Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

The simple business model for all businesses in the identity space:

The identity business resides inside the cloud labeled “magic happens.” Identity business fulfill demand that comes from web sites. They only indirectly serve users. The thrives if it can generate sufficient magic to satisfy the web site owner. He, of course won’t be satisfied if the user isn’t reasonably happy. Of course if the business can’t get enough users nobody will be happy.

Sufficient magic is actually the sum of all magic over the set of all users served. So a little magic per user will be enough if the number of users is huge.

That drawing is a bit misleading. Treat the idea of a customized experience very flexibly. A web site that denies a credit charge based on the user model magic makes is customizing the experience for the thief’s. Other users might not even notice that kind of customizing.

The marvelously clueful Jon Udell writes about the return of hailstorm like systems. One line caught my eye.

“Re-entering the basic facts each time perpetuates an illusion of privacy. Yet the reality, for many of us, is that these facts are public.”

Yes! “The illusion of privacy.” Very nice.

But .. four additional things too.

1. It’s very very hard to pre-fill with 100% accuracy. Even small error rates are enough to overwhelm any increase in sales that may arise from greater ease of use, particularly if the blame for those errors falls to the vendor.

2. The vendor wishes to frame the relationship with the customer as respectful to the customer. Both vendor and customer may know that such information is widely available but polite people don’t bring it up. If you do then it’s unclear if you can be trusted with the more semi-private information. The vendor that pre-fills you home phone number seems more likely to reveal your pants size, or your color preference to strangers.

3. Sales is like poker. You don’t want to reveal anything during the negotiation that your not absolutely positive is going to advance the deal toward closure. For example consider you are buying a car and it has floor mats with a stain resistant coating on them. No salesman in his right mind will tell you that unless you explicitly reveal that your worried about the carpets getting dirty. Unless he’s sure that the information will fill a need the customer has mentioned it goes mentioned. Who knows, maybe this customer is afraid of cancers caused by such coatings. Vendors are very ambivalent about revealing their hand.

4. Finally some of these forms are actually part of a quiz. The form is a means of reducing identity theft. The credit card company can use any information the vendor collects at point of sale to reduce the chance of fraud.

You have to get authorization prior to all form pre-filling; not just from the customer but from everybody who has a stake in the data. For example your going to have trouble get medical records without the care giver’s permissions as well as the patient’s permission.

Even very mundane seeming revealing of information have strong systemic barriers casual revealing.

I learned years and years ago that you absolutely must clear the bytes in a file block before saving it to disk. If you don’t then sooner or later you’ll have a customer complain that your application revealed company secrets! This happens because they deleted the file with the salesmen bonuses in it and then the operating system hands your unsuspecting program the same file blocks without clearing them and then … well you get the idea.

While I hadn’t forgotten that design rule I seem to have forgotten until reminded today that if you should avoid certain byte values in file encoding. Why? Because if you use vertical tab or linefeed in the file encoding then when the customer prints the binary file to the line printer the printer consumes an entire box of paper. I wonder if the Java byte code takes that rule to heart?

While I don’t know the analogous rules are for files headed for the laser printer; but somebody around here has got a file that breaks them.

Some people pick a question, usually in graduate school, and then spend the rest of their life puzzling out an answer to that question. Lately I’ve been reading some of Irving Janis‘ work on decesion making. The question he seems to have asked early on was “How did these smart people make those choices that lead to this fiasco!” In his book Groupthink he looks at the fiasco of Pearl Harbor, the crossing into North Korea in the Korean war, the Bay of Pigs, and the escalation in Vietnam.

This turns out to be an excellent question to build a career around! No shortage of fiascoes to study. No shortage of people with money scared to death they are on the road to a fiasco. Better yet there is no shortage of people convinced that those around them are on that road.

Making a decision is embedded in a context that aids and constrains the outcome that gets generated. This cartoon highlights three aspects of the context. In this view of the problem solving we ignore the actual problem and look only at the resources brought to bear on solving it.

Irving establishes a straw-man he calls “Vigilante Problem Solving.” That’s the good kind of problem solving and it outputs good decisions. The failure modes are framed as “taking short cuts” or other resource limits that preclude the good kind of problem solving.

Here’s a little enumeration of constraints on the quality of the problem solving that lifted from his book Critical Decisions along those three dimensions.

• Cognitive Constraints

• Limited Time
• Perceptions of Limited Resources
• Multiple Tasks
• Perplexing complexity of the issue
• Perception of lack of knowledge
• Ideological Commitments

• Need to maintain: power, status, compensation, social support.
• Need for acceptability of new policy with organization

• Strong personal motive: Greed, Desire for fame, etc.
• Arousal of an emotional need: e.g. anger, elation
• Emotional stress of decisional conflict

The constraints lead to failure modes. By picking apart the historical record of the various fiascos he has collected a library of these failure modes. The contribution of the Critical Decisions book bridge between the model of resource limits and various failure modes. It’s a bridge from a general model to the stories in his collection of fiascos. Each bridge is a template that outlines a given problem solving technique and then highlights how that problem solving technique goes bad.

Here’s an example. A template for a problem solving technique that plays to a person or organization’s strengths an augments those with reasoning by analogy:

We have cliches to dis this technique. “Searching where the light’s bright.” of “If you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail.

But this is a fine problem solving scheme. We all use it. It plays to our strengths and let’s us leverage our organizational muscle. It will only lead to a fiasco if the problem fails to fit the available SOP. Things fall apart when the organization starts getting highly invested in the analogy between a nail and screw. Then they start engaging in various thought stopping processes and begin singing in unison: “I gotta hammer, I hammer in the morning…” For a while they think they are happy!

Vigilance is hard work.

I’m am so excited to discover that the Victoria and Albert collections are moving online. These photos of the collection are just wonderful!

Ivory, silk ribbon, printed paper and grease (mutton fat and tallow). This is a device 1850-1860 used by women to keep score in archery.

Grease in the acorn helped the fingers slide smoothly off the bow string. Score is kept by poking holes in a replaceable cardboard disk with the pricker.