Transcript Strategic Outlook : Tactical Responses

Managing Collaboration
Effectively
Nick Bleech, Jericho Forum Board of Management
-with help from Will Harwood, University of Kent
- and Wikipedia!
Jericho Forum Annual Conference
22 April, 2008
A Jericho Forum ‘Work in Progress’
Introduction
• Collaboration: inter-working between people,
between systems
– Effective collaboration: advancing mutual objectives of the
collaborators
– Managing collaboration effectively: fostering and maintaining
the conditions for effective collaboration (e.g. trust and
security)
• Collaboration-Oriented Architecture (COA)’s
‘repositories’:
– COntrActs: capabilities - relationships - obligations
– REPutations: business events - outcomes - performance/
satisfaction of the COntrAct
• Collaboration viewed ‘memetically’
Security without trust
A
B
(request,claim,evidence)
e.g.
• A wants B to run a program P
• B only wants to run programs that it believes are safe
• request - run this program P
• claim C - it complies with your ‘safety policy’
• evidence - proof of P obeys C (testing = partial proof)
What is trust?
• A ternary relation: A trusts B for action C
– Trust is in the same category of concepts as knowledge and
belief
– To say I trust you is to assert a belief or knowledge about
your actions.
– Trust means that we believe a system maintains a property.
• Trust involves Risk in that you are handing over
control of your interests to another – it is used in
place of evidence for behaviour.
“Dispositional Trust” - willingness generally to trust
“Interpersonal Trust” - based on perceived qualities of the person/ thing being trusted
Transactional
Trust
Positive
Incentives
Social Trust
Negative
Incentives
Decision to
Trust
Rational-Legal
Traditional
Charismatic
Authority/Control
Dependency
“System/Environment Trust” - in things/processes
within which a trust relationship exists
“Dispositional Distrust” - willingness generally to
distrust
What is trust?
What is trust?
• The context for trust decisions
– Who to trust - identity
– Why to trust - entitlements, rights, permissions
– Experience/reputation, beliefs, and verifiability
• Security problems
– What to disclose in order to achieve a desired trust decision
(need to tell/ need to know)?
– What not to disclose e.g. to preserve privacy/anonymity?
– How to communicate and share knowledge in order to reach
the trust decision?
– How to capture and communicate experience to maintain
trust?
What is trust?
• If your interests encapsulate my interests then I will
trust you.
• Encapsulation: The realisation of your interests
necessarily leads to the realisation of my interests.
• To trust you, I need to believe that both:
– Your goals encapsulate my goals, and
– You are capable of realising your goals (may invoke
interpersonal and/or system/environment trust)
• Trust is (should be) used when providing evidence is
either not possible/feasible or very costly.
• Trust is (should be) rational.
(Federated) Security with
Trust
A
B
request
result
Bilateral evidence/proofs of behaviour replaced by “identity proofs”,
and “assertions” (claims) but trust in principals’ (agents’) behaviour
still needed
• A wants B to do C
• claims – I am A, I am B, A is permitted C at B, …
• evidence
• credentials for A, B
• delegation certificate for C is permitted for A at B
‘Traditional’ Trusted Third
Party (TTP)
A
B
Visa/MasterCard/…
• Works well in financial setting
• TTP is a Risk Absorber - really deferred trust
Problem
• Tension:
– e-business network effect and power of ‘mass collaboration’
(unorganized collaboration)
– Versus: the need to manage collaboration effectively
– Mass collaboration models look attractive, but don’t seem to
advance all parties’ objectives all of the time, e.g. trust and
security
• Existing TTP constructs are problematic:
– Pooled liability, architectural inflexibility
– “We don’t use a TTP in the ‘real world’, so why here, why
now?”
• What practices, structures and incentives need to be
resolved?
Why should I care?
• Real-world problem: many joint ventures, risk sharing
partnerships etc. prove difficult to manage
– Concepts, models, guidance needed
• Collaborations can (should) be of arbitrary span and
depth, so what hope for ‘e-collaborations’?
• Mass-collaboration gaining popularity in the e-world:
– Social networking, wikis etc.
– Social networks complement rather than replace more
traditional forms of interaction and social mechanisms (see
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody, 2008).
– So if we accept that trust and security are inherently
multifaceted, social networks can’t provide all the trust and
security we may ultimately need.
• COA can help
Genetic Viewpoint
• Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
popularized (and advanced) the genecentric view of evolution: ‘bodies are
the gene’s way of making more genes’
• Fundamental concepts here are
replicators and vehicles (survival
machines)
– Replicators include nucleic acids notably
DNA, which composes genes (base-pair
sequences)
– Vehicles include people’s bodies, dogs and
fruit flies
Genes in Action
• Kin selection
Genes in Action
• Kin selection
Genes in Action
• Kin selection
Genes in Action
• If a gene “knows” that another body
contains a copy of itself then it gets
equal benefit from helping the other
body reproduce (inclusive fitness)
Genes in Action
• If a gene “knows” that another body
contains a copy of itself then it gets
equal benefit from helping the other
body reproduce (inclusive fitness)
Altruism among Selfish Genes
• Dawkins established that mutual trust
among gene-copies can evolve thus
advancing the goal of inclusive fitness
• Thus genes can pursue non-selfish
survival strategies that still advance
selfish (to the gene) goals
• The way to see this is by considering
iterated prisoners’ dilemmas
Prisoners’ Dilemma
B
Co-operate
Co-operate
Defect
R,R
S,T
T,S
P,P
• Temptation
• Reward
• Punishment
• Sucker
A
Defect
T>R>P>S
Nash Equilibrium, worst mutual
outcome, but most logical in absence
of trust
Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma
• Robert Axelrod demonstrated that when various
strategies compete in repeated games of the PD, the
‘tit for tat’ strategy produces the best overall outcome:
– A: if B cooperated last time, cooperate this time; otherwise
defect
– Hence parties that can’t otherwise communicate can do so
through their actions, and past actions create a ‘shadow of
the future’: basis for trust
– Dawkins postulates that many genes preprogram this
strategy to maximise survival
• This also shows that interaction intensity tends to
generate more trusting behaviour.
• When thinking about trust and ‘trusting behaviour’,
iterated PDs help to uncover rational incentives.
Memetic Viewpoint
• Dawkins extended the replicator/vehicle paradigm as
a way to characterize evolutionary models of cultural
information transfer
– In this viewpoint, memes stand for ideas, concepts, patterns
of thought etc. located in the memory
• Memes may alternatively be thought of as observable
cultural artifacts and behaviours
– Some memeticists argue whether ideas are objectively
observable within the memory
– In semiotics, signs need to be communicated (copied) and
interpreted: memes gloss over the interpretation bit!
Memes in Action
• Memes, like genes, are copied with variation
and selection. Only some variants survive, so
memes (and hence human cultures) evolve.
– Unlike genetic (DNA) replication, meme replication
has a high chance of inducing mutations.
– Memes replicate by imitation, teaching and other
methods, and compete for space in our memories
and for a chance to be copied again.
• Large groups of memes that are copied and
passed on together are called co-adapted
(mutually reinforcing) meme complexes, or
memeplexes. E.g. religious ideas.
Memes Schmemes
• Is Memetics pseudo-science?
– Advocates point to promising predictive capabilities
• E.g. Jon Whitty’s Memetic model of Project
Management (PM): essentially self-serving, evolving
and designing organizations for its own purpose.
• So PM is a memeplex comprising the stories, rules
and norms of project practice and experience.
– Organizations believe projects evolve a sense of purpose
through their mission statements and explicit goals, but
these are often organization’s political compromises
– Similarly, projects are seen as superior problem-solving
tools, but PM lore focuses mostly on why projects fail not
why they succeed, which omits consideration of how else
‘success’ could be achieved.
Collaboration as Memeplex?
• Jon Whitty’s analysis of PM generates insights, so
what about collaboration?
• The ‘memetic’ viewpoint seeks to identify a
collaboration as a memeplex, and the elements that
COA defines/implies as memes
• In COA, we associate collaborations with
– COntrActs (a meme type)
– REputations (another meme type)
• Insight: view all three as ‘first class citizens’
• Insight: the architecture should foster ‘inclusive
fitness’ of its memes.
Towards Effective
Collaboration
• A standard component of corporate strategy is
organizational design (OD)
– As corporate strategy has evolved to embrace broader
goals, social outcomes, and stakeholder values, OD has
evolved too.
• Contemporary trends include:
–
–
–
–
Reinventing hierarchies
Project-oriented OD
Networks (small-world networks, a.k.a. clusters)
Guilds (Eli Lilly example)
• All these approaches seek to maximize effective
collaboration
New OD strengths/weaknesses
Type
Reinventing
hierarchies
Strength
Weakness
Expertise prized, e.g. Little control
research teams, jazz
bands
Remarks
A.k.a.
‘adhocracies’
Projectoriented
Flexible to focus on
Inappropriate for
clear goals over finite sustaining
durations
activities
Cf. Jon Whitty
critique
Networks
Flexible, durable,
multi-organizational
‘Small world’
networks
improve on ‘pure’
networks
Guilds
Combines features of Long term
networks and
cohesion?
adhocracies
Can be
swamped by
interactions, trust
may be shallow
Eli Lilly model
COA’s first class citizens
• Definition: in business terms a ‘repository’ is simply a
persistent and dependable record of facts
– COntrAct repository models ‘static’ bases for collaboration
– REputation repository models ‘dynamic’ collaboration
execution performance
• Implementation expected to be via ‘repository as a
service’ (RaaS), so capable of existing ‘in the cloud’
– In this model, the ‘TTP as intermediary’ vs. ‘we don’t do
business through TTPs’ tension is transformed.
– Tracking risk, reputation and the satisfaction of obligations
goes ‘into the cloud’
– TTP (now a ‘RaaS provider’) does not transfer or absorb
counterparty risk/ liability
Benefits
• Today, risk/reputation scores, audit trails etc., are:
–
–
–
–
After the fact, low-level, un-normalized
Duplicated across enterprise architectures
Bandwidth consuming if transmitted
Subvertable
• In contrast, the repository model seeks to:
–
–
–
–
Unify this metadata
In a normalized fashion
Suitable for scalable multiparty access/update
With denormalization required only
• a) as by-product of implementation constraints, or
• b) where one party needs to place greater trust in a local copy
of repository data than another.
Implications
• Memetic view of collaboration allows collaborations to
become ‘first-class citizens’: informs business
architecture
• Viewed ‘memetically’:
– A transaction is the vehicle for a COntrAct replicator
– A business outcome (potentially, risk impact) is the vehicle
for a REPutation replicator
• This requires changes in both the ‘business mindset’
and architectural assumptions about:
– Where to put security metadata e.g. ‘classifications’ sit within
COntrActs as a view of risk appetite
– Relationships between security metadata, other metadata
and transactional information flows
‘Bottom Line’
• We postulate that
– appropriate collaborative team OD, design of incentives for
more-or-less altruistically motivated team members, and
– architectural underpinning for team working (using COA)
• …together maximise effective, e-enabled
collaboration.
– This requires validation.
– COA foundations (inherently secure communications,
endpoint security etc.,) are necessary building blocks before
RaaS can be reliably implemented.
Next Steps
• ‘Managing Collaboration Effectively’ open
discussion group
– This Summer, probably at London Business
School (LBS) - expressions of interest sought
– OD implications of guild models
– Collaboration as a tool for ‘wicked’ problemsolving
– Collaboration effectiveness
• COA development
– Join Jericho Forum to participate!
Q&A
• Thanks!
• Contact: [email protected]