Platform
Technologies
Overview
With the rise of information technology and the ever-increasing complexity of our technology landscape, platforms
have become the design paradigm of choice for today's complex engineered systems. We first saw the power of the
platform model in the development of the personal computer some twenty to thirty years ago as operating system
providers built their technology as a platform for software developers to create applications on top. But it was not until
the past decade with the widespread advent of the internet that the platform model has truly come of age as virtually
every internet company from the biggest search giants to the smallest little social media widgets has started to define
their solution as a platform. With the Internet of Things though, what happens on the internet doesn't stay on the
internet anymore. IT may be at the cutting edge of the platform revolution in technology but as information makes its
way out into the physical world through the Internet of Things all physical technologies will be increasingly recognized
as platforms becoming designed and operated as such. The smart grid will be a platform, the smart airport will be a
platform, the smart city, car, and house will be platforms and even the smart door handle will be a platform.
We can cite a number of factors that have converged to give rise to this new technology architectural paradigm.
Firstly information technology and the rise of the services economy means technology solutions can be built via a
service-oriented architecture by connecting up services from different providers, as technology developers
increasingly build products on top of other people's platforms. Secondly complexity; to deal with this ever-increasing
complexity of our technology landscape will require a move from the standalone solutions of today, into a world of
systems of systems, where smaller technologies are nested within larger ones which in turn are nested within larger
ones in a plug and play, flexible, modular, service-oriented architecture.
Thirdly user generated systems; increasingly end-users are becoming producers and to harness this new source of
innovation means closed systems have to open up; creating APIs and platforms on which end-users can alter, adapt
and innovate while being supported by the core technology. Equally, this more complex landscape of IoT requires
companies to collaborate with other providers within larger networks, again requiring that they open up their core
technologies for interoperability with others, with the platform model being an ideal candidate for this. Lastly, fast
paced technology change and the demands of a new innovation-driven economy require constant product evolution
and much shorter technology development cycles for which the platform model can prove well suited.
"While product and service
opportunities abound, the future
will not be about a single product,
process, service or solution.
Rather, it will be shaped through
digital industry platforms and
ecosystems that fuel breakthrough
innovation and disruptive growth"
- Accenture Consulting
Platform Abstraction
A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base or infrastructure upon which other applications,
technologies or processes are developed for the end-user. For example, in personal computing, a platform is the
basic hardware and operating system on which software applications can be run. Although the term is most readily
identified with information technology it, of course, applies to all type of technology. For example, a city is another
good model of a platform technology, with a core set of underlying infrastructure services that are provided for
building developers to construct modular structures in the form of buildings on. This platform allows them to draw
upon underlying services so that they do not have to reinvent them each time and can thus develop and deploy their
buildings more rapidly.
The key to the platform technology architecture is abstraction, as all platform technologies involve two distinctly
different levels to their design with these different levels defined according to their degree of abstraction. Abstraction
is the quality of dealing with generic forms rather than specific events, details or applications. In this respect,
abstraction means removing the application of the technology from the underlying processes and functions that
support that application. The platform is an abstraction, meaning that in itself it does not have application. For
example, you might rent a cloud platform from a provider but in itself, this is absolutely no use to an end-user they
can not do anything with it. Platforms are composed of generic processes that do not have specific instantiation. The
application is designed to bundle these underlying resources and turn them into a real instance of an application that
can be applied in the real world.
In the auto industry, for example, a car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production
models from which many different specific models can be created. In this way the car companies have abstracted
away from any specific type of car to create a two-tiered system; one level being generic the other specific to any
instance of that model. This is a central aspect of the platform model, the creation of a generic form or set of services,
on the underlying platform level, and then on the application level these services are bundled into different
configurations and customized to the specific needs of the end-user. In such a way a finite amount of reusable
abstract building blocks can be bundled and re-bundled on the application layer.
This use of abstraction works to remove the complex for the application developers. By moving core services down to
the platform level application developers can simply plug into these services and build their applications on top of it,
thus working to greatly simplify the complexity they encounter. We can think about a house as a platform, once there
are common protocols, IoT platforms for houses will be built where any device, technology or item that enters into the
house can then connect into the platform and become an application, the house platform can then manage these
applications, providing them with infrastructure services and present them as an integrated solution to the house
occupants.
This core idea of abstraction is very powerful and can be applied to our entire technology landscape, with smaller
more specific technologies sitting on top of others that work as the platform supporting them which, in turn, may also
sit on top of others that support them. For example, smart cities will become platforms with houses being applications
that draw upon the common physical and information resource made available - such as parking, water, electricity etc
- but also the house itself will be a platform for all of the technologies within it delivering services to them. Each layer
in the hierarchy bundles the resources provided to it from that below and delivers those resources as a service to the
applications that sit on top of it.
Application
Level
Platform
Level
"A platform may include physical
components, tools and rules to
facilitate development, a collection
of technical standards to support
interoperability, or any combination
of these things. Serving as a stable
nexus or foundation, a platform can
organize the technical development
of interchangeable, complementary
components and permit them to
interact with one another"
- Kevin Boudreau London Business School
Bundling
A platform technology has been defined as a structure or technology from which various products can emerge without
the expense of a new process introduction. This is achieved by defining a core set of building blocks and then
configuring them into different bundles depending on the context. Effective platform technologies should work like
Lego kits, where the platform provides the elementary building blocks that are then bundled together on the
application level to meet the specific requirements of the end-user.
For example, in enterprise architecture, there is a framework called TOGAF that defines any organization in terms of
a set of building blocks that are essential to the workings of any enterprise. Developing an effective platform
technology requires a coherent understanding of what the core services are and thus what those basic building
blocks that any application will need are. This is not evident, it took us many centuries of building enterprises before
we came up with a generic model for the building blocks of any enterprise outlined in TOGAF.
Platform design goes hand in hand with a service-oriented architecture, where developers of applications treat the
building blocks as services that they then simply string together in different ways to build their solutions. For example,
today a new business can be relatively quickly and easily setup - at least compared to a few decades ago - because
of the core platform of the internet and the many different services - building blocks - that are available for
entrepreneurs to bundle together into new solutions. For example, within just a few weeks, one could create a new
service by building a web application that draws upon services from Twitter, for user identity, Etherium for secure
transactions, Alibaba for sourcing materials, Upwork for staffing etc. The fact that you don't have to build all of these
core components yourself, you are just plugging them together means that you can easily and quickly reconfigure
them when needed.
At the heart of the platform model is a distinction between the basic functionalities of the technology and how those
functions are composed; a platform level that deals with the "what" and an application level that deals with the "how".
The basic functions of the technology - the building blocks - are the "what" and the way those capabilities are strung
together is the "how". One could think of a fab lab as a platform technology, the materials are the "what" or building
blocks that are made available for people to construct into objects through the use of the machines. The way they use
those machines to process the building blocks into finished products is the "how".
"Hierarchical layered design, and modular composition... have become
universal principles for managing complexity in the design of
technologies. All complex systems can be described in terms of their
architecture, that is as a hierarchy of modules or subsystems that in turn
have their own subsystems" - Martin Irvine Georgetown University
Interoperability
Platforms are open systems, unlike traditional technologies that are simply designed as individual physical objects
that perform a function, platforms are designed to be interoperable with other systems, they will likely have external
applications running on top of them all of which can not be fully foreseen by the developers of the platform. Think of
an IoT platform for a house which will have to interoperate and work with many devices and technologies in the house
if it is to be successful at delivering the end service.
Previously technology was developed largely "in house" with each company creating their own proprietary systems,
delivering it to the end-user, trying to create lock-in and compete with other companies who were also creating their
own systems. The industrial model of technology development was typically one of high capital costs, long design
and production cycles within closed organizations creating proprietary technologies with limited interoperability
between the technology of companies in the same industry.
Much of this industrial model was a product of the physical nature of the technologies being developed which made
them excludable and rivalrous in nature. But the dematerialized nature of information technology makes it vastly
easier to duplicate and exchange information services and this has a very profound impact on how we design and
build the service systems of today. This dematerialized nature makes them non-excludable and nonrivalrous which
creates a very different dynamic. The result is one of increasing cooperation as most of the value is no longer inside
of the organization or technology but increasingly outside of it; the value is increasingly in the system's capacity to
interoperate with other systems.
A smartphone would not be very valuable if it could not connect to the internet or run other people's applications on it.
Most of the value that the end-user gets from their smartphone is not created by the original technology developer,
but instead by other people connecting into that platform and building things on it, or that system connecting to other
systems - such as to web pages - with the user getting value from that interoperability and connectivity instead of so
much the device itself. In such a way interoperability becomes key and the platform model is designed to optimize for
this fluid connectivity between the core technology and other systems built on it or external to it.
With information technology, we can build once and deploy many times, almost anywhere at very little cost per extra
unit. Facebook can build their software platform once and through the internet, it can be accessed and used as a
service at extremely little extra cost, per person, to them. With information technology, the marginal cost of the extra
user often goes to almost zero.
In the stand-alone, individual technology paradigm of the industrial economy the same or similar technology was
developed by many different companies and then they competed for market share. But with service systems a new
model is emerging, that of platform technologies, where various modular services are made available that can be
then plugged into platforms to be delivered as an integrated experience to the end-user. Interoperability and
collaboration between systems are the key ingredients, and platforms facilitate this by allowing different technologies
to plug into each other and draw upon their services in a seamless fashion.
A platform technology architecture - being open - is optimized for user generated systems. A suit of new technologies
from solar cells to distributed manufacturing and virtually all forms of information technology are driving a revolution in
user-generated systems, as capabilities get pushed out to the edges of networks. In a previous age of centralization
when productive capabilities were centered within large organizations and required large amounts of fixed capital,
then closed organizations made sense. But today with the rise of the prosumer it is becoming critical that
organizations, business processes and all kinds of technology are able to harness the input of the end-user if they are
to continue to thrive in this world of distributed technologies.
The most successful technology providers of tomorrow will be those who are able to harness this mass of new
capacity and capabilities on the long tail by providing them with the tools, know-how, methods and connectivity to
participate, and the platform model is idea for this. Sell a man a fish and you make a bit of money and he feeds
himself for a day, give a man a fishing rod and he can feed himself and you can sell him on-going services for his
fishing rod, also he can help you in developing new innovations for your fishing rod.
"Platforms do not operate according
to a premeditated plan, they set the
stage for action to unfold, an ideal
platform is like an empty diagram"
- Benjamin Bratton University California
Evolution
The world is speeding up, as the pace of change gets ever faster the requirement to be able to meet that fast paced
change will become ever more important. Adaptive capacity and agility are, and will increasingly be seen as a key
requirement, if not the key requirement, in the coming decades. In stable and predictable environments technologies
can be built as homogeneous systems without the capacity to change, enabling them to be optimized for efficiency
within one environment. But as that environment and the pace of innovation changes, faster and faster, this
homogenous architecture appears less viable and there is a need to switch to a platform model to enable fast-paced
innovation at the edges of networks.
The goal of what we are trying to achieve may stay the same, people will always want food, clothing, housing,
entertainment etc. but in fast paced environments the context stays changing and thus how we achieve that goal will
change, making it important to be able to bundle and unbundle building blocks in new ways, quickly and easily.
Platform technologies can be every effective at enabling an evolutionary process of technology development. The fact
that they separate the current application from generic processes means that as demands change old applications
can be retired and new more relevant technologies can be built quickly. Applications are instances of a technology, an
instance is a specific configuration of a technology for a specific application. For example, a wheelbarrow is an
instance of a technology, it has a specific shape, size,
and form which can not be easily reconfigured. Any
technology that is an application or instance will go
While Facebook focused on creating a robust
through a linear lifecycle because it does not have
platform that allowed outside developers to build new
the capacity to reconfigure or regenerate itself.
applications, Myspace did everything itself. `We tried
Traditionally our technologies go through a linear
to create every feature in the world and said, O.K., we
lifecycle from cradle to grave. For example, imagine
can do it, why should we let a third party do it?' says
building a bicycle, the first time you build it you just
MySpace cofounder DeWolfe. `We should have picked
build a whole bicycle from start to finish. Then you
5 to 10 key features that we totally focused on and let
have to build another one but this time for a child, the
other people innovate on everything else'
– Business Week: The Rise & Ignominius Fall of MySpace
fact that it has different requirements means you
have to start again from scratch.
Every time that you have to build a new bicycle with new requires you start to get a better idea of what in the
development of this technology is a core feature that remains unchanged and what changes with each different enduser requirement. If you go on developing bicycles long enough you will eventually start to see emerging a core
platform that remains unchanged and an application level that changes.
When we combine this feature of abstraction to platforms with user-generated solutions we start to get the potential
for a truly evolutionary development process. By building a flexible modular structure where components can be
easily bundled and re-bundled, and by putting this closer to the end-user, it allows for much faster feedback and
iteration in the development process.
With respect to agility and adaptability, the key design innovation of platform technologies is in separating what is
permanent from what is contingent and temporal, so as to build a stable core that can support the rapid
reconfiguration of applications depending on the context and thus make the system agile. The platform model of
reusable building blocks and bundling allows also for rapid innovation on the application level. The more solid the
building blocks and the lighter the links between them the easier it is to take them apart, change them around and
experiment.
The bundling model to platforms offers the possibility of developing more sustainable technology solutions in that it
focuses our attention on the reusability of systems components. In bundling we can design to create a light, loosely
coupled set of connections - a network - between the parts during their composition that can be easily dismantled
giving us once again a set of building blocks that can be potentially endlessly bundled into new solutions.
In such a model we are essentially separating the organizational structure from the component parts so as to avoid
the linear life cycle of a homogeneous system by being able to unbundle them quickly and easily. In a more traditional
homogenous system, the organization's structure and building blocks are more or less one. For example, think about
a house made out of blocks and mortar for connecting them, the house will go through a linear lifecycle from cradle to
grave where it will be knocked down because it is difficult to separate the building blocks from how they were
composed so as to recompose them. Homogeneous systems may well be the cheapest option and optimized for
efficiency but as adaptive capacity, resilience and sustainability increase in importance, a modular platform model
may become greatly more effective in this respect.
"The Key to Innovation: Build a Platform"
- Forbs Magazine
Conclusion
The platform model to technology is emerging in many areas as a solution to the new set of requirements and
possibilities enabled by information technology and the services economy. A key part of this shift to the platform
model will be the ongoing development of the Internet of Things. As the number of technologies and devices
proliferates at an extraordinary rate new platforms will have to coalesce so as to provide the integrative structures to
such complexity; enabling plug and play solutions through open APIs, and efficiency through the provisioning of
common services.
For the IoT technology landscape of tomorrow to work effectively, it will have to be a massively complex system of
systems with one platform built on top of another, on top of another, all supported by the ultimate platform, the
internet. As the internet comes "offline" and into the physical world in the coming decades it will bring with it the
platform model reshaping our technology landscape. Although the old world of discrete, closed, monolithic, monodimensional technology solutions is well understood this new world of platform technologies is today far from
understood. Understanding the core dynamics to platform technologies is a critical component to success in today's
and tomorrow's economy.
A Systems Innovation Publication
www.systemsinnovation.io