I'm watching John Seely Brown's plenary address at the 2006 Collaborative Technologies Conference, which is a wide ranging and fascinating talk on ways and forms of collaboration.
Lots of good stuff and plenty of blog activity around this and the other talks - but in many ways echoing (in a good way) what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in our brave new world...mashups, Second Life, "honouring the emergent", etc.
Something that did make me think though, was his description of how an Asian apparel company (Li & Fung) has a large number of suppliers (10,000+) that it has organised into loosely coupled supply and innovation networks where knowledge, practice and process are shared between companies.
Hmm...now the way I've generally thinking about collaboration, sharing, security, etc, has been fairly simplistic: there are essentially 2 situations - you're inside a firewall, or you're on the outside. Most available tools focus on the external world (technorati, del.icio.us, etc). Some companies are starting to think about replicating these tools and services within organisations (an external service probably cannot subscribe to, tag or bookmark internal content).
But how do we facilitate sharing and collaboration across a number of different companies ? The partners don't have access each other's internal space, and using an external service reduces their ability to reuse internal content (unless they want to copy it to an external service, and then keep it up to date - yuck). It also maybe implies a need to agree on a common set of tools (good luck !) - and suddenly they're not very loosely coupled anymore.
So, is there (or will there be) a need for something like a reverse proxy architecture that allows proxying of interesting internal content (feeds, web content, web service calls) to authorised external services ? Or am I making up solutions to problems that don't exist ? Or, even worse, am I misunderstanding something ?
[tags]ctc2006, collaboration, internal, external, collaboration, proxy[/tags]
Inside the firewall..outside the firewall - but the twain need to meet
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I don't think you're wrong, but how about a slightly more radical suggestion?
How about instead of thinking "should we make this information available to the outside world?" always focusing our attention on "What very good reason is there for keeping this hidden and a secret?" I believe that asking this question starts to uncover some of the unconscious assumptions we make about our organisations. "But..but...but...that would mean people would know we aren't perfect!"
Doing so brings the control-freaks out into the sunshine, where the unreasonable bits of them wither and fall off.
Good question; must've been solved for quite some time by --between others-- carmakers with their subcontractors (I think of Toyota, Renault & Nissan, Etc.). Worth checking?
Lloyd,
I agree with what you're saying, in principle - permeable membranes, cluetrain, etc - but I think the realities of life predicate a more complicated, granular and flexible model for sharing and permissioning, and before we can get to your question - "Why would be want to hide this", there needs to be a critical mass of already shared information that hasn't given rise to doom and catastrophe - people need to see that this works, not just read about it in theory.
YGG - definitely worth checking, although my assumption (and I know how dangerous assumptions can be) is that their sharing occurs in a pretty controlled and constrained way - think EDI rather than RSS. But I could be very wrong - and if anyone has further info that would be cool.
yes very probably EDI or RSS !
I'm trying to find out.
YGG - anything you find out would be great. I've been thinking about this over the last couple of days, and some of the technologies/principles behind SOA could be the answer here. I need to dig into this more deeply as I've fallen off the big enterprise architecture track over the last few years, but it seems as if the WS-* protocols cover discoverability and security, and are very much designed for interop.
I'm still trying to fit everything together - for example, would one *publish* details about an internal feed to a "Discoverability server" which would make it relay requests and responses from authorised external sources. Apologies to SOA and WS-stack gurus (like you're even reading this !). Probably be useful to create some use cases / user stories and then work out how to do it from there.
Fun fun fun !