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, 26 tweets, 7 min read

On industrialization of information services

>>This thread is the table of contents; the full story is in the cited documents.<<

Sections:
History: Manufacturing
Now: Information Services
Future: A Marketplace Combining Two Levels of Standardization
1/24

History: Manufacturing

Manufacturing of mechanical systems transformed from individual craftsmanship to industrialization in the 19th century, largely driven by governments’ interest in standardizing weapons manufacturing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchan…
history.com/topics/inventi…
2/24

That hasn’t happened for information services, and it must. What can we learn from manufacturing?

First, the meme “interchangeable parts”, the way the 19th century revolution is described, is irrelevant to information services, and even misses a big point for manufacturing.
3/24

The meme that better applies to information services as well as to other forms of industrialization is “interface standardization”.
4/24

In the context of mass production of identical systems, “Interchangeable parts” means that, in the slot in the system where component “X” is supposed to go, any component in the “X” pile will do. That’s good, but it’s not sufficient.
5/24

What’s more important is that you can build *new* systems by joining together components that were made to conform to the same interface standard but have never worked together before, and they will work together as intended.
6/24

The Wikipedia article cited above makes the important point that the manufacturing revolution was a very broad one, requiring many parts of the economy to move together along a wide front.
7/24

There were other changes not mentioned, for example, mechanical drawing standards, technology for reproducing drawings (the “blue” in “blueprints” refers to an obsolete iron-based reproduction process
oncenter.com/blog/article/t…)
and, importantly, screw-thread standardization...
8/24

which has a long and interesting history of its own.
boltscience.com/pages/screw2.h…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thr…
Many of these new standards required training a generation of new practitioners, for example, draftsmen, electricians, and machine-tool operators.
9/24

We take each of these standards for granted, but each one was a survivor of hard-fought battles.

Now: Information Services

The industrialization of information services is at a very early stage of this process, and progress along its broad front is uneven.
10/24

Distribution is proceeding apace, but development is still a cottage industry. We have made progress in development in interoperation, particularly over the Internet, but very little progress in doing something we take for granted with mechanical systems: ...
11/24

...the software equivalent of going to a building-supply store, picking up all the parts for plumbing a new bathroom, and taking them home and putting them all together into a working system.
12/24

Plumbing is an apt example, because there is standardization at two levels, which I’ll call *interconnection patterns* and *assembly patterns*, and both are willingly provided to us by the retailer.
13/24

By “assembly patterns” for plumbing I mean guidance showing how different subsystems are connected differently and how they work as a whole.
See the attached graphic.
14/24

This two-level situation holds for information services, too. We’re getting good at connecting things together but we have nothing equivalent in building software applications like assembling pieces we buy at a building-supply store. Why?
15/24

One reason: there is no consensus on standard assembly patterns of pre-built components. Back in the 1970s PARC gave us Model-View-Controller, which is widely accepted, but since then I’ve seen little progress.

In the following I'll convey a vision of a path forward.
16/24

Future: A marketplace combining two levels of standardization

This concept has come together in the last few years. It has six parts, enumerated below. Because this is Twitter I’ll briefly describe each part and give you links to more specific information.
17/24

A. There is an overall construction-process model that comprises assembling basic building blocks (built by developers) and assemblies (wired together by just about anybody after a few hours of training) into larger assemblies, including single use cases and applications.
18/24

(The assembly pattern is described in a walk-through on pages 5 through 19 of
melconway.com/Working/WP_20.…)

B. The interconnection pattern is the set of wiring rules enforced by the wiring tool. (Four slides beginning at melconway.com/talks/2019_con…)
19/24

C. There is a platform-based two-sided marketplace, in which users can access building blocks and assemblies, build, test, and run new assemblies, and submit them to the commons.

The platform is the wiring tool and a commons of building blocks and subassemblies.
20/24

(See the three slides beginning at melconway.com/talks/2019_con…)

D. There is a well developed visual application model (based on the “connection hypothesis”) for a single use case of a business application.
melconway.com/talks/2019_con…
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E. There is another visual model that accounts for sequencing of multiple use cases in an overall event-sourced application model.
eventmodeling.org/posts/what-is-…
22/24

F. There is a new design pattern that suggests how to create, modify, and execute a complete application within a single “Immediate-turnaround WYSIWYG” development tool.
melconway.com/Working/WP_20.….

See example 6 (page 40) of the "DOer-SHOWer" pattern (page 25).
23/24

These are the elements of a new platform-based information-service creation and operation business.
24/24

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