Management
Quanta Value Network℠(QVN)

I am taking control ... the 'Personal Digital Framework™ (PDF)'

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

I am taking control ... the 'Personal Digital Framework™ (PDF)' 'QVN is a new set of architecture guidelines and approach to business model design and transformation that focuses on the positioning and linking together of services within a more open, collaborative and boundaryless digital world, supported by three foundational frameworks' Looking at things from my perspective and understanding my expectations! The framework defines logical services that sit between the needs of the customer (the individual) and the actual services being provided by a wide range of vendors and companies looking to improve meaningful and trusted relationships with their end users. Think of PDF as a new world of requirements and services with the individual at the center. The PDF looks at the emerging convergence of digital assets from an end user point of view. This could be thought of as a user centric view covering connectivity and integration of all the smart devices and smart applications that the consumer has today. In addition, it looks at the issues concerning the data/information that people have at their disposal and the changes in architecture design that will enable more self-control of the same. The PDF has seven elements and is still evolving. its individual elements have been around for some while but in various fragmented pieces - such as home security systems, intelligent cars, smart phones, wearable medical devices, social networks, on-line shopping, etc. New innovation is still expanding into this framework such as the 'Internet of Things' appliances, more wearable technology, linkages between this and say connected cities, and so on. The framework supports both an individual device/element as well as a customer holistic view. The world is becoming much more consumer centric where customers themselves define their own personal value pathway scenarios (more a pull model than the existing push way).The PDF will look at this new world of more consumer centricity and personalized services with higher trusted expectations through meaningful experiences. The framework below describes the high level seven elements for consumer centric architecture design thinking - more detailed information is available and will be subjects of future posts from Vincigravitas. 1. My apps: This covers the expanding range of personal applications that are available for the many devices: smart phone, tablet/notebook, personal computer, car, and logic that will be evolving for other smart appliances - such as your domestic appliances. Here the thing to consider, when looking at the QVN approach, is a need to really look at these applications and define what are the actual services they are providing? How will these link to an orchestrated value pathway? What integration is required to an organizations Enterprise Digital Framework? Here the choice to the consumer is vast and changing every day with high competition form 'like' applications/services. Who will win in this race to provide trusted applications? Some common categories include personal productivity and administration, social networking, news, port, local retail access, events/entertainment, travel, music, photography, media, education, utilities, etc. 2. My needs: Here the idea is that we will be moving from a push reactive experience from advertising to a push proactive (and somewhat incentivized) experience satisfying needs (mostly in near real-time too). Today we have access to personal applications (see above) and windows into the internet world to find information for shopping, education, healthcare, and sports/events as examples. For each of these we can find huge amounts of information, but often now this is just too much information (even with syndication - but that is usually pre-defined not real-time). What if we could just list our needs and get the quanta service to come to us? As an example, if on a business trip in a new city and in the evening you fancied eating a nice Italian pasta dish. Today you could spend 15 to 20 minutes searching and accessing the various applications and information channels and then having to make a decision and arrange a reservation. What if you could simply say I need pasta for one person at a time, date and location near to your hotel (GPS)? The let the service/bidding come to you with whatever special offers they may wish to add. 3. My profiles: Today we are required to have multiple identities and passwords - but these are being requested by the vendor service applications. It is becoming a nightmare to keep track of all your identities and passwords and this is now leading to a federated approach - for example the idea of signing onto a new application using your credentials from another common one you use. But each vendor has your details rather than you control your own identity centrally and let the vendors come into your world to authenticate. We also want to explore the idea of having multiple 'avatar' identities. You may be a father in the morning (wanting father type services), then moving into a fireman in the day (needing services for your working identity), then transferring into a tennis player in the evening (now needing sports-person type services), a very simple example, etc. Your identity at any given time, place, context describes the opportunity for quanta service linking - so why do we get labelled with a single identifier (like social security number)? How many different hats does a person wear? 4. My devices: The number and range of smart devices is growing exponentially. Think of this as the 'Internet of Things' for you! Today we have ways of individually looking at each device and its intelligence maturity. This is a complex personal management issue. What if all the devices could interoperate within the PDP? When you enter the car it will access your diary (personal cloud based most likely), seek the meeting address, and negotiate local parking at dynamic pricing for the duration you need, then navigate you to your individually assigned parking space in time for your meeting (noticing real-time traffic conditions) - all without you needing to worry. Also the range of sport/medical devices will soon link directly with your insurance company and physician's office to allow better healthcare monitoring and more differential and competitive pricing of their quanta services. 5. My services: This focuses on the individual and their capabilities and skills. Here we can link to the quanta services the person is able to provide in which he/she specializes in. We may assume that today most people have single jobs that require 20% of the person's specialist skill - which results in some frustration when performing the other 80% commodity tasks. What if the person defines his/her quanta service areas and announces these to the market and awaits real time bids for those expert services? Hence the individual works at more 80% specialization across a number of companies. In essence each person becomes their own mini company. For this the QVN orchestration engine needs to be able to discover these skills and link them to scheduled quanta services - with dynamic availability pricing included. 6. My content: Another area that is more mature (but still very fragmented). Typically this covers storage for your documents, photographs, music, etc. But, what if the individual became much more responsible in the future for his/her own information (a trend that is growing). As an example, medical records, why should there be multiple copies of your medical information (or pieces of specific information) spread across many offices each of which holding the information in storage units (both cabinets and cloud) that are not readily accessible - say when an emergency occurs? Why shouldn't individuals themselves have their records and have the choice where and when this should be used? Also, why today when we move home do we have an admin nightmare telling many organizations about our new address? Why shouldn't their quanta services access your personal 'information as a service' address details (with allowed authorization and authentication)? 7. My people: This is about your personal relationships and the different types of relationships that you may have. Again today this is managed in a very fragmented way with often linkages to your friends repeated within many applications. Here we should start to look at the type of relationships we are involved in and what kind of quanta services may apply to each segmentation profile (family, friends, sports team-mates, etc.). An initial consideration may be across four levels: close family and friends (1 to 10 type relationship); your extended network (1 to 100 type relationship); common interest relationships (1 to 1,000 type relationship) and lastly more global network collaborations (1 to 10,000 type relationship). Looking at the seven in isolation is part of the PDF, but more importantly is the future architecture thinking of collaboration between the seven. So that if your personal wearable medical device 'Internet of Things' for you shows some emergency state then it can access your medical information and send directly to your physician and notify your family social network ...(one simple example of many). So, in the future, the personal architecture network needs are going to grow and become a little more complex - who will step up and be a technology vendor looking after the person at the center? What new technologies, standards and interfaces will be required to move in this direction? The aim being to use QVN thinking to describe the customer driven value pathway scenarios and architecture mini 3 month transformations to pragmatically deploy solutions within the PDF framework. Let me know if you/your business would like to join in! This is another post in a series of short publications that will dive deeper into the Quanta Value Network thinking - I hope you like and find it useful. More detailed papers describing each of the seven elements are planned for the future. Please let me know if you would like to continue discussions in these seven areas (either send me a personal message with your address or comment below). Thank you for your interest in this!