C2B is existing vocabulary

I called the new Mechanical Turk service by Amazon a C2B marketplace in my previous post (People as a Service). I hadn't heard the term before and tagged my post accordingly using Technorati. Through technorati I've discovered that quite interestingly this has been defined already by Thibaud Elzière, CEO/Founder of Fotolia.com in his blog.

Tags: mturk C2B

People as a Service

There's an awful lot of talk of Software as a Service (Phil Wainewright's blog is an excellent resource) but Amazon have just flipped it by launching Mechanical Turk. This is SofwarePeople as a Service. The idea being that certain tasks are best peformed by humans. They call them Human Intelligence Tasks (HIT). The nuts and bolts are that as a requestor you use their web services to make HIT requests. HITs are processed by people registered with Amazon's mturk website. Requestors pay money for successful HITs, and people completing them get paid. Amazon gets a 10% commision for providing the service. The end result is that a new marketplace has been created. I'll call it a Consumer to Business (C2B) marketplace as its a polar reverse of the typical Business to Consumer (B2C) model.

Tags: mturk web2.0 B2C C2B

Operational View

I believe that there is a gap in traditional software development processes for the monitoring and management of 24x7 solutions. I think this gap has always existed but the move to OnDemand providers, or more specifically moving solutions into a outsourced managed services has brought this to a head. In my opinion there are several levels of monitoring

1. Network layer - Can I connect
2. Hardware later - Is it up/down
3. Application Platform/Server - Is the server up/down
4. Application - Is my application on top of the Application Platform/Server up/down
5. User Transaction based - Is transaction x working
6. User Transaction within Capacity - Is transaction x performing as expected
7. User Transaction within Capacity and Adhering to business rules - Is transaction x performing as expected according to the business rules (end of month accounts=service cannot be down)

My opinion is that operations get to 2, maybe 3 but no further. The reason for this is because typical software processes start with Business Use Cases, and follow through to design, implementation etc... There is no concept of operational use cases. The end result is that a software developer does not focus on the operational model of the solution ( abit like the way security is not a consideration). Most monitoring platforms (EM/Compuware/Tivoli/Openview included) provide a framework for monitoring, however the people responsible for implementation on top of that framework are focused on operations. They do not have the domain knowledge to get past 2,3 above. They also speak a different language than development. If we are to solve this problem then the operational use cases must get promoted further up the software process so that its treated as a first class concern rather than an afterthought. Operations and development need to engage better and only then would we have an opportunity to get to level 6 or 7. I think this is an industry problem. Most of the monitoring frameworks provide an implementation model to get to 6+7 but they should be treated almost as a language paradigm. The operational specific use cases must be layered over the framework by operations and developers with application domain knowledge.

Tags: Operations Monitoring Software Process

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