Ola Sundvall

Category: Digitalization

  • Web3 and all of my questions, #3

    Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

    There is obviously a dividing line between integrity and authenticity when we talk about creating value based on Web3 technology. I’ll see if I wind up my own tail in trying to elaborate on this (for me) quite unclear topic.

    Cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers, DApps etc. built on a blockchain has this quite odd property – they leave the users information wide open for all who look into the database of the blockchain. This is by design and quite inevitable as I have understood it, and it was revealed for quite some years ago as a part of research written about in Wired (it’s a really well-written long read, highly recommended for those looking for an introduction to the crypto world).

    This reveals a conflict between wanting to claim authenticity and wanting to have integrity. I visited a webinar a couple weeks ago where a Swedish web3 community had invited to a session around web3 application for corporates. I realized there and then that one of the first questions a buyer representative on an enterprise is going to ask is “how does your product/technology comply with GDPR*?” And I also realized that if you don’t have a clear answer to give instantly on that question, the buyer’s not gonna buy (or even consider to further think about it. Said and done, I thought I should be the smart one in the virtual room and ask about the lecturer’s view on this. And yes, it became clear for me that this isn’t an obvious thing to solve. You can of course build protection mechanisms in your overarching logic, but it isn’t necessarily an easy task, since this mechanism need to follow your info through the blockchains journey through the nodes.

    Another question to think about in this context is then – is it even desirable? Do we really want to hide our personal data that we have uploaded in the blockchain? Isn’t this one of the purposes with the cryptographic technology – to prove that we really are the one we claim to be? And could it even be that we need to redefine what personal data is, when web3 use gain a wider traction, or is it even like personal data is personal data covered by GDPR* in one application and not in another? Is maybe GDPR* not be applicable in certain future use case scenarios? In some use cases it might be more important for me to prove my authenticity than having my integrity secured, or?

    This leads me to an analogy regarding surveillance and me being the one saying “I don’t care ‘cuz I have nothing to hide”. Could it be really, really bad in a long term to claim authenticity through blockchain-ish footprint from a surveillance perspective, if the surveillance structures start to use my wide-spread, wide-open authenticity information against me?

    A possible branch on this topic is to analyze fraudster scenarios and how to block them, a topic possibly being another factor the buyer of web3 development will ask questions around. Having preparations for this in a product development startup quickly becomes a hygiene factor in order to build trust towards the corporate user.

    *)GDPR here taken as an example of an extensive and very adopted regulatory framework, with the awareness of many other frameworks existing globally.

  • The ‘start from a blank paper’ curse

    It aint what you might believe at first – a super-trendy writing about how to start blogging. It’s far more boring than that. This piece could also be headlined with something like “How to overcome the lingual glitch between IT and the rest” (though I realize I don’t have any clear answers, after reviewing this mess).

    This reasoning might seem a bit over-due, old school or even obsolete in the era of furious Product-Management-with-an-agile-foundation, but it will never stop being relevant. Why? Because old truths are boring but often more persistent than we actually want them to be.

    I will elaborate on one of the most overlooked phenomena that has existed even since human started to build things that in some way does human work for her – namely managing of requirements. I find it kinda strange that this discipline so often is regarded as a certain discipline, hosted outside a production workflow och outside a development project and populated by specialists that is regarded as a really special sort of nerds. The competence field QA is also often perceived as a bit self-generating and my experience is that it often is slipping around above or around the project or maintenance teams it is supposed to be integrated in*, similar to “the process team” that makes process management a work on its own merits, often regarded as self-generating as well.

    From time to time I have been involved in discussions with business representants and in the context of trying to understands the needs and what problem they want IT to solve. Many times we have been sitting with an existing solution that fits the needs ok but not fully, and trying to improve functionality already decided and designed by a third part, the vendor of a system, may it be a cots, may it be quite a specialized product (in earlier days often named service, but product is a more popular term nowadays, yet another thing to explore in a future post…).

    A repeating thing that has showed in these contexts is that the business side often have difficulties in formulating requirements so they are easy to digest for the IT people trying to technically solve the issues. Once we took it so far that we arranged educations for the business stakeholders, eg. mostly process leaders (might today be replaced by Product Owners), where we let our very dedicated and skilled requirements analyst teach requirements management to the participants. This turned out quite well for some time (not that long that we’d wished though), and lead to a little bit deeper understanding on the business side for the need of a common language when having the specifying dialogues.

    BUT – the error I think we made then was to assume the starting point too late than what we should have** – because we didn’t explore the need for the requirement to occur in the first place. Business needs is the focal point one should start looking into instead of starting a change or request journey with trying to state a requirement that might be quite intangible if the needs aren’t clarified. I have seen agile profiles in different feeds emphasizing the need discussion, but I have never seen it being more than a fragment in the never ending flood of talk-about-how-to-work platitudes. This should be a success factor in both easing the need for translation but also a possible lever for the business side to actually take more active part in the early phase of a change tickets journey in the code-crunching machinery. It has also the potential of easing the often (always) cumbersome with prioritizing a backlog, since it should be much more obvious how needs are weighed towards each other than bad formulated user stories or features with unclear business value. It also has the potential to give a clearer definition of done, if you originate from the need instead of a lingo-feature description.

    BUT – isn’t this already what all agile how to’s and agile descriptions always have told us in DoD and DoR’s explanations??

    OF COURSE – I’m not trying to come up with some new fresh ideas here, I’m just (as always) trying to point out what already exists.

    BUT – try, just try to give a business representative the explanation of DoD found here of even DoR found here, and you will get this “do I dare to question this mumbo-jumbo without being classified as an idiot” face in return. We really do need to be able to talk about needs (and in second-hand requirements) with the business side with being so centric about the IT-side lingo which is held so dearly by too many.

    Tying the ropes:
    Regarding the headline of this post: I somehow feel that I need to get back to this in order to tie this story together. One of the most common and I guess classic mistakes organizations do when it comes to management of requirements is the silly “You just can start from a blank paper” prompt, given by IT to business. It is often ditched quite quickly, since everybody knows that they need some kind of facilitation or guiding, because the present state is needed as input value, as well as different conditions and constraints that limits what actually is possible to describe if the user story is supposed to be meaningful and valuable.

    For reference:
    The explanation of what a user story is supposed to be is actually more or less good, but often overlooked and not fully embraced (or understood, or correct interpreted) by all in the processes, making it necessary to reflect over when uncertainties are spotted.

    To be continued:
    *) The QA experts should have more of a more tangible, facilitating role in the organizations they serve than they have, since their traces most often is a trove of hard-to-answer questions in the WoW-section of the endless Confluence library – for every team to invent and solve independently.

    **) This urges me to write about the real life cycle of a change or new-feature ticket in a teams workflow. Will do this as soon as possible.

  • Web3 and all of my questions

    Photo by GuerrillaBuzz on Unsplash

    I tried to dive in to the web3 universe, as I for quite a long time have heard that web3 is the future, that it can change how we live and work and that it is important for everyone to learn more about this. Until now I have bought this wholeheartedly, but also been wondering a bit why this doesn’t seem to lift off. Here in this first pondering I try to sort a bunch of reflections and questions from the more technical point of view.

    I can’t refrain from comparing the web3 ideas with a concept that maybe became more rebellious than it deserved – but it was founded on an idea of true decentralization – namely the BitTorrent protocol. Some of you might think that I’m totally out in the wild, but I’m fully aware of that BitTorrent is a file transfer protocol, and that web3 is more of a way to verify transactions that represent different purposes and has the potential to serve an infinite number of applications, it’s only the imagination that sets limits for what you actually can use web3 for. My comparison is around the decentralization idea and the absence of a centralized ownership and with that the following of one-sided determination of terms (the one who takes the (financial) risks is also the one who owns the terms).

    When individuals started to share big files with the BitTorrent protocol, nodes were growing like fungi out of the internet soil – it grew rapidly to a pirate-ish life style where the most credited were the one who hoarded hard disks and seeded like crazy, and the famous site Pirate Bay acted like a hub for a big part of this traffic – though there were a lot of sites doing the same, some with more specialized themes regarding content. I’m targeting the nodes in this comparison, since they were truly decentralized and also anonymous, since it was the indexing site, acting as a central hub and search spot collecting torrent files and in this architecture being the lever for increased and continued sharing. Nowadays torrent sharing is still active, but maybe more in the open source community where operating systems and large program files can be distributed in a way that optimizes net load and utilization.

    A weakness in this model was that not so popular files could take ages to download due to too few seeders, maybe also with too poor upload speeds. This revealed a lack of robustness – what happens when too many nodes shut down for whatever reasons and the seeders numbers decline? The availability of the asset is suddenly jeopardized, and there is no one who grants availability – what to do then? In the pirating context it was law enforcers that chased down the model to decline in parallell with the development of streaming services, making the decentralized model more centralized and more web2-ish, but the reasoning about robustness could and should be applied on the web3 idea as well in order to reflect over success factor that need to be in place somehow.

    Decentralized infrastructure – how to reach a sufficient level of perseverance, so a sufficient level of trust can be reached? What criteria do a currency need to fulfill in order to be regarded as perseverant and trustworthy?
    Which fundamental criteria is possible to set aside if one tries to imagine an existence beyond our present economic model* that postulates eternal growth, with return on investment as norm for success?

    Blockchain technology on a node published on the internet isn’t as easy to set up for a private person as a BitTorrent seed, It requires a database and some code that can do the work blockchain nodes do (where verifying transaction data is core business). Therefore we shouldn’t expect everyone who has a computer on an internet connection to be an enthusiast in hosting Blockchain nodes. This instead leads to an emergence of startups, offering robust and reliable blockchain support as a service. And this in turn, leads me to turn the page to the next post, pondering on the economical and business model aspects of web3.

    *) I imagine our present economic model as having two pillars, where one is exchanging time and effort with currencies or money, the other is investing in ideas in order to make the value of the investment grow. More about this in a coming post

  • If this is my major differentiator, I’m getting depressed…

    As years goes by you recognise different patterns in your life, given that you take your time and/or have the ability to reflect over which impact your behaviour have on the surroundings, and what this give you in some form of a “brand” or which expectations people might have on you.

    Your impact on others is usually composed by a number of subtle and more or less small elements that might be hard to wash out or even recognise in the daily clutter and distraction-filled existence called life – or maybe the part limited to living, weekday, whatever. Some people also define parts of these patterns as reputation, as for example Per Frykman in his unremitting propagation for the importance of your professional reputation, which I support wholeheartedly.

    A couple of years ago I actually ordered an analysis of my Professional Rep by this guy, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. This scariness told me quite a lot about my self confidence. I was quite affected by the feedback people gave. My fears when starting the survey was pendulating somewhere between getting really bad reviews and a compact silence in return, but I got an overwhelmingly positive picture of my reputation as a professional peer and have since then had that message in my tag line everywhere that i can possibly imagine.

    Now is a time when I really find it necessary to take command over my business and really try to deal with my own value proposition and this isn’t so easy as one can believe, but it sure is a healthy clarifying process to go through.

    And when I grind this in my mind, I find one of the possibly not-so-wished elements that makes me ME… people often ask me for advice about this and that (I know I SHOULD bill more for this, but…) and I often find myself passing their wonderings on to the information Behemoth Of All Time – I Google. And I mean Google as a verb you know, not the sub-company of Alphabet.

    Almost as often as I Google on behalf of others I wonder why people isn’t capable of googling themselves? I’m thinking about adding a title to my list of skills – “professional Googler”. It has been like this for many years and I consider myself quite nerdy when coming to digital adoption and this whole pack of modern attributes. The somewhat strange thing is that I’m totally illiterate when it comes to for instance asking SQL-questions into a database, though I have somewhat figured out how to suck out information of systems when real need has arisen and no one has been nearby to ask for support.

    One of the things I don’t understand about this is why people never learn how to get real benefit from their gadgets. Everyone of us can go bananas over some more or less stupid writings on the internet, but to actually fact-check (or find a tutorial of some sort, or to, digitally supported, solve their own daily issues) seem to be totally out of reach for many. How can that be?

    Meanwhile I sit here and wonder if my key differentiator is that I’m a really skilled googler – therefore considered a nice, wise guy that people go to with their questions… is my true title maybe “Google broker” then? Or should I call myself “Search Engine(er)”…? Or maybe I should study to become a priest?

    How du you differentiate yourself in order to succeed in business?

  • En vanlig morgon i tjänstesamhället

    Tisdag morgon, på väg till bussen. Kommer på att jag glömde köpa månadskort igår kväll, på sista dagen för det gamla färdbeviset – slarver.

    Jaja, kanske tobaksaffären (eller kallas en sån Spel & Godis nuförtiden?) är öppen, annars får man satsa en slant på en SMS-biljett. Affären-som-tillhandahåller-färdbevis är naturligtvis stängd, mot busshållplatsen. Jag köper min biljett i god tid så jag slipper stå med skammens rodnad och fippla under bussfärden. Får ett SMS i retur – hmm:

    “Köpet misslyckades. Kontrollera dina kortuppgifter på ditt sms-konto på https://sl.klarna.se, byt till faktura eller registrera ett annat kort. Vänliga hälsningar, Klarna.”

    Visst faen, jag har ju bytt ut kortet som är kopplat till mitt SL-konto. Klickar på länken i SMS-et, går in på kontot, följer instruktionerna. Går ej att radera kortet i och med att valet “fakturabetalning” som man måste falla tillbaka på, “inte är tillgängligt för närvarande”.

    Vad gör jag nu? Kallt om fingrarna, måste fly in i värmen, ringer SL Center. Inser plötsligt vad det är som genererar hatet i samhället – det måste vara alla käcka autosvar som man får i örat och robotar som man ska prata med för att beskriva sin fråga, samt förvarningen om att jag kan komma att bli uppringd av deras automatiska kundundersökning…

    Mitt ärende ligger utanför SL’s kompetens- och ansvarsområde, så jag blir vidarekopplad till Klarnas Servicedesk, ånyo med tillhörande käcka bonding-fraser från roboten. Här sitter en mer tekniskt bevandrad handläggare som faktiskt verkar ha behörigheter att göra något. Under den relativt långa tid som åtgärden tar bekantar jag mig med appen jag inte velat använda – SL’s egen app för biljettköp m.m. Här ser jag att det finns en inbyggd logik för kortbyte – men varför har jag inte börjat använda den appen…?? Jag vågar inte göra något då Klarna är och rotar i back end bland mina parametrar.

    SÅ PLÖTSLIGT – är det någon som hojtar till: “Nu har jag tagit bort ditt kort, det händer direkt, nu kan lägga in ett nytt”. Tack för det, samtalet avslutas. Noterar i kontoinställningarna att mitt telefonnummer tagits bort från SL-kontot, inte kortnumret. Knappar in mitt nummer och se där, kort- och telefonnummer är fortfarande sammankopplat.

    Jag går då in i SL-appen, tar bort mitt gamla kort och lägger in det nya. Köper biljett i SL-appen, åker till stan, cirka 25 min senare än planerat.

    Var kan man dra för lärdomar av detta? Jo, till exempel att

    • många till synes triviala tjänster i vissa ögonblick är väldigt viktiga för att tillvaron ska fungera.
    • t.o.m. en sån som jag, som alltid förespråkar tillämpning av ny teknik och gärna testar allt som går att testa gällande nya tjänster, har fixa idéer om att hänga kvar vid det gamla.

    Min slutsats är klar: om det kommer ett nytt sätt att göra något på, PROVA. Den nya designen är faktiskt avsedd att underlätta mer än den gamla! Håll inte fast vid det gamla bara för att du inte vill prova nytt. GLÖM INTE BORT DET NU!