Advantages of having a business component-level blueprint of all public services.

Sheri Loessl on the IBM Blueworks collaboration site pointed out the value of having your government blueprinted as though it was one large business enterprise.

Having a holistic view of the business of government will aid government leaders in their strategic thinking, and in decision making on initiatives or programs that must span multiple agencies or governmental jurisdictions. Having a unifying master business model of all areas of government, can help government officials to 1) identify opportunities to realize efficiencies, 2) deliver programs and services more effectively and innovatively, 3) identify and align roles and responsibilities to enhance collaboration across government (and beyond) and; 4) reduce time-to-service. The ability to look across program area or jurisdictions and find areas where sharing services and collaboration for better outcomes can be realized.

For all those working as enterprise architects in the public sector, there are benefits that can readily be realised from this approach.

• Don't have to reinvent the processes of government for each department or agency (there is also commonality across systems of government - Westminster, Federal ...)
  
• Goals and measures can be consistently applied from top to bottom

Lets get out there and share or borrow these organisational components before re-inventing the wheel ourselves.

Smart Meter Privacy Issue

For the ultimate monitoring of your home life consider the humble electricity meter now being updated to the internet age. This post covers the issue in some detail. Smart meters, like other devices that are associated with what you do, have the underlying privacy genie that , once out of the bottle, will be a devil to get back in.

Petabytes for your datacentre

This from Backblaze takes me back a few years when I had to contribute to a cabinet paper to plan for the purchase of a new disk drive (just one and well less than a gigabyte!).
There is a neat chart demonstrating the difference in cost between what you pay for raw disk units at your mail-order supplier and storage as a consumable. How does a pile of disk drives  at us$81,000 become a staggering us$2.8million from EMC or Amazon?
There is also a how-to which is complete down to the rubber bands needed to damp the drive vibration so I expect my geek son to be warming his flat with one of these.

Locational Privacy

EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has published a great article covering the implications that location-aware services and technology have on privacy.

Transit passes and access cards

Another broad area of application is for passcards and devices
allowing access to protected areas; for instance, passcards which allow
access to bike lockers near train stations, or cards which function as
a monthly bus pass. A simple implementation might involve an RFID card
reporting that Bob has checked his bike into or out of the storage
facility (and deducts his account accordingly), or equivalently that
Bob has stepped onto the bus (and checks to make sure Bob has paid for
his pass). This sort of scheme might put Bob at risk.

A better approach would involve the use of recent work on anonymous credentials.
These give Bob a special set of digital signatures with which he can
prove that he is entitled to enter the bike locker (i.e. prove you're a
paying customer) or get on the bus. But the protocols are such that
these interactions can't be linked to him specifically and moreover
repeated accesses can't be correlated with one another. That is, the
bike locker knows that someone authorized to enter has come by, but it can't tell who it was, and it can't tell when this individual last came by. Combined with electronic cash, there are a wide-range of card-access solutions which preserves locational privacy.

The time has come for the unnecessary collection of personally identifying information by transport operators to stop, permanently addressing this aspect of locational privacy.

This subject surfaced briefly with the introduction of the Snapper transport payment card in Wellington but was not addressed practically by the transport operators who appear to rely on assertions of the security associated with the device rather than prevent the undesirable uses that the gathered information may be put to.

The technology required for anonymous credentials is now practical. Legislators and privacy guardians should move from the wording policy statements to demanding that personally identifying information is not collected unnecessarily.

Architects work to the Maker's Schedule

Paul Graham's essay on the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule provides food for thought for those of us that are expected to come up with ideas to deadlines.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. .... But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

So manager-type, you have asked the enterprise architect to come up with a new vision and roadmap for the business and technical architecture ... does it really help to haul them into adhoc meetings at short notice to ask about your current pain? Try cornering them at the coffee machine instead!

Drools + BPMN 2.0

An encouraging announcement from DROOLS indicating commitment to BPMN 2.0 at notation and xml representation level. This is how standards adoption should work ... do not wait for the tedious ratification and adoption votes; commit to the standard (whatever it will be); implement as it gels so that people can get used to it; fine tune implementation to standard as it gets to the ratified state.
I would put in a plea for a formal compliance document, stating what part of BPMN 2.0 is not yet implemented, so that early adopters do not waste time trying to decide whether it is the implementation or user's dumb specification of a business process that is at fault.

Seastead - an Ark for Tokelau

I returned from a few days off-net to a barrage of articles and emails that I really should get down to but a couple came together so appropriately that they interested me far more than the  dry stuff about business process that I usually have to force into the brain.

In a well thought out article in the NZ Listener  , Ruth Laugesen describes the plight of the Tokelau islanders in the face of climate change.

New Zealand these days, idle conversation can turn to climate
change and what it might hold for our children and grandchildren. In
Tokelau, which has been settled for 1000 years, such conversations are
almost too difficult to have.

“At the end of the day we will be
the first people to go underneath the water,” says Toloa, the ulu, or
head of Tokelau’s governing council.

“It could happen at any
time. There could be one cyclone where the whole island could go
underneath the water. It’s quite difficult and it’s quite painful to try and
accept the fact that one day we may wake up and we are underwater,”
says Toloa, on the phone from Apia, Samoa, where Tokelau has its
administrative base.“So it’s not a good feeling. We’ve heard the
Al Gore presentation and know all [about] global warming and all that
kind of stuff,” he says.

Tokelau, population 1416, is a
self-governing territory of New Zealand and a forgotten frontline for
climate change. Two other Pacific atoll micro-states, Kiribati and
Tuvalu, have become international symbols as some of the first nations
that could become inviable as a result of climate change. But Tokelau,
as a low-lying atoll state, is just as vulnerable.

New Zealand’s
history as a tinpot colonial power means Tokelau’s people are New
Zealand citizens, have a New Zealand flag and, bizarrely, observe
Waitangi Day as their national holiday. In Wellington, the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs has an Administrator for Tokelau. This year New Zealand
will give Tokelau about $17 million in aid.

Coincidentally, an article from Inhabitat, described the current thinking about The Seasteading Institute whose modest mission is 

To further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous
ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social
systems.

Seastead have this visionary approach to above the waves living with a fairly modest $5/sqm target.

On the one hand, we have pacific islands, atolls actually, and their populace disappearing beneath the ocean. On the other, a plan for establishing communities living on the ocean.

Although the Seasteaders aim to avoid problems with territorial authorities by moving around on the high seas, Tokelau and other island groups could utilise the same technology to address the rising seas that will eventually engulf them. Even awash, the atolls would provide protection from extreme waves. With mobility a design  feature of Seasteads, getting out of the way of cyclones would be a benefit sought by many pacific islands.

Why even think about spending large amounts of money on keeping the islanders in the middle of the ocean rather than relocating them to South Auckland? Well NZ does claim a large Exclusive Economic Zone around Tokelau which would be hard to sustain if they are abandoned.