Meetings in Japan

When I travel, I like to meet with government officials around the world to talk about strategy and policy issues around science, technology, innovation, and related subjects.  So, on my trip to Japan to attend the US - Japan Innovation Summit, I took the opportunity to meet with Japanese government officials to discuss these matters. 

Given the rate and pace of advances in IT, there has been plenty to talk about -- more than at any time I can recall since I have been holding such meetings.  Many of my meetings with both businesses and governments since the Internet era was born ten years ago, have focused on the increasing importance of the Internet, open standards, community-based initiatives like Linux and Grid, and more recently, the evolution toward collaborative innovation.      

But more and more, the focus of the conversation is not on the actual technologies and standards used to build the open infrastructures that enable collaborative innovation -- which for the most part are going on relatively well. Rather, we're talking more about how we can leverage these open infrastructures to make significant progress in addressing problems of national and global importance. That has certainly been the case here in Japan.

For example, how can we help develop health care infrastructure that links physicians, patients, hospitals, insurers and everyone else involved to be able to provide the kind of high-quality, efficient medical services that every country is seeking?  How can we enable the creation of business process infrastructures to provide services of all kinds to small and mid-size businesses, where so much of the job creation and innovation takes place, so they can better compete with, as well as become suppliers and customers of, large enterprises?  How can we build disaster management infrastructures to be able to anticipate and respond better to what we saw we saw with Hurricane Katrina, last year's South Asian tsunami, or the 1995 Kobe earthquake?  And in general, how can we take advantage of the Internet and the powerful collaborative infrastructures we can create around it to make businesses and nations more productive and efficient -- and more democratic, collaborative and creative?

I tell them in our conversations that the really hard problem is increasingly the creation of open standards at the business level. We need to be able to exchange documents and information of all sorts; to standardize business processes where there is no reason for them to be different; and to link those processes and information together flexibly, both within the business and across businesses in an economy. You need IT products, services and infrastructures, but increasingly those are in pretty good shape compared to the ad-hoc nature of the applications and processes above them. It is still very difficult to integrate the crazy quilt of business process silos that have evolved over many years, let alone to change them quickly and flexibly in response to market conditions and external events.  That is why we need to apply science and engineering in the design, building and deployment of these end-to-end business and societal (e.g., health care, disaster management) solutions. Otherwise, their complexity and cost will be major impediments to progress. 

I told the government officials I met with in Tokyo that enabling such a business process revolution is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities we face in the 21st century. This is particularly important for the more advanced countries like the US and Japan. They must focus on high-value products, services and solutions based on continuous innovation, since they cannot compete on low-cost labor.  Close collaboration among business, academia and government will be necessary to address these really important and difficult challenges.  I hope my meetings in Japan can be of help in making this happen.

Comments

[Antony Alappatt]

I agree with you. The business process revolution is one of the greatest challenges. This has been a issue i have been pondering for the last few years (After a very challenging ERP implementation). I have come to a conclusion or opinion that we are in this situation because of the way we have approached computing. The business process is about coordination and hence we should be using coordination/communication as the primitive rather than algorithm. What do you think?

[Irving Wladawsky-Berger]

Antony, I could not agree more. The Internet style of computing is all about composition, coordination and , communications, which is why it is so flexible. The business applications that implement business processes have been written in "classic" programming styles, which are way too monolithic and static. The move to Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services promises to let us decompose business processes into modular components, which can then be composed using the Internet style of building systems. That would then make designing and changing processes much more flexible than the situation today.

[Antony Alappatt]

I would like to advance it one more level deeper. My belief is that SOA and Web Services are a good way to tie to existing computing infrastructure. Shouldn't we even change the way we look at programming. Instead of using algorithms to code business process why don't we use interactions as the basic fundamental. I.e composing interactions as the fundmental rather than composing algorithms.Create process by composing interactions rather than algorithms. I thihk there is already mathematics which do this.