CB: What are you currently telling business leaders about where future value lies in evolving Internet technologies?
JP: A lot of big changes are being driven by the Internet. It is causing a rebirth of ideas that had formerly been impractical. An idea – no matter where it comes from – can be accessible immediately. Leaders of institutions such as hospitals, schools, government should be envisioning the concept of modeling the end result and then reverse engineering to build systems which make that happen. In business, we had had the barter system   & give me cow and I’ll give you some grain& . Then the concept of mercantile exchange appeared and then business processes that evolved in silos. Now we are talking about integration of processes. I feel that too many companies are focused on the end state, and are ignoring the current day to day challenges around what they could be doing right now to be a more effective e-institution.

Interview by Chris Bishop

This was the theme of my conversation with John Patrick, Internet visionary, celebrity speaker and author, and the former VP of Internet technology at IBM. I caught up with him at his home recently just before he was heading to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore to speak at an IBM conference including 100 Asian CEOs.
We talked about his general views on where the Internet is going and particularly, his perspective on some of the topics that the Enterprise of the Future team has been focused on.
CB: John, what do you see as a constraining development of transformational initiatives related to the Internet?
JP: Here is an all too typical scenario. The Distinguished Engineers come up with an idea and take it to the implementers who say “Well, we can have a plan in 6 months”. IBM can not achieve what customers are looking for using this kind of process. Innovative projects need to be developed outside of the mainstream where there can be short development cycles, where they just do things. The old model of “Plan, Build, Deliver” is not viable. We need “sense and respond”. If you have to think through every possible implication, you will never get there.
CB: What are you currently telling business leaders about where future value lies in evolving Internet technologies?
JP: A lot of big changes are being driven by the Internet. It is causing a rebirth of ideas that had formerly been impractical. An idea – no matter where it comes from – can be accessible immediately.
Leaders of institutions such as hospitals, schools, government should be envisioning the concept of modeling the end result and then reverse engineering to build systems which make that happen.
In business, we had had the barter system – “give me cow and I’ll give you some grain”. Then the concept of mercantile exchange appeared and then business processes that evolved in silos. Now we are talking about integration of processes,
I feel that too many companies are focused on the end state, and are ignoring the current day to day challenges around what they could be doing right now to be a more effective e-institution
CB: Can you share your perspective on Web services? How will it impact business in the future?
JP: Web services will be the lingua franca for governments, hospitals, universities, big and small businesses. And it is not a new idea. The idea of componentizing business function has been around for decades. There have been many initiatives to try to make business processes into LEGOs, but now, there is a great deal of focus on this space. The Internet offers the capabilities to set standards and create shareable code that can deliver commonly valuable functionality and to aggregate and simplify access to multiple solutions.
The answer to providing this capability is Web services, because it allows incompatible processes to talk to each other. Web services allow a business process to send an email to another business process, and then allow another business process to respond to it.
CB: What do you think is the relative importance of Internet technology for solving business problems?
JP: None of these are technology problems. They are attitude problems – many orders of magnitude of improvement can be done with existing technology.
We are 5% of the way into what the Internet has in store for us. To get to the next 95% is attitudinal. It is not difficult to do – you have to get to a new way of thinking. There can not be 18 month development cycles any more – they simply can’t be that long. This needs to be fixed to make value for customers
CB: Is your sense that there will be an inflection point for On Demand Services, similar to what Dell did in transforming the PC business?
JP: We have to watch for who will be the next Amazon of banking and the Amazon of healthcare and on and on. Dell did not have to remove partners from their business model. This is why BCS is so important, because they are now able to leverage the methodology that PwCC brings to the equation. As an output to those consulting planning engagements, IBM can say we have hardware and software capabilities to take this plan we developed and make it real for you.
We also need to fervently get behind and support open standards for Web services (security, messaging) and operating systems such as Linux to drive adoption of On Demand services.
CB: What can IBM do to help customers understand and implement the On Demand agenda?
JP: The steps to helping customers become On Demand are:
1.build a business strategy
2.create an IT strategy to fulfill the business strategy
But On Demand is much bigger than this and there is some confusion about it. Information technology on tap is an element, but the ultimate On Demand idea is to be able to fulfill all transaction needs on any device, to anybody, anywhere, at any time. Users can get whatever they need, wherever and whenever they need it, on any device.
CB: How do you view the role of “Trust” in the future of the Internet?
JP: Trust is the ultimate element. Without it, nothing matters. Security and privacy are part of it, but the big thing is authentication. It does exist today – we have IDs and passwords – but you don’t really know who the Web site is and they don’t really know who you are. If you read the fine print, most companies say that if we receive a valid ID from you, then we believe it is you.
There are instances of it in place today. One example in the United States is “e-File” from the IRS. They authenticate millions of people using a combination of email and regular mail. You are first enrolled on-line. They then send you a code in an email and you go to a Web site to finish the process. They have enough criteria to accurately map you to who you say you are. They combine a collection of specific facts (your gross income from the prior year could be one element) that only you would know.
However, if you want to be 99% accurate, you need biometrics. You will need to attach your body to an ID. This has been in the labs for a long time. It now costs about $5 per computer to include it in a ThinkPad. As a society, we need to get this rolled out.
Trust is ultimately a leadership issue. Some large enterprise has to say “we can deal with the regulatory issues because it will make things better for our customers”. And then they can launch it iteratively, in stages.
CB: How can companies guesstimate or build models using current data about the marketplace, competitors and external factors to anticipate the needs of their customers in the three to five year timeframe?
JP: Customers can try to develop a five year plan and try to execute against it, but it is difficult, because nobody knows what it is going to be like in five years. Most of what is important now didn’t exist five years ago – things like blogging and Wi-Fi and Web services.
The focus should be on helping enterprises put in place a standardized, scalable infrastructure that meets the needs of customers. And it needs to be done now. I am not saying just wing it – it is good to have a five year vision and a rough plan. But the focus has to be on flexibility.
The risk of focusing too far ahead is that as the pace is accelerating, you could be missing the opportunity to fix something, or make the present as good as it can be. And there are so many things that can be made better.
The main focus should be a sense of urgency to iterate in the present. The odds are that if this is in place, customers will be able to take advantage of the next big thing that comes along. When you have this, you can adopt new ideas quickly. If you build a flexible, scalable, standards based infrastructure, the odds are good that you will be in a position to adopt new things that come along.
(You can learn more about John’s trip to Asia as well as other information related to his life and work on his Web site at johnpatrick.com He has also recently written an article for Network World called “The Ultimate Internet“.)