Gibburt

A little while ago, I was asked to write a one-page opinion piece for a publication of the research institute I work for, since this is their fifteenth year in existence. In the broadest sense, I was asked to give an opinion on where future information systems will or should be going. Below you will find said piece.
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The main challenges for future information systems are not technical in nature. The predominant driver of progress in information technology has been a technology push, rather than a market pull. Unfortunately, the technology push has (once again) driven systems beyond the understanding of legislators, lawyers and business strategists. The following cases serve as an illustration of current problems.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) was introduced to prevent legal owners of media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) from copying the contents of those media. Why DRM was doomed to fail from the get-go can be made clear even without an understanding of the technical details: When a user has a stand-alone medium and a stand-alone device that can display, interact with or play the content of that medium, there will always be some point where the content is directly accessible. In other words, you can not make content available and unavailable at the same time. In an attempt to avoid this giant loophole, the old and classically flawed paradigm of security-through-obscurity is often employed. DRM technology usually implies a conscious deviation from the medium’s standard, or making the standards themselves proprietary and secret. Either way, it is very unlikely that future media players can be guaranteed to be capable of playing media with deprecated DRM technology on them. This is why (a medium with) DRM technology is often referred to as “defective by design.”
To add insult to injury, lobbyists have successfully had laws passed in the E.U., the U.S. and elsewhere, that disallow consumers even attempting to break copy protections. Unfortunately, most nations that have implemented such laws have not legally specified what constitutes a copy protection. Whenever a producer feels the evil consumer has stolen its candy, it can now press charges against the consumer, so that it does not even have to pay for the cost of (civil) litigation.
The Electronic Health Record (EHR) has a long history of public debate. One of the most clamant problems with the EHR is the abundance of privacy issues. If every doctor has unrestricted access to your EHR, insurance companies and employers can effectively verify what they are now not legally permitted to ask. On the other hand, if only doctors registered as your doctors have access, they should always be available when calamities occur elsewhere (and the access of insurance companies and employers is not eliminated, just made less likely). Political debate in The Netherlands was already drawing to a close, when the first questions where raised with regards to options to log all access to an EHR.
Both DRM and EHR are progeny of that bromidic paradigm of design in information systems, that if something is not allowed, it should not be possible. Would this paradigm be truly astute, all potential murder weapons should be removed from supermarkets. Analogously, rather than fencing off wrongful behaviour or including a penalty for such behaviour inside systems, an audit trail should be kept, so that detection of and repercussions for such wrongful behaviour can be implemented in the real world. It works for breadknives, so why would it not work for computers?
The main challenge for future information systems is that of a new design paradigm, where systems are no longer designed strictly for their desired purposes and allowed behaviours of users, but for their foreseeable purposes and potential behaviours. On a more holistic scale, business models and laws – both often based on capabilities provided and limited by the state-of-the-art of the time they were conceived – should not be imposed on information systems, but rather evolve with them.

Filed under: Politics, Science by Philip Hölzenspies | Social tagging: design paradigm > information technology