What is a data marketplace?

A data marketplace (or data mart) is an online portal or website where data can be easily found and shared.

Although the name indicates that data is only bought and sold via a Data Marketplace, other data can also be made available such as Open Data (free to use, re-use or redistribute) or Shared Data (limited by license or end-usage).

Data marketplaces typically offer various types of data for different markets and from different sources. Making them a focal point for providing and accessing information about specific sectors or industries.

There can be a wide range of data formats and technologies provided via Data Marketplaces. However the widespread adoption of APIs for integration has meant that these are often the chosen modern way of publishing data sources now.

Transport & mobility - data quality

Lately I have been looking at data quality in the transport & mobility sector.

Helpfully UK Gov has 6 "Core data quality dimensions":

1. Completeness
describes the degree to which records are present

2. Uniqueness
describes the degree to which there is no duplication in records

3. Consistency
describes the degree to which values in a data set do not contradict other values representing the same entity

4. Timeliness
describes the degree to which the data is an accurate reflection of the period that they represent (and that the data and its values are up to date)

5. Validity
describes the degree to which the data is in the range and format expected

6. Accuracy
describes the degree to which data matches reality

These terms are use across UK Gov and were created with the UK Data Management Association https://www.dama-uk.org/

More info here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-government-data-quality-framework/the-government-data-quality-framework

VUCA - the military term for tech projects

I'm finding that I'm increasing using the military term VUCA when referring to a technology project. This acronym, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity has been used over the last 2 decades to reflect the lack of knowledge about what is about to happen.

For me it sums up the vauge definition of large software-based projects, where either there has been insufficient strategic input, not enough analysis or just a general lack of willingness to define future scenarios or risks.

I'm now on the hunt for further useful military terms, without falling back on SNAFU.

Transport volumes are very low right now, but this isn't just bad news

We live in a business world now driven by Digital Transformation. It seems that every media outlet wants to be "the next Netflix" and every takeaway restaurant thinks they should be "the next Deliveroo" Note: This is despite Deliveroo actually losing over £200million last year, a fact that hasn't been lost on the UK stock market in the week

2020 will be remembered as the pandemic being the catalyst for a huge shift to digital. Digital working processes, Digital meetings, Digital retailing, etc. 

It will also be remembered as the year there was a huge reduction in the overall use of transport, as:

- those working were strongly encouraged to work from home, where possible

- lockdowns prevented a significant amount of personal & business travel 

- tourism was stopped

- people were furloughed from work  

Photo credit : https://unsplash.com/@thenightstxlker

But, as vaccines are rolled-out and restrictions are lifted, we are likely to see a significant "bounce-back" in the transport & mobility sector over the next few months, as staff return to the city and the office (although perhaps not to pre-pandemic levels for a long while / if ever). 

So now it is high time for transport operators (and their suppliers) to fully embrace digital transformation and modernize their legacy business processes & systems. The current situation of low passenger volumes may mean reduced revenue, but also means less risk when making significant technology and data changes. 

In short, if you are going to implement a new process or technology solution across the transport sector... now is probably the best time to do it.

Does your website really need “personalisation”?

I see it in nearly every new website set of requirements these days… the request for “personalisation of the digital user experience” or something similar.

(Usually just sitting in one line of a very long set of crafted and prioritised requirements or user stories – hiding in wait to catch-out the unprepared software or digital agency that has to fully respond with a costed and carefully caveated proposal in a matter of days)

So what is meant by “personalisation”?

In my experience there are two different types of digital personalisation:

Implicit personalisation

This is where the user experience is changed based upon inferred and non-personal details cleaned from the user e.g. their referral site, the search engine term they used, the language of their device, the day and time of their visit and even the assumed location they are browsing from.

This gleaned information can then be used to serve-up more tailored marketing messaging & content (text & images) and perhaps more targeted products that have been previously viewed or purchased by similar people. The aim is that the website ‘learns’ what assets to serve to improve the site’s goals (AKA the conversions), typically an ecommerce purchase or a lead generation form completion.

It can be relatively easy to implement basic implicit personalisation, either using such functionality already available with a decent Content Management System (CMS) vendor or from a Conversion Rate Optimisation tool that can be added subsequently.

 

Explicit personalisation

This functionality has the same basic aim, to increase the conversion rate of the digital experience and therefore make more money or generally get more business. This is also done by serving up the content, data or features to favourably change the user’s behaviour. However explicit personalisation does this by utilising data actually known about the customer, such as: their address data (for more local content), their demographic data (for more age or gender relevant content) or their previous browsing & purchase data (for more targeted content).

This form or personalisation, as you can imagine, requires the digital user experience to have access to some or all of the customers' personal data, perhaps stored in an online account. It therefore typically needs a more complex integration to the source of the customer’s data and secure handing of potentially personal details. 

Google now using bold to show keywords in organic and Ads

To quote my old pal Jon Gritton "Whoa.... Google's bold text just changed font"

And yes, a quick check in Google UK indeed confirms that both the organic and paid (Ads) text now highlights the search term in bold text.

This is a significant change to the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and now almost certainly increases the value of Meta Description tags within each page. So expect the Search Engine Optimisation and Paid Ads community to be excited and full of recommendations to take advantage of this alteration.

Planning a new website or app? Think strategic

I talk to a lot of individuals and organisations about improving their digital experience.

Most want to redevelop their website or mobile apps to be more usable, commercially beneficial or compliant (e.g. to web accessibility standards).

I have therefore found myself using this diagram to explain the different dimensions to consider before going any further.

Strategic aims:
What are the top-level objectives of your organisation? To grow market share? To innovate faster? To delight your customers? 

Commercial goals:

How much is a prospect worth to you? Do you prioritise long-term customer lifetime value? Or just to make as much short-term revenue as possible? 

Personas & channels:
What are the archetypal features and mindset of your different target users? Which of these personas are the higher converting & higher value ones? What digital channels and devices do they use and which ones convert better?

User needs and top tasks:

What problem are they trying to solve (and what would stope them doing it)? Why are they doing this task now? What path(s) to conversion does each different target group take?

"As Is" analysis:
Why are you replacing your current site / app / platform? Why doesn't it perform or help you meet your aims & goals? What data or insight are you not getting right now? What volume or performance do you need / want?

Usability testing:
What elements of your site help users and what hinder them? Is your navigation & on-site search usable and useful? What components to customers miss out or not understand? as they browse Why do they leave your site half way through your main goal funnel? Why do users not like, trust or believe your content?

Benchmarks & standards:
Is your site / app fully meeting all legislation?  Is the front-end fully compliant with all coding standards? Does your content's tone-of-voice align with that of your brand? Is the site optimized for search engines? 

Competition:
Which of your competitors delivers a better digital experience and why? What features or content do they have that sets them apart? How is your competition able to be faster or more innovative? (In other words... what tools and processes in your organisation make you slower or less agile?)

Best backpack for all weathers - this was not what I meant

My consultancy company (Ideal Interface) has recently started working with this UK backpack company called traffic (https://gowithtraffic.co.uk). They have cleverly designed a wipeable water-resistant backpack called the "crosstown" and now sell it on Amazon. We do the digital marketing work for them, including some content marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO).

My latest blog post appeared on their website today with the title "There’s no such things as bad weather – just an unsuitable backpack!" 

This was quickly indexed in Google and within hours appeared in the Google Search Engine Results (SERPs). However the small issue is that the term that now gives this page a top ranking in Google UK is not one we expected. And rather than the page appear for searches such as "bad weather backpack" or similar... the one that DOES work from an SEO perspective is: "unsuitable backpack".

Ooops :-) 

Needless to say, we are going to have to look at alternative ways to optimise this site and its pages for the correct search terms in future.

Australia makes Facebook & Google pay for news

Australia will force U.S. tech giants Facebook and Google to pay Australian media outlets for news content in a landmark move to protect independent journalism that will be watched around the world.

Mel Silva, Managing Director of Google Australia and New Zealand said about the regulation
"It sends a concerning message to businesses and investors that the Australian government will intervene instead of letting the market work"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jul/31/google-and-facebook-to-be-forced-to-share-revenue-with-media-in-australia-under-acccs-draft-code

How do you think?

A friend on Facebook recently posted about some people not having an internal monologue when they think.

This got me thinking (funny that) and realising that I have a strange combination of thoughts, that help me in different situations:

1. 1. Internal monologue:
   Typically used to read and sometimes remember names & places (e.g. repeat it over & over to get the noun to ‘sink in’). On other occasions hear my internal monologue and quickly repeat it out loud without checking what I’ve heard… this is when I get accused of “speaking without thinking” - just ask my embarrassed wife - which is actually the opposite of what happens.
2. Non-verbal idea:
   These are usually more abstract and are when my mind wanders (especially in the loo & shower for some reason). It is at these times I come up with innovative stuff, typically by mashing together different concepts.
3. Visual thoughts:
   This is where I use my brain to draw / create something (sort of like a 3D object in a computer programme). I think it comes from my engineering studying days and is now especially useful for visualising technology ideas, where I need to work a problem out or crate a solution. However, this is best done by drawing out on paper / whiteboard what is in my head and then getting myself or others to change/add to it.

How do you think?

Wow, what a year 2019 was

I've had some pretty interesting years in my life (so far), but 2019 surely has to rank up there with busiest and most productive from a work perspective.

Aside from managing a Digital Strategy, technology and Marketing consultancy for the 12th year.... throughout 2019 I managed to pull together various transport / mobility and data specialists to form the Open Transport initiative. They worked to deliver two draft API specifications, one a transport account data interoperability standard and the other the design for a centralised transport operator information look-up (a directory service, giving the URL of each transport / mobility provider’s account API).

On the 3rd January 2020, following a wide-reaching peer review and feedback period, these specifications are now due to become ratified Open Standards and made publicly available. Thus, allowing the transportation and mobility industry to freely use them without conditions.
Yes.... I know. I am giving away a load of intellectual property that I've built up over many months of work from different subject-matter-experts... but the industry needs it (well, it actually needed it many years ago, but nobody ever got around to doing the work).

This work is available here (https://opentransport.co.uk) 

The aim of the initiative is that over time every transport authority (central and local government), transport operating company and their software vendors all recognise the customer value that this openness brings to the entire transport industry and therefore implements it at early as is feasibly possible….and possibly before it becomes legalisation.

My personal thanks goes out to all those who have helped. 

Developing Open Transport isn't about the the technology

I have been pretty involved in the creation of the Open Transport Initiative. A project, along with some very clever folk in the transport industry, to create a new interoperability open standard for transport / mobility accounts.

It has been personally rewarding (so far) and on 14 October we launched a near-finalised version of the customer account specification for peer review & feedback.

Several people have commented that this is a pretty significant technology, which (assuming it is adopted across the transport industry) could provide a similar level of integration and openness as Open Banking has provided to the Financial Services industry.

But the reason for creating this Open Standard and giving it away (eventually) isn't to show how technically proficient I and those around me are. It is to meet a growing need that has been identified... that a customer's transport data such as: purchases, usage and concessions is locked away in an account for each mode of transport.

Steve Jobs once famously remarked 'You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.' and this is what we have done. 

Why the cost of your cloud infrastructure could be too high

I've recently been been looking at some significantly increasing cloud hosting costs for a client.

There are a lot of reasons why this is happening... but in short, a lot of additional cloud costs come from these three causes:

1. Incorrect cloud architecture
This could be: not using “build & burn” practices, failing to automatically spin up (and especially spin down) components as needed, etc.

2. Processing more data than is needed
This could be: the creation of too many environments, badly sized test databases, etc.

3. Having unnecessarily stringent NFRs for non-production
In this could be: the high specification of development or test environments, running batch jobs too often and when not needed.

Open Transport Initiative is gearing-up for launch

I've been quiet on this blog over the last 6 or 7 weeks, as I have been working hard on a number of client projects and also getting things ready for the launch of Open Transport.

As well as the actual website: https://opentransport.co.uk/ there is now a Linkedin page online:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/open-transport-initiative/?viewAsMember=true

Knack Bags earns 5 star rating on TrustPilot

I'm very happy today that a Press Release for our client Knack (https://knackbags.com) has just gone live.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/knack-bags-reviews-earn-5-star-rating-300906864.html

Knack have (justifiably IMHO) gained a 5 star rating and some great reviews for their website, service and products. 

Transformation in Travel needs rethinking

If Digital transformation is all about the connected customer, then how can transport be truly transformational if it doesn't provide what the digital customer wants?

A customer doesn't want a fragmented mobility experience. They want a cohesive one that is consistent (but not necessarily exactly the same) across all digital channels. But how can transport deliver a truly mature digital experience when:

• Every train operating company (26 in the UK) is a difference franchise, most of them providing their own online account
• Many local bus services don’t have online self-service accounts and those that do have one for each operation / franchise (despite these services being run by the same parent company in a lot of cases)
• Public transport services have private competition which only allow their tickets to be accepted via their own mobile app

We therefore need a rethink of how every customer account for each transport provider integrates. And that this way of integrating is not locked to a particular operator or technology provider. To ensure that if I have 4 accounts with 4 different operators... I don't have to log in to each one to get a holistic / aggregated view of my entire transit purchases or trips.

Short Sighted User Experience

Boots.com make life difficult for online bookings by:

1. Forcing online registration for booking an eye test appointment online (despite already asking me a lot of these questions as part of the appointment request process)
2. Generating an error that I haven't used a loyalty card number as part of the registration (which I do not have nor want)
3. Not indicating that the loyalty card number is a required field

So I think I will phone for an appointment instead (thank goodness I didn't need glasses to find this out)

Loyalty & a fragmented transport network won't work!

I recently read an article on Wired.com about how USA-based transit providers are offering loyalty rewards to encourage usage of their services.

In my opinion royalty rewards are offered for only two purposes:
1. In exchange for customer data (e.g. give us your email for 10% off first purchase)
2. To change user behaviour (e.g. get 20% off rail fares for travelling off-peak)

However, this article got me thinking about how a multi-modal (rail, bus, subway, ferry, etc.)  transport network could never hope to implement an effective loyalty scheme if it only had one mode... in other words in a fragmented area, such as Scotland, could this work?

So here's my article on Linkedin explaining this in more detail:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/supporting-loyalty-rewards-fragmented-transport-hayden-sutherland/

In reality... of course I know it won't work unless:

• All operators share the same technology/software/account application (and I know how unlikely that would be in a privatised industry)
• There are ways for all these accounts to integrate together, so that an aggregated view of all accounts is possible in one place.
  And I think it is for this purpose that an Open Transport API should work towards.

Taking Mobility-as-a-Service Seriously

This week I have made it public knowledge the Ideal Interface has joined MaaS Scotland.
https://blog.idealinterface.co.uk/2019/07/19/ideal-interface-joins-maas-scotland/

Although technically we joined just before I attended the MaaS Scotland Annual Conference in Edinburgh on June 20th... this announcement is part of my growing aim to get more involved in the ongoing development and industry acceptance of an Open Transport API for account interoperability.

LIFESPAR cloud architecture principles to follow

With more and more organisations adopting cloud technologies for their applications, I've seen the tendency to just "life and shift" architectures. Physical servers are replicated as virtual machines and the same software applications as before are run "on somebody else's computer". 

• Latency-aware
• Instrumented
• Failure-aware
• Event-driven
• Secure
• Parallelizable
• Automated
• Resource-consumption-aware

But this approach doesn't leverage many of the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or the new cloud-only components available as platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It also means that architects creating cloud-native solutions need to have a different set of principle to before.

Some of the best guidance I have seen in this area comes from Gartner, who use the acronym LIFESPAR to explain those principles to follow for designing cloud-native architectures.

So what is LIFESPAR and what does it mean to an architect?

Latency-aware:

Understand that every application needs to be designed & implemented knowing that it may not get an instant response to each request. This latency could be milliseconds, or it could be seconds, so ensure each solution elegantly deals with delays and is tested to prove it works under these conditions.

Instrumented:

Every solution and every component must generate sufficient data about their usage and ideally send this information back to a central location, so that real-time & subsequent decisions about the architecture, cost, volumes, etc. can be made. In this way, as instrumented approach supports an elastic automatically scaling system (scaling both up AND down).

Failure-aware:

Remember that things fail (hardware, processes, etc.) and that software, created by humans, is never usually bug-free. So always design solutions that wait or fail & re- in the way you need them to. Failures must also be comprehensively tested - if necessary, writing code to force failures (e.g. the Chaos Monkey). Also bear in mind that in some scenarios... latency and failure are the same thing.

Event-driven:

Applications used to developed with synchronous actions (as the performance, etc. of the target system was known). But now in a decoupled architecture, messages need be sent as events. This also simplifies scaling and makes them more resilient to failure.

Secure:

Always assume your solution will be subject to some sort of malicious activity and try to prevent it. This means restrict events and users, minimising attack surfaces and following best practice data handing and security processes.

Parallelizable:

Many small systems are usually cheaper that one large one, even in the cloud. Therefore find ways to scale-out your solution and its processing & messaging, rather than scaling-up.

Automated:

Every cloud-based component and also your overall solutions should be able to be deployed, started, stopped & reset via scripts. Remember to test this from a command line, from the beginning of development through to your Operational Acceptance testing (and even as a means of testing Disaster Recovery processes).

Resource-consumption-aware:

So, you now have almost limitless processing and storage resources at your fingertips. But you also either have your credit card charged as you use the service or are going to get an invoice for what you use very soon... Therefore, always consider using the least amount of cloud resources possible. Simplify your solution, build & burn of components & environments, automate components to start & stop only when they are needed and don't store more than you need (e.g. by sharing test data across solutions & environments).