Thursday, March 15, 2007

 

Food Information Services and "Produce Provenance"

In my last post I wrote about the new program in "Information and Service Design" that we've started at UC Berkeley and about the Symposium we held on March 2 to mark the ISD "coming out" party. Eleven graduate students in our School of Information presented their research, and every one of their papers is worth reading, so if I felt the need to blog every day I'd probably write about every one of them. But I don't so I probably won't.

Nevertheless, a paper by Jessica Kline titled

The Future of Food Information Services


has turned out to be remarkably prescient, so I've decided to write about it. In her abstract Jessica wrote:

With growing attention to E. coli outbreaks and mad cow disease, consumers are increasingly questioning the food they eat. In response, many in the food industry are beginning to provide both transparent and convenient information regarding a food's history. Many small scale farms recognize this needed service and have created blogs that explain general farming principles, provide photos of the land, animals, and equipment, and portray the daily lives of farmers and their families. This paper describes these current information services provided to consumers and predicts the future direction of these vital services.

And in her presentation at the Symposium, Jessica brought down the house when she said that "I don't just want information about food. I want information about MY food."

I thought these ideas were clever but a little speculative. I've written about "information supply chains" before, but location and temperature tracking of 20-foot containers on huge cargo ships seemed pretty different from tracking food intended for consumers.

However, in the last week I've read a couple of articles and found some web sites that suggest that there really is something pretty revolutionary going on with food information services to enable tracking and tracing of food to specific farms or even to specific parts of a field.

Earlier this week a story in the Wall Street Journal called Tailing Virulent Veggies (13 March 2007) described how Dole Foods has started using RFID tags on boxes of green vegetables to track them from the fields where they were picked all the way through their processing. This was in response to the E. coli contaminated spinach that implicated Dole last fall, but the RFID tags aren't yet economical enough to go on individual bags. However, according to a short article with the smart title of "Produce Provenance" in Business Week, (19 March 2007) Dole has started to put codes on those pesky stickers that clutter individual pieces of fruits. You can enter the code on a web site to link a particular bunch of organic bananas to the farm in Colombia where they come from (like the Don Pedro Farm, code 776 .

So Jessica is on to something, and I'm going to encourage her to do some more thinking about these food information services. I think an important next step will be the development of information and process standards so that applications that use food information can be easily and robustly built. I feel a joke lurking somewhere about "mash-ups" with potato data, but I just can't make it work.

-Bob Glushko






Sunday, March 04, 2007

 

Announcing "Information & Service Design" at UC Berkeley

This past Friday I moderated a symposium at the School of Information at UC Berkeley to mark the "coming out party" for a new program in "Information & Service Design" that I'm helping to get started.

We are all very aware of the relentless trend for our economies, local, national and global to be increasingly based on information and services. But because of the scope and depth of these transitions, which cut across information and computing science, business strategy, economics, organizational sociology, software design, law, and other specialties -- no single academic discipline is capable of making sense of them to help prepare students to be effective players in this new economy.

So there have been calls to develop a new science of services that can do this. A Berkeley campus-wide initiative is emerging as a joint effort of the engineering, business, and information schools.

But we think that we have a unique configuration of competencies within the School of Information:

• information modeling
• systems analysis and design methods
• implementation of web-based services and information-intensive applications
• Internet business architecture.

These 4 areas broadly span the stack from what some would call "low-level" concerns of information analysis and software architecture all the way up to big strategic concerns about "business architecture" -- how businesses and service network emerge and evolve, covering issues like component business modeling and global sourcing and outsourcing.

We've already had good success at finding synergies across these diverse topics; in particular last semester I co-taught a course immodestly titled "The Information & Services Economy" with AnnaLee Saxenian that started with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Frederick Taylor and ended with web services. We also conducted a weekly lecture series with a fascinating set of speakers that included CEO speakers from start-ups and global consulting firms and people doing services research at Google, Fair Isaac, Genentech, Accenture, IBM, and other leading firms. (These weekly lectures are continuing this semester).

These new courses were incredibly stimulating for both us and for the students, and that inspired Anno and me to institutionalize our curricular and research experiments in services into the Information and Services Design program.

The Symposium we held Friday consisted of 11 talks by graduate students based on research and term papers they wrote for one of these new courses on services from the fall semester. Their papers cover a diverse set of topics -- theory of service design, analysis of some design problem or opportunity, even specific case studies. You can download the papers here.

-Bob Glushko

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