Dashboard, management console, single point of monitoring and control, that sort of thing.

I think I get your point, but would appreciate it if you could expand on what you think the problem enterprises want to solve here is. What do you think “review and manage” really means in the enterprise world?

Yeah. But .. it’s hideous finding your way around in their system….”
I second that with fireworks and dancing girls. It is the textbook example of clutter and chaos. It is an example of non direct activity to try to get you to miss an automatic renewal. Not a pleasant attitude. They do flood you with emails at expiration though. ;-) The solution is to pay a lot for a long term commitment. I know that you are good at predicting the future. Happy New Year
Jim

Yeah. But .. it’s hideous finding your way around in their system. Every time I go there I have to relearn it. I’d like to flow their service through a console that just presents me with my standard autorenew checkbox.”

“Banks should provide the service of interfacing with vendors on your behalf, and handling these renewal issues.”

That’d certainly be helpful. Thinking more broadly though there are all kinds of service relationships that will, increasingly, be electronically mediated. Healthcare for example. We’re heading for a situation where we’ll have to use a variety of different interfaces to specify our policies on who can access our healthcare data. And then a whole different set of interfaces to specify who can access our financial data, or our kids’ school data, or…

This isn’t a domain-specific problem. It’s a general problem that wants a general solution.

“Unfortunately the incentives seem to be working against you. A lot of the people you pay simply do not want to do the coordination software to allow it to happen”

And since there’s no such management console as I envision, the benefit of doing so is as yet only imaginary.

“I think this is much more complex a circumstance than just something that can be solved by SOA”

Undoubtedly. But the concept of flowing service relationships through intermediaries that can aggregate and normalize the assertion of policy is quite sound. Whether we ever get there or not depends on the usual chicken-and-egg dynamics I guess, but it’s at least conceivable.

Banks should provide the service of interfacing with vendors on your behalf, and handling these renewal issues.

The vendors you buy from through a bank should never know about you personally, just that your bank certifies that payment has been authorized and the bank will take responsibility for paying the vendor. You should be able to review your purchase history through your bank’s system, and pass the information to others on your terms.

Someday soon, when you pay in person, your smart phone will get a receipt via a wireless link to the register, and call your bank to authorize the payment. The bank will notify the store in real time that payment has been authorized (or that an identity theft has been discovered). No one at the store ever needs to get personally identifying information about you or have access to your credit card.

It’s up to the banking institutions to recognize this opportunity and capitalize on it.

Interesting indeed. For me, the key was toward the end. For a geek like me, you nicely outline the use case for “a fabric of cooperating services governed by policy-based intermediaries”. I hadn’t see SOA described that way, but it’s certainly true.

KC

I hear you! I spent quite a bit of time at home during the holiday to check all my online accounts. For each one, I had to log in using a username (which I try to keep the same for all accounts for convenience) and a unique password, which I keep written down because I can’t remember all of them.

Some of the accounts have changed their log-in process. A few have changed their whole domain due to company merger. Several now ask me to pick a question, (or two, or three) like “What is the name of my favorite pet?”. Now I not only have to keep track of all the passwords, I have to keep track of answers to questions. Granted, I might be able to remember the name of the pet I considered my favorite pet when I answered the question, but if I get bitten, my answer may change. Besides, if I’m incompacitated, I would like my wife to be able to access the account.

I’m not sure what the solution is. In fact, it’s probably a good idea for me to keep a personal eye on the accounts. Errors have been known to occur. If everything were automated and I never visited the account site, I might miss something important. Some sites have better security than others. A few still use short PIN numbers instead of passwords.

As a compromise, I would like to manage the financial accounts (e.g., utility bills) through my bank or credit card company. Since I’ve already authorized the bank/cc company to make automatic payments, it would be nice to see a summary there and define the rules you mentioned. For example, I would visit the MasterCard site to indicate which accounts can automatically renew the expiration date. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to specify the range and frequency that payments could be automatically paid? For instance, my electric bill could be paid once a month in a range of $20-$300? If no bill comes–that’s a problem, tell me! If the bill is over $300–that’s a problem, tell me! (May be the cc company already does this!?) This way, my bank/cc company is protecting and warning me of unusual billing.

PayPal is a little different because it acts as a second tier. PayPal shows up on your credit card, but other entities are linked to PayPal. This means you would have service policies on PayPal for some accounts and a service policy on the credit card company for PayPal.

This approach wouldn’t result in a single place to manage service policies, but would reduce it significantly.