations.

For example, a hospital is an enterprise, with one of its sub-contexts providing a hip-replacement service.  A patient’s condition would then be a customer situation, the need for a hip replacement being one of this condition’s sub-situations.

Now consider that the patient’s condition demands a number of different treatments provided by different specialist organizations – physiotherapy, home nursing, orthoses, home help. This would be a demand higher up the patient’s effects ladder, addressing more of the need arising from their condition (and thereby reducing the patient’s value deficit).   Let us say that a geometry-of-use is a functor composing some number of sub-functors within the hierarchies of some number of different enterprises.   A stratification can be expressed in terms of  the ‘is-used-by’ relations between the geometry-of-use and these sub-functors, representing how these sub-functors are composed.

Which brings us to demand asymmetry.  A demand arising from a customer situation is asymmetric for an enterprise if the functor of the geometry-of-use can not be made to commute at all levels with the functors of the enterprise i.e. there is no natural transformation between the functor for the customer situation and that of the enterprise as a whole. It is this demand asymmetry that forces us onto the ground of collaborative systems of systems and beyond.

by Richard Veryard

An independent review into the way the MOD buys equipment for Britain’s Armed Forces was published yesterday, Thursday 15 October 2009. [Report, MoD News Article, BBC News]. Key finding.

“The Ministry of Defence has a substantially overheated equipment programme, with too many types of equipment being ordered for too large a range of tasks at too high a specification. This programme is unaffordable on any likely projection of future budgets.”

That situation might sound familiar to a lot of managers, not just in the defence sector.

The report makes some favourable comments about the Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) programme, but indicates a lack of hard financial data that would be required to make quantitative decisions. As regular readers of this blog may recall, there has been some discussion along these lines published in the RUSI Journal, including Agility and Innovation in Acquistion (Feb 2008) and The Meaning of Value-for-Money (Feb 2009).

The explanation for the current crisis can be found in the essential multi-sidedness of the defence acquisition ecosystem. Traditional cost accounting approaches (such as activity-based costing) fail to address the complexity of this multi-sidedness, and researchers are urgently seeking alternative cost accounting methods appropriate for complex systems-of-systems.

One of the key issues for Through Life Capability Management is that any errors or omissions in the long-term equipment programme must be repaired through what are known as Urgent Operational Requirements (UOR), which over the long haul can prove far more expensive and inflexible than the planned equipment.

The report also praises the Smart Acquisition programme, and expresses regret that the disciplines of Smart Acquisition have been somewhat diluted by recent reorganization.

***

by Richard Veryard
cross posted from SOAPbox blog

Various people talking about the dispute between Google and the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

Boing Boing, Search Engine Watch, Emergent Chaos, Graham Shevlin.

One line of discussion relates to privacy. Some commentators are praising Google for resisting the US Government’s demands for data, when its competitors have apparently complied.

But there is another important consideration, which appears relevant to Google’s position. There is an huge gap (asymmetry) between the information requirement (as stated by the DoJ) and the data on Google’s database. (See especially Danny Sullivan’s post at SearchEngineWatch.)

So the DoJ is hoping to solve a complex problem with very large amounts of data? Does it really make sense for the DoJ to copy the raw data from Google onto its own processors? In a service-oriented grid-enabled world, it would seem to make more sense (and raise fewer privacy concerns as well) for the DoJ to collaborate with Google (and its competitors) – to compose intelligent and relevant analytical enquiries that can be run by Google (as a service, albeit commandeered by the Government) to help solve the DoJ’s problem.

Of course Google is an interested party in the outcome of the DoJ’s deliberations, but does engaging it as a trusted partner in the analysis really increase its ability to bias the outcome in a self-interested way? And if it provides knowledge and metadata services rather than raw data, this might mitigate the threat to its position as a trusted custodian of personal search records?