Thursday, August 22, 2019

Setting off Towards the Data-Driven Business

In an earlier post Towards the Data-Driven Business, I talked about the various roles that data and intelligence can play in the business. But where do you start? In this post, I shall talk about the approach that I have developed and used in a number of large organizations.

To build a roadmap that takes you into the future from where you are today, you need three things.

Firstly an understanding of the present. This includes producing AS-IS models of your current (legacy) systems, what data have you got and how are you currently managing and using it. We need to know about the perceived pain points, not because we only want to fix the symptoms, but because these will help us build a consensus for change. Typically we find a fair amount of duplicated and inconsistent data, crappy or non-existent interfaces, slow process loops and data bottlenecks, and general inflexibility.

This is always complicated by the fact that there are already numerous projects underway to fix some of the problems, or to build additional functionality, so we need to understand how these projects are expected to alter the landscape, and in what timescale. It sometimes becomes apparent that these projects are not ideally planned and coordinated from a data management perspective. If we find overlapping or fragmented responsibility in some critical data areas, we may need to engage with programme management and governance to support greater consistency and synergy.

Secondly a vision of the future opportunities for data and intelligence (and automation based on these). In general terms, these are outlined in my earlier post. To develop a vision for a specific organization, we need to look at their business model - what value do they provide to customers and other stakeholders, how is this value delivered (as business services or otherwise), and how do the capabilities and processes of the organization and its partners support this.

For example, I worked with an organization that had done a fair amount of work on modelling their internal processes and procedures, but lacked the outside-in view. So I developed a business service architecture that showed how the events and processes in their customers' world triggered calls on their services, and what this implied for delivering a seamless experience to their customers.

Using a capability-based planning approach, we can then look at how data, intelligence and automation could improve not only individual business services, processes and underlying capabilities, but also the coordination and feedback loops between these. For example in a retail environment, there are typically processes and capabilities associated with both Buying and Selling, and you may be able to use data and intelligence to make each of them more efficient and effective. But more importantly, you can improve the alignment between Buying and Selling.

(In some styles of business capability model, coordination is shown explicitly as a capability in its own right, but this is not a common approach.)

The business model also identifies which areas are strategically important to the business. At one organization, when we mapped the IT costs against the business model, we found that a disproportionate amount of effort was being devoted to non-strategic stuff, and surprisingly little effort for the customer-facing (therefore more strategically important) activities. (A colour-coded diagram can be very useful in presenting such issues to senior management.)

Most importantly, we find that a lot of stakeholders (especially within IT) have a fairly limited vision about what is possible, often focused on the data they already have rather than the data they could or should have. The double-diamond approach to design thinking works here, to combine creative scenario planning with highly focused practical action. I've often found senior business people much more receptive to these kind of discussions than the IT folk.

We should then be able to produce a reasonably future-proof and technology independent TO-BE data and information architecture, which provides a loosely-coupled blueprint for data collection, processing and management.

Thirdly, how to get from A to B. In a large organization, this is going to take several years. A complete roadmap cannot just be a data strategy, but will usually involve some elements of business process and organizational change, as well as application, integration and technology strategy. It may also involve outside stakeholders - for example, providing direct access to suppliers and business partners via portals and APIs, and sharing data and intelligence with them, while obtaining consent from data subjects and addressing any other privacy, security and compliance issues. There are always dependencies between different streams of activity within the programme as well as with other initiatives, and these dependencies need to be identified and managed, even if we can avoid everything being tightly coupled together.

Following the roadmap will typically contain a mix of different kinds of project. There may need to be some experimental ("pioneer") projects as well as larger development and infrastructure ("settler", "town planner") projects.

To gain consensus and support, you need a business case. Although different organizations may have different ways of presenting and evaluating the business case, and some individuals and organizations are more risk-averse than others, a business case will always involve an argument that the benefits (financial and possibly non-financial) outweigh the costs and risks.

Generally, people like to see some short-term benefits ("quick wins" or the dreaded "low-hanging fruit") as well as longer-term benefits. A well-balanced roadmap spreads the benefits across the phases - if you manage to achieve 80% of the benefits in phase 1, then your roadmap probably wasn't ambitious enough, so don't be surprised if nobody wants to fund phase 2. 

Finally, you have to implement your roadmap. This means getting the funding and resources, kicking off multiple projects as well as connecting with relevant projects already underway, managing and coordinating the programme. It also means being open to feedback and learning, responding to new emerging challenges (such as regulation and competition), maintaining communication with stakeholders, and keeping the vision and roadmap alive and up-to-date.

Related posts

See also

Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Process Automation and Intelligence

What kinds of automation are there, and is there a natural progression from basic to advanced? Do the terms intelligent automation and cognitive automation actually mean anything useful, or are they merely vendor hype? In this blogpost, I shall attempt an answer.

Robotic Automation

The simplest form of automation is known as robotic automation or robotic process automation (RPA). The word robot (from the Czech word for forced labour, robota) implies a pre-programmed response to a set of incoming events. The incoming events are represented as structured data, and may be held in a traditional database. The RPA tools also include the connectivity and workflow technology to receive incoming data, interrogate databases and drive action, based on a set of rules.

Cognitive Automation

People talk about cognitive technology or cognitive computing, but what exactly does this mean? In its marketing material, IBM uses these terms to describe whatever features of IBM Watson they want to draw our attention to – including adaptability, interactivity and persistence – but IBM’s usage of these terms is not universally accepted.

I understand cognition to be all about perceiving and making sense of the world, and we are now seeing man-made components that can achieve some degree of this, sometimes called Cognitive Agents.

Cognitive agents can also be used to detect patterns in vast volumes of structured and unstructured data and interpret their meaning. This is known as Cognitive Insight, which Thomas Davenport and Rajeev Ronanki refer to as “analytics on steroids”. The general form of the cognitive agent is as follows.

Cognitive agents can be wrapped as a service and presented via an API, in which case they are known as Cognitive Services. The major cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure) provide a range of these services, including textual sentiment analysis.

At the current state-of-the-art, cognitive services may be of variable quality. Image recognition may be misled by shadows, and even old-fashioned OCR may struggle to generate meaningful text from poor resolution images. – but of course human cognition is also fallible.

Intelligent Automation

Meanwhile, one of the key characteristics of intelligence is adaptability – being able to respond flexibly to different conditions. Intelligence is developed and sustained by feedback loops – detecting outcomes and adjusting behaviour to achieve goals. Intelligent automation therefore includes a feedback loop, typically involving some kind of machine learning.

Complex systems and processes may require multiple feedback loops (Double-Loop or Triple-Loop Learning). 

Edge Computing

If we embed this automation into the Internet of Things, we can use sensors to perform the information gathering, and actuators to carry out the actions.

Closed-Loop Automation

Now what happens if we put all these elements together?

This fits into a more general framework of human-computer intelligence, in which intelligence is broken down into six interoperating capabilities.

I know that some people will disagree with me as to which parts of this framework are called "cognitive" and which parts "intelligent". Ultimately, this is just a matter of semantics. The real point is to understand how all the pieces of cognitive-intelligent automation work together.

The Limits of Machine Intelligence

There are clear limits to what machines can do – but this doesn’t stop us getting them to perform useful work, in collaboration with humans where necessary. (Collaborative robots are sometimes called cobots.) A well-designed collaboration between human and machine can achieve higher levels of productivity and quality than either human or machine alone. Our framework allows us to identify several areas where human abilities and artificial intelligence can usefully combine.

In the area of perception and cognition, there are big differences in the way that humans and machines view things, and therefore significant differences in the kinds of kinds of cognitive mistakes they are prone to. Machines may spot or interpret things that humans might miss, and vice versa. There is good evidence for this effect in medical diagnosis, where a collaboration between human medic and AI can often produce higher accuracy than either can achieve alone.

In the area of decision-making, robots can make simple decisions much faster, but may be unreliable with more complex or borderline decisions, so a hybrid “human-in-the-loop” solution may be appropriate. 

Decisions that affect real people are subject to particular concern – GDPR specifically regulates any automated decision-making or profiling that is made without human intervention, because of the potential impact on people’s rights and freedoms. In such cases, the “human-in-the-loop” solution reduces the perceived privacy risk. In the area of communication and collaboration, robots can help orchestrate complex interactions between multiple human experts, and allow human observations to be combined with automatic data gathering. Meanwhile, sophisticated chatbots are enabling more complex interactions between people and machines.

Finally there is the core capability of intelligence – learning. Machines learn by processing vast datasets of historical data – but that is also their limitation. So learning may involve fast corrective action by the robot (using machine learning), with a slower cycle of adjustment and recalibration by human operators (such as Data Scientists). This would be an example of Double-Loop learning.

Automation Roadmap

Some of the elements of this automation framework are already fairly well developed, with cost-effective components available from the technology vendors. So there are some modes of automation that are available for rapid deployment. Other elements are technologically immature, and may require a more cautious or experimental approach.

Your roadmap will need to align the growing maturity of your organization with the growing maturity of the technology, exploiting quick wins today while preparing the groundwork to be in a position to take advantage of emerging tools and techniques in the medium term.

Thomas Davenport and Rajeev Ronanki, Artificial Intelligence for the Real World (January–February 2018)

Related posts: Automation Ethics (August 2019), RPA - Real Value or Painful Experimentation? (August 2019)

Saturday, August 03, 2019

Towards the Data-Driven Business

If we want to build a data-driven business, we need to appreciate the various roles that data and intelligence can play in the business - whether improving a single business service, capability or process, or improving the business as a whole. The examples in this post are mainly from retail, but a similar approach can easily be applied to other sectors.

Sense-Making and Decision Support

The traditional role of analytics and business intelligence is helping the business interpret and respond to what is going on.

Once upon a time, business intelligence always operated with some delay. Data had to loaded from the operational systems into the data warehouse before they could be processed and analysed. I remember working with systems that generated management infomation based on yesterday's data, or even last month's data. Of course, such systems don't exist any more, because people expect real-time insight, based on streamed data.

Management information systems are supposed to support individual and collective decision-making. People often talk about actionable intelligence, but of course it doesn't create any value for the business until it is actioned. Creating a fancy report or dashboard isn't the real goal, it's just a means to an end.

Analytics can also be used to calculate complicated chains of effects on a what-if basis. For example, if we change the price of this product by this much, what effect is this predicted to have on the demand for other products, what are the possible responses from our competitors, how does the overall change in customer spending affect supply chain logistics, do we need to rearrange the shelf displays, and so on. How sensitive is Y to changes in X, and what is the optimal level of Z?

Analytics can also be used to support large-scale optimization - for example, solving complicated scheduling problems.

Automated Action

Increasingly, we are looking at the direct actioning of intelligence, possibly in real-time. The intelligence drives automated decisions within operational business processes, often without a human-in-the-loop, where human supervision and control may be remote or retrospective. A good example of this is dynamic retail pricing, where an algorithm adjusts the prices of goods and services according to some model of supply and demand. In some cases, optimized plans and schedules can be implemented without a human in the loop.

So the data doesn't just flow from the operational systems into the data warehouse, but there is a control flow back into the operational systems. We can call this closed loop intelligence.

(If it takes too much time to process the data and generate the action, the action may no longer be appropriate. A few years ago, one of my clients wanted to use transaction data from the data warehouse to generate emails to customers - but with their existing architecture there would have been a 48 hour delay from the transaction to the email, so we needed to find a way to bypass this.)

Managing Complexity

If you have millions of customers buying hundreds of thousands of products, you need ways of aggregating the data in order to manage the business effectively. Customers can be grouped into segments, products can be grouped into categories, and many organizations use these groupings as a basis for dividing responsibilities between individuals and teams. However, these groupings are typically inflexible and sometimes seem perverse.

For example, in a large supermarket, after failing to find maple syrup next to the honey as I expected, I was told I should find it next to the custard. There may well be a logical reason for this grouping, but this logic was not apparent to me as a customer.

But the fact that maple syrup is in the same product category as custard doesn't just affect the shelf layout, it may also mean that it is automatically included in decisions affecting the custard category and excluded from decisions affecting the honey category. For example, pricing and promotion decisions.

A data-driven business is able to group things dynamically, based on affinity or association, and then allows simple and powerful decisions to be made for this dynamic group, at the right level of aggregation.

Automation can then be used to cascade the action to all affected products, making the necessary price, logistical and other adjustments for each product. This means that a broad plan can be quickly and consistently implemented across thousands of products.

Experimentation and Learning

In a data-driven business, every activity is designed for learning as well as doing. Feedback is used in the cybernetic sense - collecting and interpreting data to control and refine business rules and algorithms.

In a dynamic world, it is necessary to experiment constantly. A supermarket or online business is a permanent laboratory for testing the behaviour of its customers. For example, A/B testing where alternatives are presented to different customers on different occasions to test which one gets the best response. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Netflix declares themselves "addicted" to the methodology of A/B testing.

In a simple controlled experiment, you change one variable and leave everything else the same. But in a complex business world, everything is changing. So you need advanced statistics and machine learning, not only to interpret the data, but also to design experiments that will produce useful data.

Managing Organization

A traditional command-and-control organization likes to keep the intelligence and insight in the head office, close to top management. An intelligent organization on the other hand likes to mobilize the intelligence and insight of all its people, and encourage (some) local flexibility (while maintaining global consistency). With advanced data and intelligence tools, power can be driven to the edge of the organization, allowing for different models of delegation and collaboration. For example, retail management may feel able to give greater autonomy to store managers, but only if the systems provide faster feedback and more effective support. 


Related to the previous point, data and intelligence can provide clarity and governance to the business, and to a range of other stakeholders. This has ethical as well as regulatory implications.

Among other things, transparent data and intelligence reveal their provenance and derivation. (This isn't the same thing as explanation, but it probably helps.)

Obviously most organizations already have many of the pieces of this, but there are typically major challenges with legacy systems and data - especially master data management. Moving onto the cloud, and adopting advanced integration and robotic automation tools may help with some of these challenges, but it is clearly not the whole story.

Some organizations may be lopsided or disconnected in their use of data and intelligence. They may have very sophisticated analytic systems in some areas, while other areas are comparatively neglected. There can be a tendency to over-value the data and insight you've already got, instead of thinking about the data and insight that you ought to have.

Making an organization more data-driven doesn't always entail a large transformation programme, but it does require a clarity of vision and pragmatic joined-up thinking.

Related posts: Rhyme or Reason: The Logic of Netflix (June 2017), Setting off towards the Data-Driven Business (August 2019)

Updated 13 September 2019

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Trial by Ordeal

Some people think that ethical principles only apply to implemented systems, and that experimental projects (trials, proofs of concept, and so on) don't need the same level of transparency and accountability.

Last year, Google employees (as well as US senators from both parties) expressed concern about Google's Dragonfly project, which appeared to collude with the Chinese government in censorship and suppression of human rights. A secondary concern was that Dragonfly was conducted in secrecy, without involving Google's privacy team.  

Google's official position (led by CEO Sundar Pinchai) was that Dragonfly was "just an experiment". Jack Poulson, who left Google last year over this issue and has now started a nonprofit organization called Tech Inquiry, has also seen this pattern in other technology projects.
"I spoke to coworkers and they said 'don’t worry, by the time the thing launches, we'll have had a thorough privacy review'. When you do R and D, there's this idea that you can cut corners and have the privacy team fix it later." (via Alex Hern)
A few years ago, Microsoft Research ran an experiment on "emotional eating", which involved four female employees wearing smart bras. "Showing an almost shocking lack of sensitivity for gender stereotyping", wrote Sebastian Anthony. While I assume that the four subjects willingly volunteered to participate in this experiment, and I hope the privacy of their emotional data was properly protected, it does seem to reflect the same pattern - that you can get away with things in the R and D stage that would be highly problematic in a live product.

Poulson's position is that the engineers working on these projects bear some responsibility for the outcomes, and that they need to see that the ethical principles are respected. He therefore demands transparency to avoid workers being misled. He also notes that if the ethical considerations are deferred to a late stage of a project, with the bulk of the development costs already incurred and many stakeholders now personally invested in the success of the project, the pressure to proceed quickly to launch may be too strong to resist.

Sebastian Anthony, Microsoft’s new smart bra stops you from emotionally overeating (Extreme Tech, 9 December 2013)

Erin Carroll et al, Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating (Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2013)

Ryan Gallagher, Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation (The Intercept, 17 December 2018)

Alex Hern, Google whistleblower launches project to keep tech ethical (Guardian, 13 July 2019)

Casey Michel, Google’s secret ‘Dragonfly’ project is a major threat to human rights (Think Progress, 11 Dec 2018)

Iain Thomson, Microsoft researchers build 'smart bra' to stop women's stress eating (The Register, 6 Dec 2013)

Saturday, June 15, 2019

The Road Less Travelled

Are algorithms trustworthy, asks @NizanGP.
"Many of us routinely - and even blindly - rely on the advice of algorithms in all aspects of our lives, from choosing the fastest route to the airport to deciding how to invest our retirement savings. But should we trust them as much as we do?"

Dr Packin's main point is about the fallibility of algorithms, and the excessive confidence people place in them. @AnnCavoukian reinforces this point.

But there is another reason to be wary of the advice of the algorithm, summed up by the question: Whom does the algorithm serve?

Because the algorithm is not working for you alone. There are many people trying to get to the airport, and if they all use the same route they may all miss their flights. If the algorithm is any good, it will be advising different people to use different routes. (Most well-planned cities have more than one route to the airport, to avoid a single point of failure.) So how can you trust the algorithm to give you the fastest route? However much you may be paying for the navigation service (either directly, or bundled into the cost of the car/device), someone else may be paying a lot more. For the road less travelled.

The algorithm-makers may also try to monetize the destinations. If a particular road is used for getting to a sports venue as well as the airport, then the two destinations can be invited to bid to get the "best" routes for their customers - or perhaps for themselves. ("Best" may not mean fastest - it could mean the most predictable. And the venue may be ambivalent about this - the more unpredictable the journey, the more people will arrive early to be on the safe side, spreading the load on the services as well as spending more on parking and refreshments.)

In general, the algorithm is juggling the interests of many different stakeholders, and we may assume that this is designed to optimize the commercial returns to the algorithm-makers.

The same is obviously true of investment advice. The best time to buy a stock is just before everyone else buys, and the best time to sell a stock is just after everyone else buys. Which means that there are massive opportunities for unethical behaviour when advising people where / when to invest their retirement savings, and it would be optimistic to assume that the people programming the algorithms are immune from this temptation, or that regulators are able to protect investors properly.

And that's before we start worrying about the algorithms being manipulated by hostile agents ...

So remember the Weasley Doctrine: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."

Nizan Geslevich Packin, Why Investors Should Be Wary of Automated Advice (Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2019)

Dozens of drivers get stuck in mud after Google Maps reroutes them into empty field (ABC7 New York, 26 June 2019) HT @jonerp

Related posts: Towards Chatbot Ethics (May 2019), Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019), Robust Against Manipulation (July 2019)

Updated 27 July 2019

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Responsibility by Design - Activity View

In my ongoing work on #TechnologyEthics. I have identified Five Elements of Responsibility by Design. One of these elements is what I'm calling the Activity View - defining effective and appropriate action at different points in the lifecycle of a technological innovation or product - who does what when. (Others may wish to call it the Process View.)

So in this post, I shall sketch some of the things that may need to be done at each of the following points: planning and requirements; risk assessment; design; verification, validation and test; deployment and operation; incident management; decommissioning. For the time being, I shall assume that these points can be interpreted within any likely development or devops lifecycle, be it sequential ("waterfall"), parallel, iterative, spiral, agile, double diamond or whatever.

Please note that this is an incomplete sketch, and I shall continue to flesh this out.

Planning and Requirements

This means working out what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, who is going to do it, who is going to pay for it, and who is going to benefit from it. What is the problem or opportunity you are addressing, and what kind of solution / output are you expecting to produce? It also means looking at the wider context - for example, exploring potential synergies with other initiatives.

The most obvious ethical question here is to do with the desirability of the solution. What is the likely impact of the solution on different stakeholders, and can this be justified? This is often seen in terms of an ethical veto - should we do this at all - but it is perhaps equally valid to think of it in more positive terms - could we do more?

But who gets to decide on desirability - in other words, whose notion of desirability counts - is itself an ethical question. So ethical planning includes working out who shall have a voice in this initiative, and how shall this voice be heard, making sure the stakeholders are properly identified and given a genuine stake. This was always a key element of participative design methodologies such as Enid Mumford's ETHICS method.

Planning also involves questions of scope and interoperability - how is the problem space divided up between multiple separate initiatives, to what extent do these separate initiatives need to be coordinated, and are there any deficiencies in coverage or resource allocation. See my post on the Ethics of Interoperability.

For example, an ethical review might question why medical devices were being developed for certain conditions and not others, or why technologies developed for the police were concentrated on certain categories of crime, and what the social implications of this might be. Perhaps the ethical judgement could be that a solution proposed for condition/crime X can be developed provided that there is a commitment to develop similar solutions for Y and Z. In other words, a full ethical review should look at what is omitted from the plan as well as what is included.

There may be ethical implications of organization and method, especially on large complicated developments involving different teams in different jurisdictions. Chinese Walls, Separation of Concerns, etc.

In an ethical plan, responsibility will be clear and not diffused. Just saying "we are all responsible" is naive and unhelpful. We all know what this looks like: an individual engineer raises an issue to get it off her conscience, a busy project manager marks the issue as "non-critical", the product owner regards the issue as a minor technicality, and so on. I can't even be bothered to explain what's wrong with this, I'll let you look it up in Wikipedia, because it's Somebody Else's Problem.

Regardless of the development methodology, most projects start with a high-level plan, filling in the details as they go along, and renegotiating with the sponsors and other stakeholders for significant changes in scope, budget or timescale. However, some projects are saddled with commercial, contractual or political constraints that make the plans inflexible, and this inflexibility typically generates unethical behaviours (such as denial or passing the buck).

In short, ethical planning is about making sure you are doing the right things, and doing them right. 

Risk Assessment

The risk assessment and impact analysis may often be done at the same time as the planning, but I'm going to regard it as a logically distinct activity. Like planning, it may be appropriate to revisit the risk assessment from time to time: our knowledge and understanding of risks may evolve, new risks may become apparent, while other risks can be discounted.

There are some standards for risk assessment in particular domains. For example, Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is mandated by GDPR, Information Security Risk Assessment is included in ISO 27001, and risk/hazard assessment for robotics is covered by BS 8611.

The first ethical question here is How Much. It is clearly important that the risk assessment is done with sufficient care and attention, and the results taken seriously. But there is no ethical argument under the sun that says that one should never take any risks at all, or that risk assessment should be taken to such extremes that it becomes paralysing. In some situations (think Climate Change), risk-averse procrastination may be the position that is hardest to justify ethically.

We also need to think about Scope and Perspective. Which categories of harm/hazard/risk are relevant, whose risk is it (in other words, who would be harmed), and from whose point of view? The voice of the stakeholder needs to be heard here as well.


Responsible design takes care of all the requirements, risks and other stakeholder concerns already identified, as well as giving stakeholders full opportunity to identity additional concerns as the design takes shape.

Among other things, the design will need to incorporate any mechanisms and controls that have been agreed as appropriate for the assessed risks. For example, security controls, safety controls, privacy locks. Also designing in mechanisms to support responsible operations - for example, monitoring and transparency.

There is an important balance between Separation of Concerns and Somebody Else's Problem. So while you shouldn't expect every designer on the team to worry about every detail of the design, you do need to ensure that the pieces fit together and that whole system properties (safety, robustness, etc.) are designed in. So you may have a Solution Architecture role (one person or a whole team, depending on scale and complexity) responsible for overall design integrity.

And when I say whole system, I mean whole system. In general, an IoT device isn't a whole system, it's a component of a larger system. A responsible designer doesn't just design a sensor that collects a load of data and sends it into the ether, she thinks about the destination and possible uses and abuses of the data. Likewise, a responsible designer doesn't just design a robot to whizz around in a warehouse, she thinks about the humans who have to work with the robot - the whole sociotechnical system.

(How far does this argument extend? That's an ethical question as well: as J.P. Eberhard wrote in a classic paper, we ought to know the difference.)

Verification, Validation and Testing

This is where we check that the solution actually works reliably and safely, is accessible by and acceptable to all the possible users in a broad range of use contexts, and that the mechanisms and controls are effective in eliminating unnecessary risks and hazards.

See separate post on Responsible Beta Testing.

These checks don't only apply to the technical system, but also the organizational and institional arrangements, including any necessary contractual agreements, certificates, licences, etc. Is the correct user documentation available, and have the privacy notices been updated? Of course, some of these checks may need to take place even before beta testing can start.

Deployment and Operation

As the solution is rolled out, and during its operation, monitoring is required to ensure that the solution is working properly, and that all the controls are effective.

Regulated industries typically have some form of market surveillance or vigilance, whereby the regulator keeps an eye on what is going on. This may include regular inspections and audits. But of course this doesn't diminish the responsibility of the producer or distributor to be aware of how the technology is being used, and its effects. (Including unplanned or "off-label" uses.)

(And if the actual usage of the technology differs significantly from its designed purpose, it may be necessary to loop back through the risk assessment and the design. See my post On Repurposing AI).

There should also be some mechanism for detecting unusual and unforeseen events. For example, the MHRA, the UK regulator for medicines and medical devices, operates a Yellow Card scheme, which allows any interested party (not just healthcare professionals) to report any unusual event. This is significantly more inclusive than the vigilance maintained by regulators in other industries, because it can pick up previously unknown hazards (such as previously undetected adverse reactions) as well as collecting statistics on known side-effects.

Incident Management

In some domains, there are established procedures for investigating incidents such as vehicle accidents, security breaches, and so on. There may also be specialist agencies and accident investigators.

One of the challenges here is that there is typically a fundamental asymmetry of information. Someone who believes they may have suffered harm may be unable to invoke these procedures until they can conclusively demonstrate the harm, and so the burden of proof lies unfairly on the victim.


Finally, we need to think about taking the solution out of service or replacing it with something better. Some technologies (such as blockchain) are designed on the assumption of eternity and immutability, and we are stuck for good or ill with our original design choices, as @moniquebachner pointed out at a FinTech event I attended last year. With robots, people always worry whether we can ever switch the things off.

Other technologies may be just as sticky. Consider the QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to slow the typist down to prevent the letters on a manual typewriter from jamming. The laptop computer on which I am writing this paragraph has a QWERTY keyboard.

Just as the responsible design of physical products needs to consider the end of use, and the recycling or disposal of the materials, so technological solutions need graceful termination.

Note that decommissioning doesn't necessarily remove the need for continued monitoring and investigation. If a drug is withdrawn following safety concerns, the people who took the drug will still need to be monitored; similar considerations may apply for other technological innovations as well.

Final Remarks

As already indicated, this is just an outline (plan). The detailed design may include checklists and simple tools, standards and guidelines, illustrations and instructions, as well as customized versions for different development methodologies and different classes of product. And I am hoping to find some opportunities to pilot the approach.

There are already some standards existing or under development to address specific areas here. For example, I have seen some specific proposals circulating for accident investigation, with suggested mechanisms to provide transparency to accident investigators. Hopefully the activity framework outlined here will provide a useful context for these standards.

Comments and suggestions for improving this framework always welcome.

Notes and References

For my use of the term Activity Viewpoint, see my blogpost Six Views of Business Architecture, and my eBook Business Architecture Viewpoints.

John P. Eberhard, "We Ought to Know the Difference," Emerging Methods in Environmental Design and Planning, Gary T. Moore, ed. (MIT Press, 1970) pp 364-365. See my blogpost We Ought To Know The Difference (April 2013)

Amany Elbanna and Mike Newman, The rise and decline of the ETHICS methodology of systems implementation: lessons for IS research (Journal of Information Technology 28, 2013) pp 124–136

Regulator Links: What is a DPIA? (ICO), Yellow Card Scheme (MHRA)

Wikipedia: Diffusion of Responsibility, Separation of Concerns, Somebody Else's Problem 

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Responsible Beta Testing

Professor Luciano Floridi has recently made clear his opposition to irresponsible beta testing, by which he means "trying something without exactly knowing what one is doing, to see what happens, on people who may not have volunteered to be the subjects of the test at all".

In a private communication, Professor Floridi indicates that he would regard some of the recent experiments in facial recognition as examples of irresponsible beta testing. Obviously if the police are going to arrest people who decline to participate, these are not exactly willing volunteers.

Some of the tech giants have got into the habit of releasing unreliable software to willing volunteers, and calling this a "beta programme". There are also voices in favour of something called permanent beta, which some writers regard as a recipe, not just for technology but also for living in a volatile world. So the semantics of "beta" has become thoroughly unclear.

However, I think this kind of activity does not represent the original purpose of beta testing, which was the testing of a product without the development team being present. Let me call this responsible beta testing. While it is understood that beta testing cannot be guaranteed to find all the problems in a new product, it typically uncovers problems that other forms of verification and validation have missed, so it is generally regarded as a useful approach for many classes of system, and probably essential for safety-critical systems.

This is how this might work in a robotic context. Let's suppose you are building a care robot for the elderly. Before you put the robot into production, you are going to want to test it thoroughly - perhaps first with able-bodied volunteers, then with some elderly volunteers. During the testing, the robot will be surrounded with engineers and other observers, who will be able to intervene to protect the volunteer in the event of any unexpected or inappropriate behaviour on the part of the robot. Initially, this testing may take place in the lab with the active participation of the development team, but at least some of this testing would need to take place in a real care home without the development team being present. This may be called beta-testing or field testing. It certainly cannot be regarded as merely "trial and error".

For medical devices, this kind of testing is called a clinical trial, and there are strict regulations about how this should be done, including consent from those taking part in the trial based on adequate information and explanation, proper reporting of the results and any unexpected or unwanted effects, and with the ability to halt the trial early if necessary. It might be possible to establish similar codes of practice or even regulations for testing other classes of technology, including robotics.

(In the same communication, Professor Floridi fully agrees with the distinction made here, and affirms the crucial importance of responsible beta testing.)


Lizzie Dearden, Police stop people for covering their faces from facial recognition camera then fine man £90 after he protested (Independent, 31 January 2019)

This blogpost forms part of an ongoing project to articulate Responsibility by Design. See Reponsibility by Design - Activity View (May 2019)

Friday, May 10, 2019

The Ethics of Interoperability

In many contexts (such as healthcare) interoperability is considered to be a Good Thing. Johns and Stead argue that "we have an ethical obligation to develop and implement plug-and-play clinical devices and information technology systems", while Olaronke and Olusola point out some of the ethical challenges produced by such interoperability, including "data privacy, confidentiality, control of access to patients’ information, the commercialization of de-identified patients’ information and ownership of patients’ information". All these authors agree that interoperability should be regarded as an ethical issue.

Citing interoperability as an example of a technical standard, Alan Winfield argues that "all standards can ... be thought of as implicit ethical standards". He also includes standards that promote "shared ways of doing things", "expressing the values of cooperation and harmonization".

But should cooperation and harmonization be local or global? American standards differ from European standards in so many ways - voltages and plugs, paper sizes, writing the date the wrong way. Is the local/global question also an ethical one?

One problem with interoperability is that it is often easy to find places where additional interoperability would deliver some benefits to some stakeholders. However, if we keep adding more interoperability, we may end up with a hyperconnected system of systems that is vulnerable to unpredictable global shocks, and where fundamental structural change becomes almost impossible. The global financial systems may be a good example of this.

So the ethics of interoperability is linked with the ethics of other whole-system properties, including complexity and stability. See my posts on Efficiency and Robustness. Each of these whole-system properties may be the subject of an architectural principle. And, following Alan's argument, an (implicitly) ethical standard.

With interoperability, there are questions of degree as well as of kind. We often distinguish between tight coupling and loose coupling, and there are important whole-system properties that may depend on the degree of coupling. (This is a subject that I have covered extensively elsewhere.)

What if we apply the ethics of interoperability to complex systems of systems involving multiple robots? Clearly, cordination between robots might be necessary in some situations to avoid harm to humans. So the ethics of interoperability should include the potential communication or interference between heterogeneous robots, and this raises the topic of deconfliction - not just for airborne robots (drones) but for any autonomous vehicles. Clearly deconfliction is another (implicitly) ethical issue. 

Note: for a more detailed account of the relationship between interoperability and deconfliction, see my paper with Philip Boxer on Taking Governance to the Edge (Microsoft Architecture Journal, August 2006). For deconfliction in relation to Self-Driving Cars, see my post Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019).

Mauricio Castillo-Effen and Nikita Visnevski, Analysis of autonomous deconfliction in Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Testing and Evaluation (IEEE Aerospace conference 2009)

Michael M. E. Johns and William Stead, Interoperability is an ethical issue (Becker's Hospital Review, 15 July 2015)

Milecia Matthews, Girish Chowdhary and Emily Kieson, Intent Communication between Autonomous Vehicles and Pedestrians (2017)

Iroju Olaronke and Olaleke Janet Olusola, Ethical Issues in Interoperability of Electronic Healthcare Systems (Communications on Applied Electronics, Vol 1 No 8, May 2015)

Richard Veryard, Component-Based Business (Springer 2001)

Richard Veryard, Business Adaptability and Adaptation in SOA (CBDI Journal, February 2004)

Alan Winfield, Ethical standards in robotics and AI (Nature Electronics Vol 2, February 2019) pp 46-48

Related posts: Deconfliction and Interoperability (April 2005), Loose Coupling (July 2005), Efficiency and Robustness (September 2005), Making the world more open and connected (March 2018) Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019)

Monday, April 22, 2019

When the Single Version of Truth Kills People

@Greg_Travis has written an article on the Boeing 737 Max Disaster, which @jjn1 describes as "one of the best pieces of technical writing I’ve seen in ages". He explains why normal airplane design includes redundant sensors.


and redundant processors, to guard against a Single Point of Failure (SPOF).


But ...


As a result of this design error, 346 people are dead. Travis doesn't pull his punches.


He may not know what led to this specific mistake, but he can certainly see some of the systemic issues that made this mistake possible. Among other things, the widespread idea that software provides a cheaper and quicker fix than getting the hardware right, together with what he calls cultural laziness.


Agile, huh?

Update: CNN finds an unnamed Boeing spokesman to defend the design.

"Single sources of data are considered acceptable in such cases by our industry".

OMG, does that mean that there are more examples of SSOT elsewhere in the Boeing design!?

How a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) in the MCAS software could have caused the Boeing 737 Max crash in Ethiopia (DMD Solutions, 5 April 2019) - provides a simple explanation of Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) as a technique to identify SPOF.

Mike Baker and Dominic Gates, Lack of redundancies on Boeing 737 MAX system baffles some involved in developing the jet (Seattle Times 26 March 2019)

Curt Devine and Drew Griffin, Boeing relied on single sensor for 737 Max that had been flagged 216 times to FAA (CNN, 1 May 2019) HT @marcusjenkins

George Leopold, Boeing 737 Max: Another Instance of ‘Go Fever”? (29 March 2019)

Mary Poppendieck, What If Your Team Wrote the Code for the 737 MCAS System? (4 April 2019) HT @CharlesTBetz with reply from @jpaulreed

Gregory Travis, How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer (IEEE Spectrum, 18 April 2019) HT @jjn1 @ruskin147

And see my other posts on the Single Source of Truth.

Updated  2 May 2019

Sunday, April 21, 2019

How Many Ethical Principles?

Although ethical principles have been put forward by philosophers through the ages, the first person to articulate ethical principles for information technology was Norbert Wiener. In his book The Human Use of Human Beings, first published in 1950, Wiener based his computer ethics on what he called four great principles of justice.
Minimum Infringement of Freedom. “What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom.”

Meanwhile, Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were developed in a series of short stories in the 1940s, so this was around the same time that Wiener was developing his ideas about cybernetics. Many writers on technology ethics argue that robots (or any other form of technology) should be governed by principles, and this idea is often credited to Asimov. But as far as I can recall, in every Asimov story that mentions the Three Laws of Robotics, some counter-example is produced to demonstrate that the Three Laws don't actually work as intended. I have therefore always regarded Asimov's work as being satirical rather than prescriptive. (Similarly J.K. Rowling's descriptions of the unsuccessful attempts by wizard civil servants to regulate the use of magical technologies.)

So for several decades, the Wiener approach to ethics prevailed, and discussion of computer ethics was focused on a common set of human values: life, health, security, happiness, freedom, knowledge, resources, power and opportunity. (Source: SEP: Computer and Information Ethics)

But these principles were essentially no different to the principles one would find in any other ethical domain. For many years, scholars disagreed as to whether computer technology introduced an entirely new set of ethical issues, and therefore called for a new set of principles. The turning point was at the ETHICOMP1995 conference in March 1995 (just two months before Bill Gates' Internet Tidal Wave memo), with important presentations from Walter Maner (who had been arguing this point for years) and Krystyna Górniak-Kocikowska. From this point onwards, computer ethics would have to address some additional challenges, including the global reach of the technology - beyond the control of any single national regulator - and the vast proliferation of actors and stakeholders. Terrell Bynum calls this the Górniak hypothesis.

Picking up the challenge, Luciano Floridi started to look at the ethical issues raised by autonomous and interactive agents in cyberspace. In a 2001 paper on Artificial Evil with Jeff Sanders, he stated "It is clear that something similar to Asimov's Laws of Robotics will need to be enforced for the digital environment (the infosphere) to be kept safe."

Floridi's work on Information Ethics (IE) represented an attempt to get away from the prevailing anthropocentric worldview. "IE suggests that there is something even more elemental than life, namely being – that is, the existence and flourishing of all entities and their global environment – and something more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy." He therefore articulated a set of principles concerning ontological equality (any instance of information/being enjoys a minimal, initial, overridable, equal right to exist and develop in a way which is appropriate to its nature) and information entropy (which ought not to be caused in the infosphere, ought to be prevented, ought to be removed). (Floridi 2006)

In the past couple of years, there has been a flood of ethical principles to choose from. In his latest blogpost, @Alan_Winfield lists over twenty sets of principles for robotics and AI published between January 2017 and April 2019, while AlgorithmWatch lists over fifty. Of particular interest may be the principles published by some of the technology giants, as well as the absence of such principles from some of the others. Meanwhile, Professor Floridi's more recent work on ethical principles appears to be more conventionally anthropocentric.

The impression one gets from all these overlapping sets of principles is of lots of experts and industry bodies competing to express much the same ideas in slightly different terms, in the hope that their version will be adopted by everyone else.

But what would "adopted" actually mean? One possible answer is that these principles might feed into what I call Upstream Ethics, contributing to a framework for both regulation and action. However some commentators have expressed scepticism as to the value of these principles. For example, @InternetDaniel thinks that these lists of ethical principles are "too vague to be effective", and suggests that this may even be intentional, these efforts being "largely designed to fail". And @EricNewcomer says "we're in a golden age for hollow corporate statements sold as high-minded ethical treatises".

As I wrote in an earlier piece on principles:
In business and engineering, as well as politics, it is customary to appeal to "principles" to justify some business model, some technical solution, or some policy. But these principles are usually so vague that they provide very little concrete guidance. Profitability, productivity, efficiency, which can mean almost anything you want them to mean. And when principles interfere with what we really want to do, we simply come up with a new interpretation of the principle, or another overriding principle, which allows us to do exactly what we want while dressing up the justification in terms of "principles". (January 2011)

The key question is about governance - how will these principles be applied and enforced, and by whom? What many people forget about Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics was that these weren't enforced by roving technology regulators, but were designed into the robots themselves, thanks to the fact that one corporation (U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc) had control over the relevant patents and therefore exercised a monopoly over the manufacture of robots. No doubt Google, IBM and Microsoft would like us to believe that they can be trusted to produce ethically safe products, but clearly this doesn't address the broader problem.

Following the Górniak hypothesis, if these principles are to mean anything, they need to be taken seriously not only by millions of engineers but also by billions of technology users. And I think this in turn entails something like what Julia Black calls Decentred Regulation, which I shall try to summarize in a future post. Hopefully this won't be just what Professor Floridi calls Soft Ethics.

Update: My post on Decentred Regulation and Responsible Technology is now available.

Algorithm Watch, AI Ethics Guidelines Global Inventory

Terrell Bynum, Computer and Information Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Luciano Floridi, Information Ethics - Its Nature and Scope (ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society · September 2006)

Luciano Floridi and Tim (Lord) Clement-Jones, The five principles key to any ethical framework for AI (New Statesman, 20 March 2019)

Luciano Floridi and J.W. Sanders, Artificial evil and the foundation of computer ethics (Ethics and Information Technology 3: 55–66, 2001)

Eric Newcomer, What Google's AI Principles Left Out (Bloomberg 8 June 2018)

Daniel Susser, Ethics Alone Can’t Fix Big Tech (Slate, 17 April 2019)

Alan Winfield, An Updated Round Up of Ethical Principles of Robotics and AI (18 April 2019)

Wikipedia: Laws of Robotics, Three Laws of Robotics

Related posts: The Power of Principles (Not) (January 2011), Data and Intelligence Principles from Major Players (June 2018), Ethics Soft and Hard (February 2019), Upstream Ethics (March 2019), Ethics Committee Raises Alarm (April 2019), Decentred Regulation and Responsible Technology (April 2019)

Link corrected 26 April 2019