Clouding the Issues

Posted on December 24, 2011 by S Chu

Cloud computing did raise attentions to some colleagues in the technology field. I have been struggling with a number of issues in VC (Visibility Cloud) and the clouding cold weather is not helping. Let’s look at the following picture I dreamed up while in Pattaya doing nothing:

Supply Chain Visibility Clouds

What’s on my mind: 1) not sure if ‘cloud services’ are fully in business here in Hong Kong. Was told that Singapore has most of the data centers of the big (US) players. One conversation on if ezTrack was deployed in a cloud, the discussion ended up in the efficiency of the so called provider P and the technical know-how remained to be seen. The database giant O was currently only at the partnership level with the local telecom H. No publishable cloud services were available. Please, someone sends in the clouds to Hong Kong!! 2) not sure if Android 4.0 apps development is fully entrenched in the local software companies here in Hong Kong. Few mentioned that they were capable and had the manpower, and one suggested that they did know some good Android apps developers here in Hong Kong. Could an Android app, not from the Market, once deployed in a mobile device, be able to deployed another in that device OTA? This is an important trait of our cloud-based intelligent apps. Still looking for answer – but first have to find out where to look first, and 3) not sure if a ‘dual’ inlays are at all not possible both technically and is engineering challenged – putting a NFC RFID inlay (ISO-14443) and a UHF RFID inlay (ISO-18000-6C) on one tag? The source tagging, say, of a pair of jeans at the manufacturer should demand a UHF tag for ease of handling, up until at the display shelf of a retailer. Current NFC phones would require upgrade (protocol-wise at least) before an UHF tag could be read, thus, pointing to a straightforward solution to ‘re-tag’ the jeans with a NFC/HF tag and/or a QR code.

Well, too many ‘not sure’ already!! Will have to read more to get an idea how to tackle these issues. At the same time, will read about a ‘traceability implementation case study’ from GS1 to design the plan to a GTC take on a garment supply chain. Back to work. Happy holidays.

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Visibility Clouds

Posted on November 17, 2011 by S Chu

Trying here to formulate a better conceptualization of SCV (supply chain visibility) in the cloud. Let me just call this concept: Visibility Clouds. Yes, Clouds as in many clouds – crossing country borders and jurisdictions. We will not touch on those legal and political issues here now. Visibility Clouds is a concept where your self-service visibility is readily available in the cloud across all related supply chains in the clouds. The visibility is on-target when the RFID-IS resides in the clouds as it would be avail for Hadoop-type apps to glean information off RFID event data. What is required for this Visibility Clouds (VCs) is to push with some redesign of the visibility platform (VP) to be active in the cloud. The plug-sync-play by each supply chain party to VC will be resulted as an instance of a personalized VM in the cloud with synchronization of both on-cloud and off-cloud supply chain data (such as from the ERP-IS). Such instance will be destroyed along with data for and in the session. We must also look into inter-cloud interoperability and synchronicity. More importantly, how would, e.g., a private cloud (say, a supplier with ezTrack) gives access to a request from a party in a community cloud. We understand that this can be leveraged with the ReBAC model (Relationship-Based Access Control model, based loosely from the Role-based Access Control model) that we have developed. In principles, we argue that the conceptualization of VC is preliminary ready for reference and some realization (or verification as in design science terminology) of VC can be articulated at the technological level.

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Supply Chain Visibility Service in the Cloud

Posted on October 29, 2011 by S Chu

Wow, anyone wants to touch on that topic? Let’s just say having ‘in the Cloud’ means that the IPSaaS (Infrastructure, Platform & Software) are all in the cloud for all the supply chain parties. Given that, how do we provide the visibility service in the cloud? In a service economy, knowledge is exchanged together (and applied) via a service to co-create value. If we take this line of service-dominant logic marketing thinking, then the service is accomplished by the existing of a visibility platform (VP) and the on-demand need of a supply chain party to gain a current snapshot of the supply chain. The knowledge of what to see is beneficial (the user) and the knowledge of how to gain that view (the technology) are being exchanged and visibility is created. Obviously, the user can access SaaS in the cloud to ‘express’ (as we have a drag-and-drop interface in the VP) the view needed, and the app that composes the accesible data and information in the RFID-IS and ERP-IS (please see previous posts) can exist also in the cloud. MapReduce may play a role in accessing the RFID-IS as it is likely to be a pool of distributed data sets (not necessary all database – or there could be NoSQL databases). I am not sure if ‘in the cloud’ requirement imposes any design issue on the visibility service? Will see once I know how to characterized the visibility service. For example, would ‘perishability’ be a characteristic? That is, a visibility service can be reused if the perishability can be tweeted. More later.

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Send in the Clowns – oh, Clouds I meant

Posted on October 29, 2011 by S Chu

I am planning to attend the launch party of a collaborative partnership of a technology company and a cloud provider. The word Cloud or the term Cloud Computing seems to be well understood my people I met. Anytime the conversation falls into Cloud or Cloud Computing, they all have their strong opinions and are very definite. Yet, from my perspective, they are different as each understands the term differently. To me, Cloud Computing is not new, just new business models for those IT companies trying to make money (or plan to make money). I dig through some readings, from presentations of a recent conference in New Year (October 2011), to academic and trade articles out on the Web and in the university library. I like the definition offered by NIST. One of the characteristics noted was ‘on-demand self service’. True, I can’t on-demand ask for an hour of extra-large CPU instances for 0.70US$/hour on a Linux box. CoTToi (\ˈkä-tȯi\, a polite hidden way of saying damn), I get the compute time online right away – I don’t have to call and play beep with the answering service, wait tranquilly listening to the tune of Lady Gaga and hang up eventually without saying a word. Ok, ok, so what? I still have to push my app to that Linux box before I can really doing computing in the cloud. Unless the cloud provider has exact the app I need as SaaS. Anyhow, I gave a presentation starting with parallel computing, distributed computing and grid computing, leading into cloud computing saying that all these four computing methodologies have their own place in history and in practice. I think I fail in striking a common chord in my colleagues who listen to my talk. They do not have the same background /academic training. To the end, I will continue to see people wandering in the cloud thinking that they get there already. May the cloud be with you but just don’t rain on me. Cloud computing is ‘metered IT services with automated provisioning?’

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The Sandwich Generation

Posted on October 9, 2011 by S Chu

Have not been writing for almost a month. Was hopping around in the States looking at houses. The friends in Las Vegas (see the header picture?!) retired and was helping with local updates and house hunting. Their kids were all grown and on their own and live in LA and NY. The kids were lucky as their parents sufficed to take care of themselves. When I was back in Hong Kong, a discussion was wondering why a 70 years old mother still had to buy dinner for the 35 years old son?! Of course, he lived in the parents’ house. He was no sandwich generation. He did not even know about the sandwich – parents were still there and kids? No way. Was it just fair that we should all be the middle of the sandwich, taking care of the aging parents (about time) and nurturing the kids, the next generation? Yes, get married and have kids, tons of them. Well, ok. At least two. No, there were married couples that signed on the dotted line with the utterance of absolutely no kids. Not sure why such feelings existed?

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Supply Chain Visibility Entitlement 101

Posted on September 2, 2011 by S Chu

Allow me to put some perspective on SCVE (Supply Chain Visibility Entitlement). This is a new thinking – away from access control.

Take the one academic view of supply chain visibility (SCV) is (there are not many and they do not converge in the conceptual level), and as a result, SCV can be defined as that a firm has the ability to track the flow of goods, inventory, and information in the supply chain in a timely manner. We translate this ‘ability’ to be achieved by a technology artifact such as the ‘visibility platform’ at where information obtained by the firm clearly shows both the physical and information flows of the supply chain. We further assume such physical flow is now converted to information flow with RFID adoption at strategic hotspots of the supply chain. That is, such ability is the knowing of “the issuing of an ASN and where exactly the (supply chain) items, or SCEs are presently”. With RFID, the timely manner requirement can now be achieved with information delivered in a real-time manner with respect to the hotspots. As such information must be gathered from different data sources in the supply chain. The issue of access control amplifies in the context of supply chain, and in addition, with differing requirements when RFID-enabled physical movement data are now available.

Access control polices who can access what. The ‘who’ and the ‘what’ requires refinement in our context. ‘What’ is the raw data and it could assume different facets such that this ‘who X1’ can access this facet A and that ‘who X2’ can access that facet B of the same raw data. What differentiate that A and B facets? Privacy. What distinguish the who’s (they are the same who as in ‘a doctor’ or ‘a supplier’) – privacy also. The relationship of X1 and X2 defines the level of privacy must be enforced, and in terms, defines which facet fits that privacy level. The access, or security in allowing access to the what, now involves multiple locations. Thus, SCV must be entitled for “clarity and fidelity” (otherwise, it would be static, linear/single dimension, limited and blind-sided.

Entitlement for SCV has four dimensions. The first dimension is the who – indicated by the neighbour index. The second dimension is the relationship with the who and vice versa – indicated by the business partnership. The third dimension is the where to entitle – indicated by the data locations. The last dimension is the currency to entitle – indicated by the freshness of the data. These four dimensions define what we call the entitlement token, as such, the visibility will be rendered by the visibility platform using the token to obtain all necessary data as specified in the visibility template created on-demand by the participant.

Ok, let me work on this more and come back to you. The above has been accumulating for the past two months in my head…before I could spill it out now.

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Entitlement 101

Posted on September 2, 2011 by S Chu

Entitlement. I was talking about supply chain visibility entitlement – a complex information sharing model in supply chains with RFID technology in place. May I step aside from this academic jumble and mumble for a second (does it only make sense when you say mumble and jumble?) There was an opinion article on House Speaker John Boehner’s response to President Obama’s stepping on a GOP debate with his speech on jobs. See, we are talking about the House Speaker and the President of United States, not John or Obama. In that, the President is entitled to some demand and you people, like a House Speaker or anyone, say no more. Or, we are not talking about entitlement here. Or we are talking about frustrations within the people building up for the past years on economy, jobs and just talks.

The rumored-to-be-successor-to-Chinese-Premier-Wen-Jiabao Vice-Premier Li Keqiang visited Hong Kong recently. His visit has now long filed into the dignitary visits folder. Yet, the handling or mishandling of the media remains a discussion even now along with the explanation given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong (UHK) to the students. The Hong Kong Police, without guessing here, must have a reason to act as they were, overextended or not. The core security zone was setup for a reason in UHK. We people could not and would not know what those reasons were. Even if we did, the boiling anger remained. Oh, the boiling anger can be viewed from different perspectives. Those with a political agenda. Those with a plan to practice the use of vulgar language to voice their dislikes. And those with just a feed-up-with-the-HKSAR-government hidden inside and now manifested into public anger, ignited for a very different reason. Oh, where I am going with this? Whatever the rights and wrongs, the Hong Kong Police is entitled to some respect that they protect the citizens from harm at their best know-how. The Vice Chancellor is the leader of you UHK students out there – destroying him for a non-academic matter in the public eyes only results a hit back to the reputation of your alma mater.

We demand for answers. We demand for justice. Yes. But keep in mind the entitlement that comes with that title – the entitlement is of long historical development, not just today’s. Oh, my hidden agenda? Let’s give the entitlement back to the teachers of the next generation. Teachers/Professors are doing only half of the job (the other half is at home), but it is more and more difficult to ‘educate’ some. Why, because the youngsters or those to be educated, know that they know it all – Google-it. Given the benefit of doubts that Google-it has all the ‘answers.’ But the kids lack the mindset to know what is what: don’t want to say, right or wrong, or good or bad. More and more youngsters grow up inside the world of 3G smartphones.

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Quality – data, information & visibility

Posted on August 28, 2011 by S Chu

I am struggling with how to make a clear distinction between data quality, information quality and visibility quality. Oh, maybe there should not be any distinction – the quality is all have the same underpinning attributes such as accuracy, timeliness, completeness, currency, etc. The distinction rests only in the context – data, information and visibility. Of course, some of you may ask why not data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Well, I am trying to get there but at this point, without a collective thinking that is firm and normative. Hopefully, I will reach that point. Let’s get back to the context.

The context points back why quality matters and in what way. With data quality, we are talking about if the data becomes information, how accurate would the information be in the context it is being used? There are two views: Is there a one-to-one mapping with some degree of degradation, from data to information? does the quality of one data contributes to the overall information quality when the information is based on multiple data sources? Because we assume here the attribute ‘accuracy’ is used to describe both the quality of data and information – accurate data implies accurate information. If so, I am done here. To gain accurate visibility quality, I need to ensure data quality is accurate – with the assumption data leads to information to visibility.

Yet, we would not use the word ‘visibility’ to talk about information completeness within a corporation. We are biased in that we view ‘visibility quality’ is affected by information from multiple sources and these sources are not singular. I believe information quality affects visibility quality. Yet the effect is measured based on the value of the visibility. The visibility in a supply chain includes information from more than one party. The value of the visibility lies with who is viewing and what information (not quality yet) is available. Oh, now I use the word ‘value’ not ‘quality’. Are they interchangeable in our discussion?and

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A Paradigm Shift – Information Exchange

Posted on August 28, 2011 by S Chu

In the design of the drag-and-drop in the Visibility Platform (see the RFID Forum Brochure in the website), which took about 2 years of discussions, stemmed from the basic question raised earlier in another technology discussion – “We have to fill in online forms often. Could we do it some other ways – like, not to have to fill in the name so many times and it is the same name I have since that day I was told that I cried the very first time?” Ok, ok. I am talking about when we design an online form, we are designing for not just one person, but likely many many different users. Wonder if we can design a form that crawls the web (or data sources) once the online user’s identity is verified to automatically filled in the necessary information without possible typos? For example, existing stored information is often needed – such as, e.g., when did you purchase the item that you are intended to return for refund? Well, I think it was two weeks before that I went down to that Mall and that shop and made the purchase – but the receipt was no longer with me. So, I don’t know. Could you, the form, please crawls the web and finds my purchase record, then fills that in for me. Thank you. Ok, what is missing? The form was yelling back, ‘How the heaven I would know what you have purchased and even if so, then exactly which angry bird badge (ABB) you purchased – there are so many out there that the piggies are revolting now with piggies invisible badge (PIB) by themselves?” Oh, right, ABBs are now RFID-tagged. Oh, right, the form continues to say that my ABB was logged at the POS when I paid for it that two weeks ago. Oh, right, the event information is in the RFID-IS. Done. Form filled once the RFID tag reader on my MacBook Air reads my tag ID and the EPC.

Point? Information exchange should be guided by the responding party, not the requesting party. State what you (the requestor) need, and I (the responder) will compose the ‘form’ that will facilitate you the requestor to retrieve the data accordingly, even directly into your system using likely web services. This idea drives the drag-and-drop design for the end user to define what they want to see at the time that they need it (on-demand), not only see what the designer and the implementer think you like to see – click on this report if you want to see the annual report (with everything in it – find what you want to see).

I know. It may not make sense with first glance. I am still trying to simplify the concept and describe it in a more readable writeup.

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Source Tagging – An Angry Bird Badge

Posted on August 15, 2011 by S Chu

Source Tagging (ST) refers to simply where the RFID is to be put on a supply chain entity (SCE) first. In other words, ST is the point at which the SCE becomes anIoT (Internet of Things). Let me call this point the IoTGoLive point (in a larger scheme, it would be one of the hotspots in a supply chain view), or for short IoTspot. Let’s say that a brand owner is ready for the production of a social widget Angry Bird Badge (ABB) each with a unique identification code for social networking prominence (such as in 4Square or yet to be happened in Groupon). The use of an EPC as the code and RFID tag as the embedded technology for verification using NFC in most smartphones (are they UHF or HF enabled? UPM RFID has a press release on 18 August about working with SimpleNFC for NFC tag delivery…) seems fitting. The badge is made of a fuzzy burly soft velvet-like material for the angry bird attached to a high elasticity high-tech rubber wide-band. The badge can be worn as one prefers, as an eye patch or as an arm band. The decision for the brand owner is where the IC chip of the RFID tag is to be placed. Both technology is available – embedded into the fuzzy bird or the rubber band. This determines the IoTspot. As the ABB identification code is a high-value social commodity (“social value” – a new topic), it must be fully managed with accuracy and correctness. Thus, with the decision to put the chip in the rubber band with the length of the band to be the antenna for better reception and transmission, the fuzzy birds will be sourced from other manufacturers and the single manufacturer of the high-tech band is commissioned to be the IoTspot. The bird will be permanently attached to each individual band – with that the ABB will become an IoT for a specific person. The choice of bird color, style and look will introduce into the supply chain once the ABB becomes a fad of the social networking arena. How does the ABB identification code to be controlled? By whom? With standardization organization such as GS1? Does it matter if it is GS1 HK or GS1 US – that is, will ABB go global? A design is suggested for IoTGoLive and artifact will be provided for inspection and comments in my next next posting. Watch out for the next posting for the underpinning concept with respect to drag-and-drop visibility and other e-Platform like features.

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