My chat with Martin was a real eye opener – there is a tremendous amount of legal risk to you when using the Internet and ignorance does not protect you!

Martin Kratz leads the intellectual property practice and co-leads the ecommerce practice for Bennett Jones. His practice is focused around intellectual property and technology law, which includes substantive patent, copyright and trademark matters as well as matters of intellectual property transactions, IP commercialization, IP strategy and opinions, data protection, privacy, ecommerce, strategic alliances, mergers, acquisitions and technology transfers among technology companies. His practice is focused on the energy, electronic commerce, cloud computing, Martin Kratz software, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, entertainment and related industries.

Martin continues to be internationally recognized as a leading lawyer. Among other recognitions he is identified:

as one of Canada's most creative lawyers by Lexpert-Thomson in the US guide to Canada's 100 Most Creative Lawyers;
as one of Canada's leading lawyers in The Lexpert/American Lawyer Guide to the Leading 500 Lawyers in Canada in intellectual property, and formerly when the categories were covered also in information technology and biotechnology law;
as a leading Internet and e-commerce lawyer in Who's Who Legal: Internet & e-Commerce;
as one of Canada's leading lawyers in Woodward White's The Best Lawyers in Canada for intellectual property law, technology law and information technology law;
in Who's Who Legal 2013 in Information Technology, Patents and Sports & Entertainment;
as highly recommended in technology law by the Practicing Law Institute;
as recommended by Chambers and Partners for information technology law and intellectual property law;
in The International Who's Who of Internet & e-Commerce Lawyers by Who's Who Legal;
as a pre-eminent lawyer in information technology transactions in Euromoney's Guide to the World's Leading Information Technology Lawyers;
as a leading lawyer in Intellectual Property and Information Technology by Lawday; and
as a leading Canadian IP practitioner by winning the Corporate Intl Global Award, Intellectual Property Advisory Excellence in Canada.

Martin has written over 285 publications on various topics involving intellectual property, technology law or on related topics including the following books as sole or co-author: Canadian Internet Law, 2013; Canadian Intellectual Property Law, 2nd Ed., 2010; Outsourcing (Canada) 2012; IP&IT Handbook 2011/12: Volume 2: Data Protection – Canada; Licensing 2012 (Canadian Forms & Precedents), Electronic Commerce Law 2012; Trademarks and Industrial Designs, 2002 (Canadian Encyclopedic Digest); Internet Law: A Business and Professional Guide, 1998 (Canada's first Internet law text); Canadian Intellectual Property Law, 1998; Obtaining Patents, 2nd Edition, 1999 (1st Edition published 1995); Protection of Copyright and Industrial Design, 1999, 2nd Edition (1st Edition published 1994); Information Systems Security: A Practitioner's Guide, 1994 (2nd Edition published 2003); The Computer Virus Crisis, 1992, 2nd Edition (1st Edition published 1989 and translated into Russian, Japanese and Dutch versions); and Control and Security of Computer Information Systems, 1988.

Martin is national co-director of Osgoode Hall Law School's Intellectual Property LLM program. Teaching or having taught courses in Intellectual Property Law, Biotechnology Law and Internet Law at several law schools, Martin is an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto) and at Concordia University College (Edmonton). At Osgoode Hall Law School (York University) Martin teaches (as lead national instructor), Intellectual Property Transactions for the Intellectual Property LLM Program. He also acts as Regional Director of the E-Business LLM program. Martin teaches an IT security and law course in the MSc program at Concordia.

Among other memberships, Martin is a member of the American Bar Association's Science & Technology, Patent, Copyright & Trademark, Sports & Entertainment and International Sections, a member of the Intellectual Property Committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, a Fellow of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, and a member of the Advocacy Committee of the Canadian Information Processing Society.

To plug in to Bennett Jones (http://bennettjones.com)

To plug into Martin's bio (http://bennettjones.com/KratzMartin/)

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:50:
From your considerable success history, describe some major challenges you have faced and your solutions to the challenges that would be of value to businesses today?
"....Not to fear change in the world but rather to seek to understand what is driving the changes and see how it can be turned into an advantage....Think about your audience what they need and how they need to be informed and to communicate in a way that is meaningful to them....Let the customer know what you are doing for them and why, not merely the result....Seek to find balance as an individual so that you can have endurance for stable and committed long term effort in business...."

:04:00:
With your deep insights as an Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Intellectual Property (IP) legal pioneer, from your viewpoint what are the top five future challenges for business executives today and what are the solutions?
"....Managing the tensions between the efforts of some current industries to seek even higher degrees of protection for ICT innovation, where the trade-off of providing greater protection is that we enrich the current generation at the expense of future generations which are less able to build on what came before....Addressing the issue of internet privacy....The migration of ICT services to the Cloud....Managing the risks of bring your own device policies while still providing flexibilities that employees are seeking....There's a generational challenge looming for executives as younger workers expect to be free to express themselves using social media even in the workplace...."

:08:43:
What are some future disruptive innovations that business executives should be watching for from a legal perspective?
"....Cloud computing involving security and privacy protocols and issues of ease of leaving a Cloud service provider's service are core issues....Security risks and mobile access risks for mobile devices and the challenge of bring your own device policies....Social media having transformative impact in our society....Locational technologies provide unique business promotional opportunities, but if abused can pose security, privacy and personal risk to users and reputational and direct liability for a business....There is growing interest in the use of 3D printers that are claimed to increase the risk of IP infringement....Another innovation risk is the use of IP rights themselves, especially patent rights as a tool to seek to extract value from successful businesses...."

:12:22:
What are the privacy and security compliance obligations users need to consider before they adopt a Cloud-based solution (public sector and private sector)?
"....A key factor in each customer's decision of whether to adopt Cloud-based solutions is understanding if the solution meets the customer's compliance requirements. In Canada, key compliance issues are privacy and security because we have mandatory privacy and security obligations and those are applicable both for the private sector and public sector. I'll differentiate between those two because while there are a lot of similarities, the rules are generally the same...."

:17:07:
What happens if you have a global organization, which for example is based in Canada, but the data resides in the US in the Cloud? Or because it's a global organization, personal records may be held in Asia, Europe, Africa, etc.; what are the implications of that?
"....Generally privacy laws relate to activities not to locations, so the activities of collecting, of using, of storing, of disclosing will trigger the possibility of privacy laws....What global organizations do is that they assess all of the legal regimes that could be applicable to their information handling practices and seek to develop a synthesized set of privacy policies and practices that allow them to be compliant in all jurisdictions, and their privacy policies typically reflect that type of integrated approach...."

:18:46:
Increasingly with the Cloud there are smaller organizations and non-profit organizations, who at a very low cost establish a global footprint. One can see all of the legal implications from that requiring considerable legal advice as to what the implications are. How is that managed if you have all of these smaller organizations including non-profits worldwide who perhaps don't have that ability or resources to do this? Are there any resources available that they can make use of or are lower in cost to help in this endeavour?
"....As a principle point a business has a responsibility to comply with the laws and jurisdictions to which it is subject, regardless of its size or its capability....The tools available for the smaller companies are to consider hiring people who have that kind of global experience as part of the workforce for the smaller company....The second approach they seek to use is in their agreements....The third approach is to look to industry associations or professional associations as sources of information and best practices in terms of compliance...."

:21:36:
You are an active blogger, written articles in this area, and also authored one or more books in this area. Do you have any recommendations as resources?
"....I think a starting point of excellent materials are the websites of the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioners of the provinces and the federal Privacy Commissioner....If people are interested at a professional or deeper level there are a number of textbooks in this area that will give you a deeper analysis of those privacy obligations and requirements...."

:23:28:
What are some contractual issues in Cloud computing?
"....The starting point is to look at what the cases and the decisions of the Privacy Commissioners have suggested....There should be covenants restricting collection, use and disclosure of the information other than for purposes for which the Cloud service provider is expressly retained....There should be covenants requiring the service provider to maintain specific privacy, safety, security and backup standards for the personal information....There should be obligations to provide access to personal information to the company and its customers or employees as required by their own privacy obligations....Some of these requirements for organizations using foreign service providers include notification of individuals if the service provider outside of Canada will collect personal information on behalf of the organization, and notification if the organization is transferring personal information to a service provider outside of Canada, and information on the outsourcing practices of the organization including its policies...."

:26:09:
Can you share some insights into the investigation and managing domain name disputes?
"....The typical types of domain name disputes we have are trademark infringements where an existing company's trademark is used as a domain name to direct traffic or to try to extort the trademark owner to purchase the domain name. There is also reverse cyber-squatting where a bricks and mortar company has a wish to use a domain name and they haven't been made internet-savvy....Another class of domain name conflicts are commentary sites where disgruntled customers or employees vent about a company's business and an existing domain name is misspelled in an effort for a certain part of the population that mistypes the name will be directed to the other site....There are two approaches legally to address these types of issues...."

:31:20:
What are the key points around the investigation and managing website misuse?
"....One of the key issues is to identify the defendant. There are legal tools available to identify the anonymous poster of content on a website, and there are some powerful non-litigations tools available such as addressing whether the unlawful material posted on a website violates the terms of use of the website and whether or not there are statutory regimes available...."

:32:28:
Social media adoption is so widespread around the world today. What are the issues around the investigation and managing social media disputes?
"....Improper social media use can expose a business to a wide range of liability including defamation, harassment, creating a hostile work environment, copyright violation, breach of confidence where a company or third party's secrets are posted, securities law violations have to deal with disgruntled customers or employees, content issues of such things as pornography and hate speech....I think the most important thing that we have as a cultural factor as we adopt social media is we have to start to educate ourselves about smart conduct so we limit our individual exposure to legal liability...."

:40:00:
Social media has an increasing presence in our lives so we have this identity either from a corporate side or as an individual. Do you know of any services that can protect that individual brand, your individuality in some way from all the kinds of misuses that can occur because of the internet?
"....There are a variety of services that purport to do this, but it is not a trivial thing to do....The broad legitimate services look at a wide range of service providers who address questions about identity theft and reputational monitoring and then look at the experience or track record of those kinds of services to see if it's worth adopting or using any of their products...."

:41:55:
How can you validate the reputation of these people providing services? Is there a clearing house or an industry association or some kind of government body that says these people are okay and their services are fine and we can validate them?
"....Efforts to address these issues are efforts to create Trust Marks that identify companies on the internet that have particular adherence to practices (such as the Better Business Bureau), or satisfy certain security or privacy requirements, and while these can be mimicked, the idea is that you can check with the source of the Trust Marks in order to verify that the company in question is actually legitimate....The issue of who you can rely on is an area where there is a real opportunity for industry associations and groups of users in particular areas to establish their own rating services and to use those types of services as sources of information to seek to identify who could be relied on. The difficulty of those kinds of referral services is that they can become 'paid to place services' so despite your reputation you might be able to pay your way into their good graces...."

:44:14:
You are a highly respected legal authority both in the ICT area and also in intellectual property; do you know of any professional legal associations that could provide this kind of additional service, especially connected to intellectual property?
"....There are a variety of those services that seek to identify lawyers who have abilities in certain areas....In terms of identifying websites, what most lawyers tend to do is not look to Wikipedia or other translation sites, but rather look to primary sources. Visit the Canadian Intellectual Property office....All publishers as you know are vulnerable to disintermediation because of the internet, but there's a circumstantial guarantee of trustworthiness that the law book publishers like other publishers provide to their content so they provide to their services in an effort to synthesize the law and make it more readily available to the lay readers as well as to the professional reader...."

:46:25:
ICT Pioneer Kelly Gotlieb has long expressed his views about privacy. What are the current issues from your viewpoint on privacy?
"....In Canada as in other countries we don't permit privacy to become a barrier to the investigation of national security or terrorist threats. The point being in discourse there is an expectation of privacy being an absolute blanket, but privacy is not an absolute right and it is constantly being weighed against other values that are also important to society. The issue is that for most issues, privacy provides a range of tools for individuals to seek to protect their privacy, however the most fundamental has to begin with the individual not to disseminate their personal information widely without care...."

:49:01:
Can you define this area of Creative Commons and then talk about intellectual property issues on the Internet?
"....With recent efforts to increase the level and scope and in some cases also the term of the copyright protection the amount of content available to nourish the public domain is threatened. So there are various initiatives such as the Creative Commons which seeks to carve out protected areas for use of content, and as a result the people who choose to make their materials available through Creative Commons licensing regimes or the like are actually the copyright holders who are making decisions to make sure those materials are available...."

:53:00:
How is the legal profession evolving?
"....In general lawyers don't do enough to explain what they do and how that role plays an important part of ensuring change and stability in society. A number of law societies are aware of this and are doing more of that type of outreach. I think other than that the legal profession continues to evolve to adapt to new modes of practice, to adapt to increase international competition, to adapt to the increasing needs of clients whose expectations have changed in particular because of digital technology...."

:54:50:
What is the driver behind your long-time support of non-profits?
"....To find that balance that I talked about earlier. It's a way to give back to the community some of the benefits I think I have and also a way to share and support good causes or organizations that are doing important work. In some cases I might be able to contribute in a positive way to that organization's ability to move their cause or their work forward...."

:55:53:
Was there a defining moment in your childhood or some kind of inspirational story that happened or a decision later in life?
"....I have a tremendous thirst for learning so it's a great way to meet people, to enrich your own life to learn about different organizations and different causes and to help to make the world a better place. Ultimately if we don't contribute ourselves individually to make the world better and we all expect somebody else to do it the world isn't going to get any better...."

:56:58:
In your background you also do a considerable amount of teaching and you are the co-director of the Intellectual Property program at Osgoode Hall and you teach for a number of universities. What motivates you in that realm?
"....It forces me to actually keep current and to think about the changes that are going on around me and to try to keep up with them....In every class there are some really bright and innovative thinkers and they approach problems in a completely different way. They are not thinking traditionally and in a linear manner so I really enjoy the learning experience that I get from the students as well....There's a benefit in getting to know people who are working in the field and up and coming and might be able to fit in what my firm might need...."

:58:30:
Can you describe some areas of controversy in the areas that you work?
"....Managing the challenges and tensions between privacy and security between the user and the service provider on those kinds of issues....Managing the tension between seeking a freedom to innovate and the protection of existing innovation....Balancing the decision making around risks and benefits in respect to the adoption of new technology such as Cloud solutions but in other industries, other types of technologies....Helping clients to manage complex disputes or complex transactions tends to raise controversies....Helping clients to seek to manage the risks involved in the adoption of new business models or new technology where legal framework is not sufficiently evolved to provide certainty...."

:01:01:08:
As a long-time contributor to ICT, do you feel computing should be a recognized profession on par with accounting, medicine and law with demonstrated professional development, adherence to a code of ethics, personal responsibility, public accountability, quality assurance and recognized credentials?
"....In my view this makes sense as self-governing professions are common in areas where there is a need for public protection and where the professionals have unique skills and the public is protected by the profession's management of the skill level for the professionals and enforcement of those standards....I think it is in society's general interest and in the Information Technologies sector's interest that the ICT profession be more widely recognized and encouraged and that be a feature that employers look at in making hiring decisions or for staff for whom they want minimum levels of competence...."

:01:04:11:
From your extensive speaking, travels, and work, do you have any stories you can share (perhaps something amusing, surprising, unexpected, amazing)?
"....I really enjoy learning and traveling and I've benefited from the opportunity to speak at many international forums and to meet people from many different sectors, Europe, South America, throughout North America, Asia, Australia and elsewhere and through that it enriches me to learn how other people solve their problems. Unfortunately I don't have an amusing anecdotal story that I can share in a public setting...."

:01:05:45:
If you were conducting this interview, in which areas would you have asked questions and then what would be your answers?
"....Getting into even into more detail about the issues of controversy in the ICT sectors in areas such as Cloud computing or social media....Drilling down further in the area of intellectual property itself....There's a wide range of interesting topics we could have gone through and the challenge really is one of time...."

:01:09:21:
Martin, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your deep experiences with our audience.

David Alan Grier is the past 2013 President of the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Fellow. He has served the society as Vice President of Publications, Director of Magazines, and Editor in Chief of the IEEE Annals. He has a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Washington in Seattle, and is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University.

He writes on the subject of technology and its social implications. His books include: "When Computers Were Human" (Princeton 2005), "Too Soon To Tell: Essays for the End of The Computer Revolution" (Wiley 2009), "The Company We Keep" (IEEE Computer Society, 2013), "The Computing Machines of Charles Babbage" (editor, IEEE CS, 2010). He is currently at work on a book on crowdsourcing.

He has served as Associate Dean or Program Director in schools of international affairs, engineering and liberal arts. He has also worked in industry, serving as a software designer for Burroughs Computer Corporation in the 1980s. David has created a new video channel on technology, technical workers, management and similar issues with short videos (mostly) released once a week. The URL is http://video.dagrier.net.

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:19:
Now that you have completed your term, what were the top challenges in your 2013 IEEE CS and President role?
"....Getting people to get their knowledge and understanding of technology to the right place and the right job....You don't really appreciate the roles that international boards and countries have in all of this until you are actually out there on the road and seeing what's happening...."

:01:00:
What are the top challenges for the IEEE CS going forward?
"....We're really trying to help those top-level, top-skilled people do their work, develop the new projects and get the teams they need. I spent a lot of last year working with software engineering standards and with professional standards to help groups train the next generation of professionals...."

:01:59:
Looking back what would you say were your top successes?
"....Top successes for me personally were being able to represent the Computer Society and being able to introduce it into new places...."

:02:32:
You are a long time participant and contributor to the IEEE CS and yet there is nothing like being the President, so what surprised you?
"....A lot surprised me. I would say the most engaging was working in China and trying to build contacts and partnerships there, helping strengthen the Chinese technical workforce and realizing that institutions that look just like American universities or American research labs had their own spin and that we had to work to understand what their needs are and that they are often quite different than ours...."

:04:40:
Are there any takeaways that could help what you are doing in the US?
"....I think one of the fundamental lessons I learned quickly is don't assume you understand the organization you're walking in to see. It may look like something familiar, but you need to listen very carefully to understand first what their needs are...."

:06:09:
What will you do next?
"....I've seen that there is a real need in our community to move between laboratory, academic research, business startups and established business and in particular, help organizations work with technical talent. I think business organizations in particular can be a little bit naïve about how they get their technical talent prepared and working for them, and I think technical talent can be quite naïve about how organizations work and they can sometimes be frustrated that they're not being well utilized....What I'm looking at right now (whether it's working with a different organization, working in the IEEE or working on my own), I'm exploring different options about helping people understand how to work with a technical workforce...."

:07:39:
You have created a new video series. What prompted this and what are your smart (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals? Can you describe lessons in some of your videos?
"....My goal is to get a series that resonates with a certain class of people in business and in research laboratories. The measurable part of that obviously is getting a number of hits and getting feedback that says that I'm reaching an audience....I'm interested in reaching managers who are working with technology and who are either organizing teams or working with teams...."

:09:40:
Do you have a social media campaign as well?
"....I have been starting that and have been working with Twitter and LinkedIn because market research that I have at hand says that the kind of people that I'm trying to reach use those two tools the most. I've done interviews now with a couple people who may help me on brand management and they have pushed me toward Reddit and Flashdot and the others...."

:10:08:
What kind of tools are you using to do the videos? Something like Skype?
"....I'm using Skype at times when I'm getting people into the video. I'm using the standard video production tools. One of my goals is to not do a big investment in production costs and learn to tell the story right. You want to have a certain quality of production and you can achieve that more by insight than by huge investment...."

:13:09:
What are your next books and what value will they provide to the audience?
"....I spent 6 weeks in India, 6 weeks in China, about 5 weeks in Europe, lots of trips to California, Silicon Valley, New York, New Jersey — there's a picture there which is quite interesting about how this community works and how it talks to itself and the role organizations like the Computer Society have in that and I think there's a story there....Something I've been pondering for some time which has become clearer to me, particularly as I've seen the way that leaders of technical organizations work, has been the connection between software and software systems and the way we organize work. I think the discussion between the software systems and the organizational ideas makes for a fascinating discussion. It is also a very interesting marker in where we are as a global civilization right now...."

:15:19:
What do you think are the top upcoming disruptive innovations?
"....I think the biggest thing is the increasing use of a combination of machine intelligence and market incentives in large systems. I think they are being used in consumer marketing more and more, but we are also starting to see them in organizational management, in the control of large systems like power grids and freeways and in other ways that are engaging people in large scale behavior....That discussion between those two kinds of data and the kinds of systems that are being built up around them I think are going to be some of the next wave of major disruptive and innovative systems...."

:17:08:
What are the top ICT growth regions internationally?
"....I think many of them are places that we know and understand. The two things that have been fascinating me have been India and China....I also think there's opportunity in Africa and I think we are starting to see the point where they are getting enough of the infrastructure and the trained people and enough people recognizing that there is skill and talent there. We'll see how well this develops and advances...."

:19:56:
Are there any areas of controversy in the areas that you work?
"....The big area of controversy is one we really don't see and talk about very much (something that has been with computing and with factory production forever), and that is what is it doing to the workforce? There are people and groups of people who benefit tremendously from the technological changes. There are also groups of people who could very easily get pushed to the side and we need to pay attention to them and think about how we engage the talent of these workers and these citizens, and help use that to strengthen their communities as well as the world at large....It's something that we need to be aware of and think how broadly we can design what we are doing, how broadly we can make institutions that help the world at large...."

:25:35:
What are your views on the rapid growth in free content?
"....It's going to be the big challenge that we will be wrestling with for the next decade or so. There is increasing free content and there's different kinds of content and we need to start understanding some of the things that puts a value that says this is good, this is not good, this is useful or not and how we provide enough economic incentives to make sure that these things are out there...."

:32:02:
There is rapid growth in crowdfunding, what are your views on this?
"....From having seen the startup world I think there is a great deal of value in it and should be able to help people move beyond that first step of funding your startup business off your credit card and moving it into a going concern. Small scale crowdfunding startup equity funds could make a tremendous difference getting small businesses going. We had enough history with Kickstarter and other non-equity forms of funding to know that there are problems and that nothing we can do can get rid of them ahead of time and remove the need for those engaging in these transactions to be aware, do due diligence and pay attention to what's going on. I do think that overall there's value in it and in particular it allows communities to support things that serve them and without having to go to a bank or to a large scale source of capital. This new kind of funding allows local communities to respond more strongly to local needs....."

:35:54:
Do you think it's going to completely change how companies are financed or do you think it's going to be some kind of a merge between traditional (banks, VC, angel) and crowdfunding, or perhaps the two working side-by-side or one replacing the other?
"....I think they are going to end up working together very closely because I think they fill different needs....One of the challenges in starting a business is not just the technical idea. There are a whole set of skills that you have to hit with minimal competency and one of the roles that angel investors do in the initial rounds of friends and family and things like that is often it brings people into your business that have some of that expertise....At the same time I've seen other organizations that have gotten themselves so far on crowdfunding and done very well say they really have to bring in someone who has operations experience to take them to the next stage. That's often an indication that they want, need and would benefit from not only the expertise, but the investment that would come from someone who would directly or indirectly provide that, so they are going to work together to do different things...."

:40:58:
What about digital currencies, what are your views?
"....I think this is part of the general trend of the last 15 years of breaking down and weakening some of the positions of traditional institutions, both companies and government institutions....It seems to me that as long as it is a speculative currency there's not a lot of damage that's going to come from it. Once it moves into the greater sense of being a transactional currency it will be interesting to see where it goes. The major currency players have a lot at stake in this and I see it's going to be a long hard discussion and that the results are not going to be decided soon. I suspect there will be a role for non country-based digital currency (least of which for moving things among various country currencies and across borders), but I'm not sure that bitcoin is necessarily it yet...."

:43:56:
What improvements in policy should happen in the next two years and what would you like to see internationally (in technology first in the US and then internationally)?
"....Certainly the US is in the final stage of making sure that technical IP coming from government research is freely available....Some issues relating to the movement of the IT professionals around the globe....Most of the standards out there for software engineering don't quite have all of them out there on cybersecurity and I think that actually is going to be the big global issue. How do we deploy standards in those two areas to protect the global IT infrastructure and what responsibilities do the individual countries have for doing it?...."

:46:40:
From your extensive speaking, travels, and work, please share some stories (amusing, surprising, unexpected, amazing).
"....I have opportunities to see students, listen to their aspirations about what they are trying to do and the challenges they face in moving from a classroom environment to an employment environment and particularly to a business environment. India was a place where I talked to a lot of students....They've got to engage a world that now stretches to Silicon Valley, that includes the European major software centers, that goes over China, and they've got to get themselves to think in a way that communicates with the rest of the world. How they get their organizations started, how they get support from their local government and how they play it globally is sort of a fascinating thing...."

:49:58:
If you were conducting this interview, what 3 questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers?
"....'If you knew it was going to be this kind of year would you have signed up at the start?'....'What's the issue that we have to address in the next couple of years?'....'If you could change things about the technology world what would they be?'...."

:55:22:
David, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your deep experiences with our audience.

* Bill Gates indicates “As a leader in defining many of the key concepts of distributed computing that enable today’s mission-critical computer systems, Leslie has done great things not just for the field of computer science, but also in helping make the world a safer place. Countless people around the world benefit from his work without ever hearing his name. I like to think this award is also recognition of the amazing work of Microsoft Research, which has become a great home for scientists and engineers who want to tackle the industry’s most difficult challenges. Leslie is a fantastic example of what can happen when the world’s brightest minds are encouraged to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

* ACM president Vint Cerf – a previous Turing Award recipient — “as an applied mathematician, Leslie Lamport had an extraordinary sense of how to apply mathematical tools to important practical problems. By finding useful ways to write specifications and prove correctness of realistic algorithms, assuring strong foundation for complex computing operations, he helped to move verification from an academic discipline to practical tool.”

* IT World Canada Microsoft researcher wins Turing Award

-----

For the enterprise, Leslie’s work on TLA and this TLA+ specification language will improve efficiency and reliability in software development and is worth a good look.

Leslie Lamport first started working with computers using vacuum tubes to build digital circuits while attending the Bronx High School of Science in New York. He went on to get his BS from MIT, MA and PhD from Brandeis, all in Mathematics. In addition, Lamport has been bestowed with honorary doctorates from France's Université de Rennes in 2003, Germany's Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel in 2003, Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2004, the Università della Svizzera Italiana in 2006, and France's Université Henri Poincaré in 2007. Turing Award

His first employer was the Mitre Corporation and Marlboro College while still a student, then Massachusetts Computer Associates while finishing his PhD and after completion. From 1977-1985 Leslie contributed to SRI International, 1985-2001 DEC/Compaq and 2001-present Microsoft Research.

Leslie's honors include:

National Academy of Engineering (1991)
PODC Influential Paper Award (2000)
Honorary Doctorate, University of Rennes (2003)
Honorary Doctorate, Christian Albrechts University, Kiel (2003)
Honorary Doctorate, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2004)
IEEE Piore Award (2004)
Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing (2005)
Honorary Doctorate, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano (2006)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2007)
Honorary Doctorate, Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy (2007)
LICS 1988 Test of Time Award (2008)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2008)
National Academy of Sciences (2011)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2012)
Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing (2013)
ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2013)
ACM A.M. Turing Award (2013, awarded in 2014)

Leslie is a legend in computing circles as evidenced in his significant body of published work. His foundational work in the theory of distributed computing is acknowledged by computing luminaries worldwide including ACM President Vint Cerf — a previous Turing Award recipient; Wen-Hann Wang, Intel's Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director of Intel Labs; Alfred Spector, Google Vice-President of Research, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. One of the most cited papers in computing history is his 1978 paper Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. From the IT World article, "the Turing Award citation notes that Lamport originated causality and logical clocks, replicated state machines and sequential consistency. Along with others, he invented the notion of Byzantine failure and algorithms for reaching agreement despite such failures; he contributed to the development and understanding of proof methods for concurrent systems, notably by introducing the notions of safety and liveness as the proper generalizations of partial correctness and termination to the concurrent setting."

As noted by Bob Taylor, founder and manager of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Digital Equipment Corp.'s Systems Research Center, "The Internet is based on distributed-systems technology, which is, in turn, based on a theoretical foundation invented by Leslie. So if you enjoy using the Internet, then you owe Leslie."

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:38:
When did you hear of this extraordinary honour, recipient of what is widely considered the Nobel Prize in Computing, the 2013 ACM Turing Award? What was the reaction from your colleagues and your family?
"....I received tons of congratulatory emails. It hasn't had any time to affect how they act with me — I don't expect it to have an effect...."

:01:08:
How will the Turing Award impact your work, your influence, your thinking?
"....I hope that it might get people to take what I say a little more seriously, especially now when I'm devoting a good part of my activity trying to show people how they should go about programming...."

:01:45:
Can you describe what were the catalysts early on to drive your passion towards science? Even in your early history you were building digital circuits in vacuum tubes. What made you do all of those things?
"....An interest in digital circuits came about, if I recall, from a book I just randomly picked out from a library shelf, a book about the mathematics of boolean circuits and that got me and a friend going around scrounging vacuum tubes and trying to build little digital circuits...."

:02:49:
Your Paxos algorithm is widely used today and you wrote Paxos made Simple to explain the simplicity of the algorithm. Can you talk more about this Paxos algorithm?
"....I suspect that in five or ten years people will look at it and say 'boy that really is simple, almost obvious, why did he get a prize for doing that'? But that's the way that science progresses....It's an algorithm that is used to implement full power in distributed systems. It's sitting down at a fundamental level that's independent of what the system does and it's a tool that you can use to build lots of different kinds of distributed systems...."

:04:07:
Can you talk about how Paxos has influenced Microsoft Research and maybe some of the products that are out there?
"....I'm not sure it has influenced Microsoft Research any more than it has influenced any other part of computer science. People who were interested in distributed computing will know the algorithm and some of them have the interest in modifying it, extending it, handling special cases and all that sort of thing. As far as products, basically any distributed full powered system that people build these days is most likely going to have Paxos in use somewhere inside of it...."

:05:21:
Due to the profound nature of the work as you mentioned it's in Windows Azure storage and I guess in the Rest Availability Proxy and the Cosmos data storage and query system. Your work in general has been applied to the Windows server transaction protocol and the modeling in the Oslo platform for model driven applications which was inspired from your work in temporal logic of actions, so I can see all the implications of it within the organization.
"....The way Paxos works, where there are no failures the algorithm is essentially what any reasonably good engineer would have written, the way they would have approached the problem. The difference between using Paxos and not using Paxos is in the engineering system, but in the engineering world if you ask an ordinary engineer or programmer to program a distributed system they'd say you program something that looks like Paxos in the absence of failures and then you would just write some code that would somehow try to handle the failure situation and most likely it would handle some failures and wouldn't handle other failures. What Paxos does is give you a complete algorithm that tells you what to do in any case. If you build your system on top of Paxos then you know that it's not just going to handle the ordinary cases or the cases you are able to think of, you know that it will do the right thing no matter what happens, even in those cases that you wouldn't think of...."

:08:12:
I'm thinking of your paper on Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System and how that came about, and where you wrote an introduction to a paper called the Maintenance of Duplicate Databases by Thomas and Johnson and you came to some realization that it did not preserve causality and that led you to this idea of Time Stamps and how could it be applied to Complex systems such as banking, airlines and reservations systems. Can you talk more about how that came about – this Time Clocks, Ordering of Events in a Distributed System?
"....I was not writing the introduction to the Johnson and Thomas paper. I received a copy of their technical report and that led me to think about the problem and understand two things. First, they had not gotten it quite right in the sense that their algorithm could seemingly violate causality (that one command issued to the system might have affected a second command, but the way that they ordered the command in their algorithm the second command could have appeared or been executed first before the first command apparently violating causality). I was able to fix that. The second thing I realized is that the algorithm didn't apply just to the particular problem they were solving (that it could be applied to basically implement any distributed system in the same sense that Paxos can be used to implement any distributed system), the difference is that in the Times, Clocks paper there is an assumption that no process failed and the later Paxos algorithm of course considered the possibility of failure...."

:10:23:
I guess the applications of these would be things like the banking and airline reservations systems that are out there?
"....That could be an application, on the other hand if you look at banking and airline reservations systems they have to tolerate failure so they would probably be using something like the Paxos algorithm....What was explained in the Time, Clock paper is how you could implement this arbitrary state machine in which things happen one at a time and implement it in a distributed system where you have commands coming from different places...."

:12:06:
Another piece of important work was this bakery algorithm as described in your "A New Solution of Dijkstra's Concurrent Programming Problem". Can you talk more about this, the problem of tackling mutual exclusion?
"....Bakery algorithm is theoretically very interesting in the sense that it was the first mutual exclusion algorithm that did not depend on some lower level mechanism, but it's still mutual exclusion. Mutual exclusion means that the mutual exclusion problem is given a system of thoughtful processes; each one of them has some sort of command that wants to be able to execute, to have them synchronized so that no two of them are executing their commands at the same time....It's a very nice algorithm so it makes a nice example that people have used a lot, and it's interesting because of this property of being the true mutual exclusion algorithm that doesn't have any practical impact, any practical use these days...."

:13:52:
Another area that's very much famous with this is the Byzantine Generals problem regarding triple modular redundancy. Leslie gets into more detail about resolving the issues and the idea of signatures and so on.
"....After I wrote the Time, Clocks paper the next step was to handle failures....I extended the Time, Clocks work to handle arbitrary faults and delayed the algorithm I came up with which makes use of digital signatures. At the time hardly anybody knew about digital signatures....I had an algorithm that extended the Time, Clocks algorithm and it was published in a little known Journal and almost nobody saw that paper. Shortly after doing that work I moved to SRI and the group at SRI had a NASA contract for building a highly reliable distributed network of computers for flying an airplane. People had discovered that the commonly used algorithms for trying to achieve reliability didn't work in the presence of completely arbitrary failures, particularly that the triple modular redundancy were to handle one failure in three computers and just have them vote on the output, and the idea being that as long as two of the computers were correct they would produce the right output and therefore the vote would choose the right value regardless of the what the third computer did. People at SRI realized that didn’t work in the face of arbitrary failures and if you look carefully at the problem you'll discover that the triple modular redundancy doesn't work in the presence of that. Their algorithm didn’t assume a digital signature and in fact their proof that three didn't work they needed four didn't handle the case where they had digital signatures, so my algorithm actually could handle one failure with just three computers. At any rate we published a paper containing their contribution and my contribution and I realized that was a very important result. The whole nature of the problem, the realization that a computer telling different information to different other computers makes certain things impossible, and I decided that it really needed a nice story to go with it to make it popular so I phrased the problem in terms of Byzantine Generals...."

:19:45:
It's a fascinating history and story on the Byzantine Generals and what you were able to achieve and the story behind it. Can you get into more detail about that?
"....I should say that I learned about the value of a story from Dijkstra (a great computer scientist and he started the whole field of concurrent computing)....So when I devised the Paxos algorithm, I thought this is a nice algorithm, this is important, I need a story and so I created a story. Unfortunately that story was not a very good story and it just confused the heck out of people and nobody would have understood the algorithm....Except Butler Lampson read the paper and he got it right away and he went around lecturing telling people that's the way they should build their reliable distributed systems...."

:21:56:
You have this TLA and this TLA+ specification language and the PlusCal algorithm and the tools associated with it. You also wrote a book published in 2002 about specifying systems using the TLA+ language and tools for hardware and software engineers. Can you give an overview of the reason behind it and the value?
"....I realized I've come to understand that a lot of the problems (certainly in programming distributed systems, but also in any kind of programming), really have to do with the high level design of what you should do before you start proving. That is, you need to think carefully about what you're doing and write down what you're doing before you start implementing....Through what in retrospect seems like a surprisingly long path, I came to a method of writing specifications that's essentially based on ordinary mathematics (the kind you learn in math classes, sets and functions and things like that), and that language is TLA+. Thanks to some other people (especially my colleague Yuan Yu who wrote a model checker for TLA+), there are tools that designers can use to check their designs or algorithm designers can check their algorithms before they start coding them...."

:25:56:
You have this document preparation system that you created. Can you give a little bit of history behind that?
"....I was going to write a book and typeset it myself and I decided that TeX was the right typesetting system to use, but to use TeX I would need a set of macros. For example you would write a macro to produce a bulleted list, so I decided to write a set of macros that I would need in my book and I figured with a little extra effort I could make those macros usable by other people and that was the set of macros that I created for LaTeX...."

:27:10:
What are your current research interests?
"....Most of my work is around TLA+ and largely writing about how people should use it, or not so much about using TLA+ as trying to get people to think mathematically about what they are doing because I believe that's the best way of thinking rigorously is using mathematics....Most of the research involved in TLA+ was done years ago, but there's still some things to do. One of the projects that I'm involved with is a real research project which is building a theorem prover for TLA+...."

:29:50:
What are the broader implications and applications of your current work?
"....The application of my current work is the TLA work. Regarding the language TLA+, I know that one domain of applicability is in the design of distributed systems and there I can very confidently say that if you are building a large distributed system and you want it to work right and you use TLA+ on it, it will really help you....But the broader message I have I think is applicable to everyone who builds computer systems whether they are little programs or large healthcare systems: it's important to think before you build and to think above the code level and the best way to think rigorously is to think mathematically...."

:32:02:
You've done a lot of research over the years and some of the most recognized research ever. There must be some lessons you can distill from doing all of that - can you share any that you may have learned?
"....That's a very difficult question because when I look back at my career I can look at any particular piece of work that I've done and say 'That was just a stroke of luck!'....Looking back it's clear that it couldn't have been just good luck because nobody is that lucky — there's just too many things. What it is that allowed me to have so much more luck than most other people I don't really know. The only thing I can think of is my background in mathematics and the fact that I'm very good at thinking rigorously and mathematically...."

:35:00:
Leslie Lamport talks about an important quality that is very important for a researcher to have.
"....There are some problems that are just innately complicated and ugly and don't have any nice solutions, and one of the abilities one needs as a researcher is to be able to tell whether a problem is something that can have a nice elegant solution or is one of those ugly tar pits that working on will get you nowhere. I think I was pretty good at that and at least I didn't waste too much time in tar pits. I don't know how many great problems I missed because I incorrectly thought they were tar pits, but that is one ability that a researcher needs...."

:36:37:
You've encountered many people in your past and present, can you name one or two or more that stand out who really inspired you to become the computer scientist that you are?
"....The people who I think influenced my thinking the most, I would single out Richard Palais who was my thesis advisor and who has become a colleague and a friend....Edsger Dijkstra, not as a mentor but through his writings he set a standard of clear thinking that I naturally adopted....I learned a lot from the many colleagues that I encountered throughout my career. I counted that and I had the good fortune to have about a dozen Turing Award winners who I would consider as colleagues in the sense of the people I've had significant technical conversations with...."

:38:42:
There's the ACM and they have many resources that have supported your work in some ways so which kinds of assets do you find are the most valuable for your work from the ACM?
"....Throughout my career the ACM Journals have pretty much been the pre-eminent ones....The ACM has influenced me through their Journals and the conferences...."

:39:49:
If you were to summarize your long and distinguished career is there a lesson you'd want to share to the broad audience?
"....I think one thing that has contributed a lot to my success is my ability as a writer. This is not so much as good writing, but it's the ease with which writing comes. I can sit down and write and it's a natural thing for me to do....So the one lesson I would want to teach probably everybody in your audience is that writing and writing well is important and takes practice and you should be practicing it all the time....A more fundamental piece of advice is to be a craftsman; that is, everything you do you should try to do well. If you are a programmer you should try to write a beautiful program and if you are writing an email you should try to write a well written piece of email...."

:42:49:
Leslie, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

Dr. Mathai Joseph CAREER

Education: B.Sc. (Physics, 1962), M.Sc. (Physics, 1964) at the University of Bombay; Post-Graduate Diploma in Electronics at Welsh College of Advanced Technology (1965), Cardiff; Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, U.K. (1968).
Academic: Fellow, Senior Research Scientist at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (1968-1985); Professor of Computer Science at University of Warwick, U.K. (1985-1997).
Visiting Appointments: Visiting Professor, Carnegie-Mellon University (1980-81); Visiting Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands (1990-92); Visiting Professor, University of Warwick (1997-98); Visiting Professor, University of York, U.K. (2001-2004).
Industry: Executive Director at Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune and Executive Vice-President at Tata Consultancy Services (1997-2007).
Other: Member-at-large ACM Council (2008-12); Founder member ACM India Council (2009-12).
Author: Digital Republic India's Rise to IT Power, History and Memoir. This book analyses the rise of Indian computing. Interleaving history and memoir, it describes key moments and decisions which led to the slowdown in the 1960s and 1970s, and the changes in the 1980s that fuelled the ascent of the software industry to pre-eminence in what has become one of the world's most important industries. Along the way the author reflects on the nature of science, the importance of computing and the interplay of theory, experiment and technology. He discusses the wide differences in the academic perception of computing in India and the rest of the world and how it affected the growth of Indian computer science as well as the computing industry.
More details at www.mathaijoseph.com

BYWAYS & SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

"The first computer I saw was in 1963. It was the TIFRAC, built at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. I was studying for an M.Sc. in Physics with Electronics at the University of Bombay (now Mumbai) and a fellow student who worked at the TIFR invited two of us to see 'The Computer'. Getting into TIFR was easy: he had told us to nonchalantly get onto the TIFR bus at its first stop. The bus took us to the back of the building and we asked our way up to his office. He looked pleased, self-important and slightly embarrassed to have us in tow as we walked towards 'The Computer Hall'. I had expected to see something vastly complex but self-explicating, that announced its capabilities to those like us who enquired. And there would be scientists waiting to tell young postgraduates all we wanted to know about the computer. What we saw instead was a room full of open racks packed with circuit modules, wires hanging out here and there and a few people too busy to answer questions. 'You want to see computer? There it is', said one as he walked away urgently. I wanted to know more but there was not even a hint I could take away to think about. If he wasn't going to tell us about the computer, I needed to find out for myself...."

For more see http://www.stephenibaraki.com/cips/v109/mathai_joseph_profile.html for a list of Publications and a full BYWAYS profile.

DISCUSSION:

Opening Comment: Welcome today, to our interview series with outstanding professionals. I am Stephen Ibaraki, and I am conducting an exclusive interview with the eminent Dr. Mathai Joseph: Internationally Renowned Author, Executive, Researcher, and Technology Advisor; Distinguished Computer Scientist.

(Q)uestion:
Mathai, thank you for sharing your considerable expertise, deep accumulated insights, and wisdom with our audience.
(R)esponse: "Stephen, it's a pleasure to be talking to you again! You know, after our last conversation I started thinking about writing a book and that is now published. I'm not sure what will emerge after this conversation but it could well be something I am not expecting!"

Q:
You are a founder of the ACM India Council. How was this done and what value does ACM provide to business, industry, governments, education/academia, media, and society in India?
R: "I was elected a member-at-large of the main ACM Council in 2008. At the time, ACM had a strong interest in setting up a new regional council in India as part of its plan for globalization, to widen ACM's areas of activity across the world. There was a great deal of support from ACM office bearers — the President Wendy Hall, the CEO John White and the COO Pat Ryan and the whole ACM Council — and the first task was to create an ACM body in India. A provisional ACM India Council was created in 2009 with leading figures from academic and industrial organizations and we went through the legal and financial steps to set up ACM India. As Treasurer, I worked closely with the co-Chairs, Anand Deshpande and PJ Narayanan, and the Secretary Srinivas Padmanabhuni and we patiently made our way through the formidable Indian bureaucracy to get all the necessary approvals! In 2012, we held the first ACM elections in India and a new elected ACM India Council took over in July 2012. This body now has the role of policy making for ACM India and setting up the executive framework.
The great thing about ACM is that it is so widely known for its quality and standards that creating recognition was not difficult. Over the last two years, ACM professional chapters and student chapters have been set up all over India and new initiatives have been started in education, research and organizing conferences and meetings. A new ACM India dissertation award was instituted and the first awards have been made. Activities have started in improving computer science education in colleges and schools though, given the size of the country, there is an almost unlimited amount of work ahead of us.
Unlike ACM in the US, most ACM India professional members are from companies and only about 30% are from academic institutions. Companies have been extremely generous in supporting ACM India, both for the annual ACM India event (which has a number of distinguished speakers, including Turing award laureates) and for specific programs."

Q:
Why should governments, corporations, universities and ICT professionals use ACM services such as the digital library, attend their conferences, join their Special Interest Groups (SIGS) and Chapter, read their publications, and make use of their learning center?
R: "Two reasons: no-one disputes that ACM sets the gold standard for quality! ACM awards and publications are treated with respect everywhere. ACM also provides a framework for professionals and students to interact, have discussions, learn and teach. There is no other comparable body capable of doing all this."

Q:
We can learn a lot from your daily activities. What do you do every day, and what lessons can you share that will guide the audience in their careers and lives?
R: "I am an e-mail junkie so the first thing I do each morning is to settle down with a mug of tea and read my Inbox in different accounts! I usually do this from about 6am to 7am by which time I feel I have caught up with events and people all over the world. After breakfast, I go to my room in the nearby TCS office and get started on the rest of the day's work: usually writing or reading reports, talking to people and occasionally attending meetings. As I have retired from operational roles, I try and keep the number of meetings down and concentrate more on nudging things forward, suggesting ways by which an activity can be hastened and talking to people who might be able to contribute. I try and help where possible by offering an opinion, reminding people of precedents and so on.
In the late afternoon, I usually go to the gym for an hour or so. I have always found that rhythmic physical exercise helps to quiet my mind so it's great that it's also good for the body! More seriously, from time to time I try and train for the next 10 km race, which is as far as I have run. One day, I keep telling myself when I am out on an early morning run, one day I'll do the half-marathon and then who knows what! But I don't think too much about that.
When I was writing my book, I worked on it at night when things were quiet. I read over what I had written the next day and tried to see how others may view the content. There was often research to be done on sources and facts and it was easier to do that in the day."

Q:
In each of your roles (past and current), describe three major challenges you faced and your solutions to the challenges that would be of value to businesses and ICT professionals?
R: "The first challenge is building credibility, of persuading people that your views and opinions need to be listened to. Decision makers everywhere tend to work in small coteries and getting a new voice heard needs a lot of work. I worked outside India for many years and found that though it needs a great deal of effort to be heard if you're a relative outsider, after that things get done quickly. It's easier in India for me to be heard but it's also much harder to actually get things done!
The second challenge is to form an alliance of people you can work with: a team, a group, a special interest group, or whatever. You can only get something worthwhile done if other people join you: a few may actually work for you in the same organization, but most others must have enough reason to join forces with you.
The third challenge is to be as critical as possible of your own work. It is far, far better to know about a defect or limitation in what you have accomplished than to be told about it by someone else. Quite often, a shortcoming is an indication of where further work will be useful so being critical can help you find directions along which to move your work."

Q:
You recently authored a 'must-read' book. What prompted you to write this book?
R: "The book was published just three months ago so I am not sure it's in the 'must-read' class yet! I wrote the book because I felt that the voice and views of people in science and technology are heard so little that usually all that non-specialists (i.e. most people!) have is a journalistic pastiche. Computing and IT have been atrociously misrepresented in India (and elsewhere) and we have allowed ourselves to be presented with another completely artificial voice. Yet computing has changed India more than any other technology. There are over 650 million cellphone connections and they have provided a route to democracy that no amount of legislation or political promise could have provided. And cellphone technology has succeeded precisely because of what can be accomplished by the computer inside: most Indians today hold in their hands more computational power than in the computer centres of the 1960s and 1970s.
I feel it is as important that the nerd's words (!) are heard as it is to strip away the notion that we are all unthinking nerds. I have tried to relate my work with the rest of my life and with what was going on around me at the time. To take one example, at the time of the Bangladesh war of 1971, I was involved with some very demanding and critical project work. However, that war was not just a distraction from this work — it was something that occupied my mind and the minds of everyone around me so much that work had to take second place. How could I write about the work without also writing about the war?"

Q:
Can you overview the chapters in your book?
R: "The book analyses the rise of Indian computing. I talk about the early days, the growth of computing as a science and how it relates to other sciences. Most of my work was experimental, where one had to build a system to evaluate how an innovation actually works. It's harder for people to accept that such work is also science.
I tried to write the book for a general audience so the memoir does not have a detailed technical history. It is a personal account of the incredible explosion of an industry seen through the eyes of someone who was there from the beginning.
Starting with college in Bombay in the early 1960's, the narrative moves to postgraduate work in Cardiff and Cambridge at the time when computing began to take form and its boundaries were better understood. We lived in a changing world: the explosive effervescence of pop music, fashion growing from both the fizz of Carnaby Street and the war surplus stalls in Portobello Road, literature moving past the existential pipe-dreams of the Beats. This was also the time when computer science began to take form.
The next chapters are set at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) where science was revered. Computing however was considered a bag of techniques suitable only for solving large numerical problems. Outside the TIFR, India had begun to confront the realities of computing, with opposition by trade unions countered by the relentless move of technology. Despite the odds, computer science was made to grow in that inhospitable soil and our research group won recognition among its worldwide peers. At the TIFR, the success was viewed with complete indifference: barriers put in place corralled computing within narrow boundaries and stifled further progress. So I reluctantly decided to move to the UK where I had been offered a chair in computer science.
Going to the University of Warwick brought many changes, from the constraints in the India of the 1980's to the first flush of Thatcherite Britain, from the uncertainties of computing at the TIFR, to the strident demands of teaching and research in a challenging environment. The university administration sought total control over departments while the government played university against university in reducing unit costs and massively raising student numbers. In this demanding environment, one had to learn that while simple survival was possible, success needed hard-fought recognition for courses taught, work done and research money earned.
Eventually, the draw of the homeland proved irresistible and my wife and I returned to India in 1997. I found a job at the research centre for Tata Consultancy Services in Pune and in 1999 I became Executive Director. Working for a company meant that the financial constraints of university research disappeared and the demand was for quick achievement. This period of furious growth of the Indian software industry raised accusations from within and without of incarcerating young people in a web of body-shopping and dull mindless work. In fact, it was the formative time of an enormously successful industry where research and development had to find a way to contribute to the work of fast-moving project teams."

Q:
Share a few unique and meaningful lessons from your book — lessons that will be hard to find elsewhere.
R: "This is the first memoir by a computing person in India, one of the first by any Indian scientist. We tend not to tell our own stories yet it is vitally important for others to get a first-hand account of what things were like so that they can understand how we got to the present.
We are not all single-minded nerds! Scientists have so many other interests that contribute to their work. Was I listening to Bach's Mass in B when I began to see how to solve that problem? Or was it John Coltrane? What was I thinking of when Auden recited from his new book? Why does the simplicity of the majestic lines of the cathedral at Chartres appeal to me more than the Bavarian Gothic of the churches in Munich?
We tend to have higher standards for certainty and knowledge than in many other fields. We are less willing to embark on political, literary or artistic criticism than our counterparts in those fields are to venture with often grossly ignorant views about science. So perhaps there are some lessons to be learnt from scientists.
Finally, science is no less important to the human condition than any other field. "

Q:
What value will the audience receive from the book?
R: "I wrote the book largely to describe the life of a person who became a computer scientist before that term was invented. Surprisingly, most of the messages I have talk about the early part of this journey, the descriptions of college life in Bombay (as it was then) in the 1960's. Some are from people around my age, so perhaps there is nostalgia, but many are from people who were not born then. The first four chapters seem to have struck an unexpected chord.
There has also been interest in the account of an Indian student in England at a time when there were far fewer Indians there than today. The descriptions of my early days in Cardiff and the later period in Cambridge seem to have fascinated a lot of people.
A few have commented on my account of life as a research student. One said in his blog, "I found the section where he describes how his supervisor allowed him to find his own feet and interests, and yet guided him gently to enhance the rigour of his work, a wonderful lesson in socialization into the research process."
I am pleased with that comment as I did want to convey the difficulties of starting to do research, an experience I went through and I have seen my research students go through.
Many of the non-technical readers skipped the parts with descriptions of computing. I am a little disappointed because I had hoped I had simplified things to the point where they would be easy to understand! For the slightly more technical reader, the book also provides a history of the growth of computing in India, the slow early steps, the bureaucratic barriers and then what has amounted to being a rush of success. "

Q:
With your insight as a top executive, what are some of the future challenges for business executives in small and medium sized businesses and in enterprises? What are the solutions?
R: "I was an executive vice-president of Tata Consultancy Services for about ten years only, so I can make no claims to a long career as a manager or executive. Like the whole Indian software industry, the company was changing enormously during those ten years. Even today, when analysts describe it as the bellwether of the industry, what is often ignored is its ability to change and adapt. Brick-and-mortar and smoke-stack industries require ten to fifteen years to change the nature of their business; software service companies have to transform themselves every two to three years if they are to survive. All work must contribute to this agility, from the way the projects are undertaken, to the kind of research and development that needs to be done (something of special interest to me). Tailoring R&D goals and processes to match the current and future demands of large software companies is still an evolving story; there are no major successes we can point at today but we are certainly getting better and better.
Small companies tend to be based around a single idea or a single product. The successful ones will be absorbed by the heavyweights and the others will fade away — and remember nine of every ten new companies are not successful. The large companies have their own hierarchies and inertia which resist change. Few major innovations come from large companies because their willingness to take on risk is limited by their rigid processes. IBM had to create a completely new division in a new location to run their PC business because they saw how different it had to be from their established businesses of mainframe computers, discs and printers. Mid-sized companies fit somewhere in between and they have to grow if they have to meet market demands."

Q:
What future disruptive innovations should business executives be watching??
R: "I will give a few examples where I feel there will be major changes.
First, the iPad showed us that most people don't want computers, they want well-engineered devices that help them to undertake useful tasks. I think computers will disappear into devices and make them far better tailored to human use than in the past. Already, PC sales are dropping and people are moving to tablets and tablet-like phones so the change has started.
Second, large companies still have substantial IT divisions to develop and run their systems. It does not make sense for a bank to employ thousands of people for their IT systems when their business is managing money. After all, steel companies cannot survive without rail and sea links but they do not run freight railway networks and shipping companies. Why should an insurance company, an entertainment company or an airline have an IT division? The career prospects for people working there are so limited that there is a high staff turnover, even though salaries are above normal. The most compelling reason is usually that these companies need to bring new products to their customers with very short lead times. With the Cloud, I see a great deal of the computing and software infrastructure of an industry being standardized: the basic functions of a bank (or an insurance company, an airline) are identical to those of its competitors so there is no reason for these to have a proprietary design. Companies distinguish themselves by their products and I think software companies will build on the infrastructure and come with near-market-ready products that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a customer within days.
Third, when one company merges with or acquires another, auditors and accountants will carefully go through their books and assets to value the company. No-one bothers to value the software systems that virtually run the company, yet the operations of the company are as critically dependent on these systems as on physical plant and equipment. The emphasis in valuation has to move away from looking at static and physical assets to valuing transactions: what is the full end-to-end cost of selling a ton of steel or an airline seat? In which part of the software lifecycle are its systems and how soon will they need to be replaced?"

Q:
Tell us more about your vision and objectives behind your current roles? What do you hope to accomplish and how will you bring this about?
R: "Most of my attention now is in education, where I spent a great deal of my career. In India, teaching is no longer a sought-out profession and we are woefully short of trained teachers in schools, colleges and universities. The big opportunity for us, and indeed for the whole world, is to be able to use the Internet to make good material available to students at all levels. It is going to need a great deal of experimentation to understand how best to combine online material with live teaching because teachers are always going to be the thought leaders and mentors of the education system. The requirements will vary from country to country: the Khan Academy has shown what can be done in Los Angeles schools but similar successes have not been reported from Pakistan, where Salman Khan came from. How does the model need to be adapted and changed, what sort of new material is needed? There are enough questions to keep us busy for some years and we will have to both make a start and share knowledge."

Q:
What are your insights and predictions for the Asia region?
R: "I am a perpetual optimist so I may not always be realistic! I think in India we are on the brink of a major set of economic and social changes that will transform both urban and rural life. The resistance to these changes provides a good indication of how different the future will be. I don’t know if it will start in one year, or in several, but change will happen and lives will improve. I am sure this is true also for other countries in Asia and change may well start first in smaller countries. "

Q:
Mathai, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

Robert Damashek has over thirty-seven years experience in enterprise architecture (EA) and integration for large-scale industry and government organization business process, EA, and IT projects, including supporting the Chief Information Officer and Chief Architect organizations at the U.S. Army and DoD. Mr. Damashek was instrumental in helping the DoD CIO and OMB Federal Chief Architect to develop an integrated common approach to EA, greatly improving collaborative enterprise planning.

Mr. Damashek is currently Binary Group's Chief Architect, leading the development and application of Binary's unique Outcome Driven Enterprise Approach™, and the development of solutions to support population health initiatives and improved outcomes.

Mr. Damashek is a thought leader in the technology and EA sectors, supporting agency participation in Federal, inter-agency, and joint interoperability activities in the DoD, Army, VA and other agencies. Mr. Damashek actively participates in the Federal Open Government Initiative, advising CIOs across the Federal Government on strategies and technologies to enhance transparency, collaboration, and outcomes.

Articles

See more at: http://www.binarygroup.com/blog/author/robert_damashek#sthash.7U8Rfkwg.dpuf

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:16:
Robert thank you for sharing your deep experiences with our audience.
"....I'm honored to have this opportunity to discuss the challenges and solutions that we are seeing that are vital to addressing large scale change in enterprise and government...."

:00:36:
What is your role with the Binary Group and describe the value to industry and professionals?
"....I am the Chief Architect at Binary Group. I've been with the group for about eleven years and lead our Center of Excellence in Enterprise Architecture and Software in which we develop unique methods for use with our clients. I also apply them in our enterprise architecture practice....As chief architect I provide thought leadership to clients to help demystify new and disruptive technologies to help them provide benefits to their missions, and to help avoid the challenges that happen where people tend to gravitate towards what they know versus new technologies that are inherently risky and scary...."

:04:26:
From your work with the Department of Defense (DoD), CIO and OMB Chief Architect, what are your top five tips for developing an integrated common approach to Enterprise Architecture?
"....Don't continue to do the same things that failed....We have to learn to think from the outside in and be mission focused....Focus like a laser on mission outcomes....Become an expert at understanding and articulating costs and risks that are involved when you don't change....Deliver things rapidly (which relates to the previous tip). Deliver insights to the decision-makers within their decision cycles...."

:08:48:
What are your top tips from your work in the Federal Open Government Initiative on strategies and technologies to enhance transparency, collaboration and outcomes? [Editor note: Noise in interview]
"....Open government means opening it up to more eyes, across silos that in the past have been blocked, so my tip there relates to how you look at leadership challenges, where they are dealing with these kinds of complexities becoming so overwhelming that they're stuck and it stands in the way of responding to new disruptions....Embrace openness as a mission enabler, not as lip service. Use these disruptions as opportunities to move the enterprise to get better performance so the enterprise can become less crisis-driven or reactive and become more performance-driven....Use cross stakeholder workshops to engage participation to where the openness helps drive out common outcomes....We should look for ways to incrementally influence open government, the idea of thinking globally, but acting locally. You build trust in a smaller, localized community rather than large-scale initiatives....From a technology side, I think people should leave big data in place whenever possible...."

:21:11:
Robert, beyond what we discussed already, can you describe some of your prior roles and some lessons from each role that would be of high value to the audience?
"....For many years I have supported the Enterprise Architecture group which is part of the Army CIO/G-6 and then supported the DoD CIO and the Office of Management and Budget as well as at the federal level. I provided enterprise architecture and my role was as an enterprise architecture strategic advisor to those organizations. Lessons learned from the Army is the tremendous cost of not having ready access to the intelligence of the enterprise in time to meet the decision-maker's cycle....Enterprise leaders (whatever scale enterprise they are dealing with) have to have the intelligence that they need to make decisions rapidly....Another lesson learned is that not having common semantics, sustains silos and allows infighting to get in the way of rational and objective thinking....At the OMB level is this whole idea of collaborative planning. Frameworks and tools and architecture methods are just that, they are tools, they support timely analysis and decision-making. We need to think about this as a discipline that will go into the strategic planning offices of our enterprises....In trying to introduce technology that is disruptive and strategic, I learned that it's very important to understand both the mission and what kinds of tolerance for risk and cost that your stakeholders have...."

:31:38:
Are there any additional top challenges you have faced and if so, what were your solutions to the challenges?
"....A lot of contractors, consultants and providers in the government space have dealt with this tremendous challenge of the government reductions. That was a challenge to our survival as practitioners and as an organization. In the process we found architecture is all about planning and doing good planning. We are able to have impact and communicate to strategic leaders in a way that we were never able to do before. This whole idea of making architecture relevant by being much more analytical and objective....Another challenge we face is breaking down silos of communication across agencies. In the Project Reach effort is a product that we produced which was built for the very purpose of connecting communities, the homeless and the care providers and case workers with the services which were available from the community and that were available locally to help people overcome issues with homelessness. The capability there is breaking down silos of communications across agencies...."

:38:28:
You've talked about projects and insights gained and you've shared about different Agencies. Do you have some recommended resources, links, sites, blogs or articles that you've published where people can get more details?
"....Go to our website at www.binarygroup.com and you will see a link to our blog....We are now engaged with Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI) and we're planning to work on a workshop in the spring....Gartner is a good source of thought about how to become outcome driven....There is the OMB's practical guide which was the practical guide to enterprise architecture and became the common approach to EA. Then the revision of the methodology has become the collaborative planning methodology. Those are two good documents to look at....The Zachman's organization (FEAC is part of the Zachman Institute), and there is work going on at that level. There's work going on at some of the different EA-focused learning organizations and some of the online groups that support the evolution of the Enterprise Architecture practice...."

:44:30:
What are the challenges with EA and where it has failed and what are some of the shortcomings of the existing frameworks that are out there?
"....In some respects what we've done with enterprise architecture is that we've treated it similarly to data warehouses. We've tried to take everything including reference models and architectures that cross everything from strategy down to implementation, etc. all the way down the line and capture all that knowledge with a consistent set of tools and in a consistent way and view with certain artifacts and made the problem that's common to huge data warehouses — they don't scale so they don't work as an enterprise solution....It just takes too long and costs too much to reengineer all the data that describes the enterprise and the data; the planning, design, engineering, operational and performance management stages are all captured in these different silos and they are different tools....Those are aspects of where things have failed and we need to think about how do we break down the problem and add value for our stakeholders and produce analysis which go into this decision, provide alternatives and courses of action for our leaders in a very short period of time and in a rapid way...."

:52:50:
Can you give us a deeper vision of how you see EA evolving and where you see it in 5 years?
"....I see it being fundamentally outcome driven where there's an initial upfront process which gets people on the same page (we need to know what's important to the stakeholders who we are supporting in strategic analysis), then we need to be very agile in our response....We are going to be part of a strategic planning group that supports all the C-level leadership positions of the enterprise and I see it moving within this 5 year period. In that regard it's going to be much more analytically focused and it's going to have to involve cost and risk analysis. We're going to have to do that more so I'm seeing the EA evolve to where we are part of a team of strategic planners that have cost and risk backgrounds who can do the kinds of analyses that really add value to the mission, to the senior leaders...."

:58:59:
Throughout this conversation you've talked about the challenges, opportunities and some of the work that you've done. You've given examples of resources that could be used and many case study type scenarios of what and where it's working and where it's not. This hints to the controversies in the field. Can you talk a little about some areas of controversy in EA?
"....I've talked a little about the role of the CIO changing and the diminishing role in some cases (at least at the lower-level CIOs) and the CIOs would like to have more authority that they have seen go away....Another area of controversy was the continuous push and pull of having a set of standardized architecture views or artifacts that Agencies could use. But largely the controversy has been the cost and time to deliver these very large and complex architectures....Another area has been the inflexibility of government procurement and contracting and conflicts with the advancing pace of technology and then how all of these sit in the context of a budget crunch...."

:01:07:37:
How do you see the evolution of EA as a recognized profession on par with accounting, medicine and law with demonstrated professional development, adherence to a code of ethics, personal responsibility, public accountability, quality assurance and recognized credentials? [See www.ipthree.org and the Global Industry Council, http://www.ipthree.org/about-ip3/global-advisory-council]
"....I certainly see a need for it. It's going to have to evolve as the practice evolves itself (which is a bit of a challenge)....I think that where the needs of the discipline are going are in flux enough that it's the wrong time to establish credentials for things that have been needed in the past, but will not be needed in the next few years. I think that things may move into the business schools and we may think of an inter-disciplinary type of management curriculum where architecture is blended as a tool of strategic planning and it is part of the process...."

:01:12:50:
From his extensive speaking, travels and work, Robert shares some stories (amusing, surprising, unexpected, amazing).
"....The story I alluded to a little earlier that happened at Bon Jovi's Soul Kitchen....You want to do something that helps people and it all comes down to people....and in the midst of it technology can only do certain things. It turns out that really what we're trying to do in most cases is an information system. We are trying to connect people with people and services with services and trying to meet people's needs...."

:01:26:17:
Robert, if you were conducting this interview, what questions would you ask and then what would be your answers?
"....Why is enterprise architecture a passion for you?....Why did you go into government versus industry?....How did you get into enterprise architecture in the first place?...."

:01:33:34:
Robert, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your deep experiences with our audience.

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