Nothing,

Absolutely nothing.

It is a gadget thing, it is a Google’s advertising thing – they know a bit or two about ads. And the value proposition is: now you (customer) can touch instead of swipe, and don’t have to carry around all that plastic in your wallet.

Admittedly, NFC enabled mobile (as in mobile phone) payment could be a convenient way to pay. Convenience, however, does not make a business case unless you can charge for it, and there is no word about charging for NFC facilitated payments.

What has not been tackled by NFC based innovations – see all the related news and announcements – is the business case and how it fits into the payments value chain.

Is it going to remove the plastic and the card vendors (the likes of Gemalto) from the equation? Is there a saving on plastic and chip and all the supply chain and stocking baggage that comes with that? Or is the plastic problem now replaced with a mobile and NFC chip baggage?

The fact is, NFC still requires a terminal (signal receiver), until that is removed or replaced with some commodity kit, there is nothing interesting about NFC and the likes. For example, consider the following where the actual POS device is replaced by the customer’s device (smartphone).

Could this scenario use NFC for the technical implementation? Maybe. However, until there is a business case for NFC in mobile payment, it will remain a hype, an attempt to carve out a buck or two from the payments value chain.

In the meantime, the really interesting developments are happening at Square and ISISPOS POS and the likes.

The book I have just finished reading – Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson – had an interesting chapter on The Slow Hunch innovation pattern.

The part in there that really caught my attention was about the common-place-book. The following historical quote from John Mason in 1745 makes the case for organised (retrievable) thoughts:

Think is not enough to furnish this Store-house of the Mind good Thoughts, but lay them up there in Order, digested or ranged under proper Subjects or Classes. That whatever Subject you have Occasion to think or talk upon you may have recourse immediately to a good Thought, which you heretofore laid up there under that Subject. So that the very Mention of the Subject may bring the Thought to hand; by which means you will carry a regular Common Place-Book in your Memory.

In the same chapter, the historian Robert Darnton is quoted on re-organising texts into fragments and removing the linearity of the text:

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

Later in the Serendipity chapter – another pattern involving accidental connections – the author mentions DEVONthink, a tool to manage and organize all those disparate pieces of information. DEVONthink features a clever algorithm that detects a subtle semantic connections between distinct passages of text.

And this is where I would make the connection with my previous post about Enterprise Architecture: A Slightly Different Approach – making the case for capturing and managing enterprise knowledge in a Semantic Wiki.

…That is the question.

I have recently earned my TOGAF Certification after following the certification course from the Architecting the Enterprise folks.
More and more of the projects dealing with Enterprise Architecture (EA) demand the knowledge of some EA framework and method. TOGAF is one of them and the demand is increasing.

While it is great to see the increasing need for EA, it is worth noting that TOGAF is not the final answer. TOGAF is a framework (there might be a clue in the name) and it hardly provides any further detail as to how to perform an EA engagement, how to develop EA, how to govern the EA…
It is a great place to start enlisting the high-level concepts [of EA] and their relationships. However, breaking down those concepts to a finer grain, discovering the relationships and concerns between them, making archiectural decisions or providing guidelines for decision making (and more) is still left to the Business and IT Architects.

A particularly interesting area for me is the tooling support for Enterprise Architectures. There are a few products already available on the market offering tooling support for different domains in EA.
I strongly believe that Domain Specific Languages (DSL) and Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) tools have a great advantage and use for the purpose of supporting EA. I will be investigating this area more in the future.

If you are registered in LinkedIn, I would recommend to join the TOGAF Certified Architects Group by following this link.

The picture used in this blog entry is originally from Cartoon Stock…

Blue Man Group is a great show with high quality audio-visual entertainment. If you have not seen it, go check it out. You can also buy their music at the venue, which I can only highly recommend. Make sure you take your camera and take a picture with the Blue man after the show.

What is a ground-breaking new idea? a killer app? a real innovative idea?
Every new idea, anything innovative has roots in something existing, something already invented. Is everything just an evolution of other things, there is nothing innovative? How far one should really go back to the roots?

Where is creativity coming from? are there geniuses amongst us? is there a special food/drink or a special ritual to unleash creativity?

Is it enough to come up with a great, innovative idea? What happens to the solution-for-every-problem-world-peace-and-cure-for-everything ideas? I have got a great idea, what’s next?

Many of these and similar questions are answered in Scott Berkun‘s book: The Myths of Innovation

• Read it once because it is simply a great read – not sure about the humor though
• Read it every time you have a worthy innovative idea – amazing how much you will find the book related to your idea
• Read it if you are frustrated about how large corporates treat innovation (especially if you are working for one) – you will find your answer in the book, not necessarily the one you wanted to hear though
• Read it if you like anecdotes, stories and lessons learned – do not forget to follow up with the many references to other books, articles, Web sites and pages