Thursday, June 23, 2011

Revisiting "Right Time"



This illustration (as indicated in the bottom) is taken from the "enterprise irregulars" site, posted by Ray Wang.
Ray Wang cites a relatively old posting of mine, talking about real-time, right-time and other time related concepts.   I admit that sometimes I abuse the term real-time (like other people do, but this is not a good excuse!), but I have not adopted the term "right-time".   In that posting I bring some classical definitions of various types of real-time.  Wang is making a somewhat different classification as a matrix with two axes:  the reactive/proactive axis, and the business value axis (low/high).  The high value proactive is called "anticipation", and the low value of proactive is called "nice things to do".   My interpretation is that both deal with notifications that may allow proactive behavior, but not necessarily automated proactive behavior of the type that we talk about (see my keynote talk last year in the OMG conference),  on the reactive front, the high value are mission critical reactions. and the low business value are called "timeless responses".  Here, I am not sure it is the best title, as there are reactions that have low value, but are time dependent, since they lose their relevance in time.  Example here is that getting an alert on available discounts in a nearby store may not be that important for me, but the discount is applicable only within the next hour, so if I would like to respond, there is time bound on this response.   Anyway - interesting classification. 

1 comment:

R "Ray" Wang said...

Opher,

Your post an inspiration in helping me consider the business value of real-time a few years back. My intent was to take the notion of real-time and consider the implications of right time.

Would love to connect via by phone or skype and maybe collaborate in the future. Great stuff on your end!

R