My last post on dematerialization dealt with developments suitable for experienced engineers, but Bug Labs wants to broaden that to include consumers:

Because everything we’re doing is open source, you are free to make it perfect yourself. You want to change something? Go right ahead. And when you do, we’re hoping you share your improvement with everyone else so we all benefit. It’s why we call our work community electronics instead of simply consumer electronics. We, Bug Labs, don’t own the keys to your satisfaction, you do. And this, in our humble opinion, is how it should be.

Bug Blogger: Worth a Thousand Words

via Futurismic and TechCrunch

Product Lifecycle Managment and Engineering Systems(ES) are key components of Rhythmeering. Already a major force in engineering systems, Siemens purchase of the world’s leading PLM vendor UGS moves us all further down the road to Rhythmeering.

The acquisition also clearly sets a new agenda for the entire PLM industry. Customers across manufacturing and process industries will now able to benefit from the integration of the physical world, through Siemens’ leading automation design and production technology, and the virtual world, through UGS PLM Software’s leading factory design, product design and digital collaboration software.”

Press Release: Siemens Acquires UGS(emphasis mine)

So what’s the next step along this road? In a word - storytelling. PLM and ES have come from and remain largely focused on products manufactured from bulk materials. The growing role of software has shifted this somewhat towards bits, but these bits are still mainly about material processing. Products are created to play some part in human activities which are best described by stories. Besides, as noted in the Roots of Hardware, dematerialization is reducing the amount of bulk material in products. Nanotechnology is accelerating dematerialization. In addition other “products”(services, media, financial) and human activities(arts, sports) are already dematerialized. By design, Rhythmeering integrates storytelling processes at a fundamental level in ways not found in PLM or ES.

Although Wal-Mart’s supply chain driven vision of RFID isn’t evolving quite as planned

That’s not stopping people from coming up with useful implementations for the tiny tags

Futurismic: RFID - bad for businesses, but great for beaches

For all of it’s resources, Wal-Mart apparently doesn’t have the rhythmeering or even engineering systems expertise to effectively help the ecosystem grow. Understanding the role of participants would allow Wal-Mart to have a greater influence by interacting with companies outside of their immediate supply chain who can contribute to the health of the ecosystem. The RFID ecosystem is much larger than Wal-Mart or the DOD.

Although compliance with Wal-Mart, the DOD, and the Metro Group (in Europe) is still the driving force behind RFID usage, closed-looped applications such as tracking at the pallet, case and item levels is gaining. “The business case and value proposition for RFID is being realized across many types of organizations.”

Industry Week

“The RFID market is poised for stronger growth during 2007 and 2008 due to end users’ increased acceptance of RFID as a valuable tool to increase efficiency in a number of applications,” says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Brendon Ouimette. “Asset management, inventory management, and work in process visibility applications will require the type of data management capabilities that RFID middleware provides.

Business Intelligence Network

• Ignorance Does Not Mesh
• Duke’s Virtual Forest
• Paint Jam
• Musical Mesh In Second Life

In The Roots of Hardware and elsewhere, I’ve spoken about the software-hardware relationship from a bird’s-eye view, but it can be helpful to zoom in a bit to see what’s important about the relationship. Ice and water are made of the same chemical compound - H2O, but in different states. One could cook or wash with ice cubes but things won’t work out as well as with water. Similarly, it would be ineffective to store perishable food in water. Hardware and software are both made from the same mathematical elements - boolean logic, but in different states. Hardware is fast but inflexible. Software has unlimited flexibility but runs more slowly. It wouldn’t be wise to program a payroll system into hardware because requirements can change. 3D graphics software without hardware assistance runs very slowly. I should note that a short but very powerful book - The Pattern on the Stone demystifies computers making it possible for anyone, regardless of technical background/aptitude to understand the basic inner workings of computing.

In our bodies ice is non-existent. Throughout the ecosystems we typically frequent each day, liquid water is more abundant and useful than ice. The same should be true of software and hardware but today’s hardware dominates the information ecosystem. This prematurely crystallized software frequently serves as an impediment to innovation.

Hardware is really just software crystallized early. It is there to make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused low-level techniques and excessive optimization to hold back progress in program design. … In short, most hardware designs today are just re-optimizations of moribund architectures.

Alan Kay: The Early History of Smalltalk

Read the rest of this entry »

Simplicity through consistency. Collaboration in context. Agility through transparency… Jazz is about helping people work together to build software more effectively, while making the software development experience more fun!

Jazz is a joint project between IBM Rational and IBM Research to build a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform for seamlessly integrating tasks across the software lifecycle.

IBM Jazz 

 See also CNET coverage

In a rapidly changing marketplace, customers aren’t always able to articulate clearly their wants and needs; even when they can, you may not have time to analyze their input and then design and offer a solution. Even with the best strategic planning and business intelligence, competitors can appear on the scene at any time and disruptive technologies can surface. Sustaining success is an open-ended process, not a project to be completed. To maintain your success, you need to interpret the participants and conditions of the ecosystem around you.

The manager of the interpretive organization needs to act less like an engineer and more like the leader of a jazz combo. Diverse components need to be brought together – musicians, instruments, solos, themes, tempos, an audience – but their roles and their relationships are changing all the time. The goal is not to arrive at a fixed and final shape, but to channel the work in a way that both influences and fulfills the listener’s – the customer’s expectations. The interpretive manager, unlike the analytical manager, embraces ambiguity and improvisation as essential to innovation. She seeks openings, not endings.

Interpretive Management
Harvard Business Review March-April 1998

Two keys to interpreting are to be able to identify and optimize critical transitions and to identify and synchronize with the rhythms of your business.
Transitions

The points at which businesses move from one thing – product, season, advertising campaign, development project – to another are incredibly complex junctures. They typically involve large numbers of people who either never work together or, perhaps worse, have worked together but not always cooperatively. Because of their relative infrequency (and often their lack of regularity or periodicity), managers have little or no training to deal with them and fewer opportunities to learn from experience how to manage them. Communication falters. Missteps occur.

In a March-April 1998 article from Harvard Business Review, the effect of handling a transition well or poorly was summed up nicely:

When transitions are poor, businesses lose position, stumble, and fall behind. In contrast, companies that manage by time pacing learn to choreograph important transitions - and to shorten the time it takes to execute them.

Dealilng with transitions benefits greatly from certain aspects of the jazz ensemble paradigm, as that same article continues:

The best transitions do more than simply take a company from point A to point B. Managers can actually use these transitions to learn, reflect, change direction, and accomplish other goals.
Harvard Business Review March-April 1998
Time Pacing: Competing In Markets That Won’t Stand Still

Taken from Jazz and the Future of Global E-Commerce

See also recent posts - Business Mesh on my other blog and the Simulations Factor here.

An application of the Rhythmeering Simulations factor can be seen in IBM’s effort to improve efficiency through Business Process Management(BPM). IBM is deploying a game to help employess learn BPM:

“To get business and IT people (to understand BPM), you need to look at a simulator or game. It’s the way people learn today–it has to be visual and they want to have fun. And the businesspeople said they like to compete,” Carter said.

IBM simulates business software in 3D game

This game doesn’t appear to be deeply integrated with their BPM offering but that’s clearly the direction we’re heading in.  Csven Johnson provides a glimpse of the possibilities

Imagine if IBM were to show a demo dealing with the process for developing a real, manufacturable product, and then at the end, the player could fab the product at home… or maybe at their local Kinko’s.

Take it a step further and have participants send their real, assembled prototypes in for judging and use either the virtual or the real model (or both) to generate marketing materials (e.g. machinima commercials). The whole package could then be evaluated and maybe the winner has a real product developed from their concept.

… There are so many possibilities almost within reach that when it hits, it’ll be as different to what we know today as cell phones were unthinkable to people in the 70’s.

reBang: Innov8 IBM’s Business Game

“What’s interesting to us is how this works in cycles,” said Leigh. “Advanced graphics/simulation research resulted in today’s gaming technology. A lot of the virtual reality techniques we now take for granted in game systems like Nintendo Wii or immersive environments like Second Life came out of labs like EVL. Now next generation gaming technology is stimulating new applications for advanced graphics/simulation research that can benefit gaming as well as other fields.”

UIC News Release