Open-plan office and peer-monitoring socialism against creativity

When I started working as a programmer after I graduated from college in 1990s, I was fortunate enough to have a wall-separated booth, thoughwithout a door. This is something which workers have taken for granted atresearch laboratories in the USA or Canada. But things have beendifferent in Japan, where I live and work.

Having a separated space for individuals has been considered a luxury inJapanese companies, where people think space is money. So I should emphasize I was fortunate; because in Japan still corporateoffices are mostly open-planned: everybody seeing each other with nowall, whole bunch of noise, and is forced to listen to each other.

I had to work in 1980s with an open-plan office in Japan as an inturn,and I thought working in the office would surely hurt my body anddegrade the quality of my thinking. If I were just moving around anddoing ordinary tasks, I wouldn't have considered it much. But I had tothink there for writing a technical report. So I thought something hadto be changed.

I do not reject the idea of shared meeting space or the importance offace-to-face meetings. Those are vital factors of successful companies.But without a place for solitude, nobody would be ableto think. Without thinking, no innovation will come, and nonew idea will emerge. How can you think without being alone?

Recently I've found an article on Web which says working in open-planoffice makes you sick and is hazardous to your health.

A recent study of Dr. VineshOommen and his group in Queensland University of Technology showsthe following results:

Results: Research evidence shows that employees face a multitude ofproblems such as the loss of privacy, loss of identity, low workproductivity, various health issues, overstimulation and low jobsatisfaction when working in an open plan work environment.

Well said.

Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister also write in one of theirclassics Peopleware (2nd Edition, 1999, Dorset HousePublishing) as follows (in Chapter 12):

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enoughquiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create theirown sensible workspace.

I've read the 1st edition of Peopleware (published 1987) in 1989, so theworkplace privacy issue is well-known for at least 20 years.

On the other hand, Japanese workplace has little changed for the past 20years. I still see many open-plan offices, especially amongnon-engineering workers.

I suspect Japanese open-plan offices are designed for managers to putthe subordinates under surveillance during the working hours. This isan example of a dark side in Japanese workplace socialism.

In a typical office layout, a manager in a team has the own desk besidesthe cluster of the desks for the team members. A team member can't takea rest or make a physical movement during working hours. I think thissort of desk layout does not respect the health of the team members, letalone the privacy or the productivity.

I've found quite a few articles about this open-plan office sicknessissue on the Web. So I think this is a matter of concern for manypeople. Maybe this is a sort of backlash due to the recent economydepression.

I'd rather work alone if I were put into an open-plan office every day again, solong as my brain and my ideas are the source of my income.

The risks of systems left alone and untested

Computer systems left alone unmaintained are a premier source of risks. Those systems may cause a serious crisis and a major service disruption.

On September 14, 2008, All Nippon Airways (ANA), a major Japanese airline, caused the disruption of the ticketing service due to the cryptographic function software expiration (as they announced in the Japanese press release), which is logically assumable about the PKI certificate, according to the other Japanese-written press reports like ITmedia's and Nikkei ITpro's.

The chilling fact revealed was that the ANA left the cryptographic function unused for 2 years and did not make a review about expiration at all when they activated the function for the terminals used by the ticketing agents. This is an awful example of software development indeed.

I wrote about the service disruption for RISKS-DIGEST 25.34 just after the incident occurred.  And recently I knew the article was quoted by another blog article yesterday.

The expiration issue is not only about the PKI certificate; domain name registration is another source of expiration risks. An expired domain can be abused for phishing and overtaken by attackers.  Software license is another good example.  In general, Expiration is a part of overall misconfiguration.  So when did you review the expiration date of the system resources under your control last time?

Chain of distrust

Communication is a collection of trust between the involving parties. Unfortunately, the trust is eroding in Internet, or in the society itself; and I see the emerging chains of distrust.

An idea called Chain of trust is a practical implementation of authentication.   Let me put it in this way; when Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Carol, then Alice assumes Carol is trustable.  In this way, Alice doesn't have to directly authenticate Carol.  Internet is another good example of chain of trust; each router assumes the peer routers will forward the packets originated from itself. 

But the chain of trust is not what should be taken as it is, in the real world.  In the Alice-Bob-Carol case of the previous paragraph, the peer-to-peer trust relationship between Alice and Carol is not necessarily established; the existence of distrust between Alice and Carol is even possible, and they may don't want to talk to each other.  Communication through a proxy is in fact quite common between the distrusting two parties. Should I call this a chain of trust?  I should rather call this a chain of distrust.

The current Internet is full of chains of distrust. Maybe I should rephrase it for accuracy; the chains of limited trust. For example, your employer will not unconditionally trust you to protect the employer's privacy, so you have to communicate outside the employer's network through a firewall, usually made of packet filters and proxy servers.  Your employer gives you a limited trust for the external communication.  This sort of limitation may cause your distrust to your employer, but the employer usually considers this is a security feature to protect the relationship with you.  The difference of interpretation to the situation of limited trust can be a source of distrust.

In a set of trusted parties with a limited size, each party does not have to spend time on authenticating each other for every packet they communicate with each other. The trust is proven through the physical connection and perimeters.  Internet's packet forwarding system extends this idea of physical connection to the chains of trust by reliable communication with discrete packet deliveries, and the idea has worked well in a limited community where the people are trustable with each other. The end-to-end principle [1] has worked so effectively that the engineers of Internet firmly believe in it.

The reality we are facing, however, is that the people are no longer trustable with each other and rather distrusting one another. People are seeking for a safe haven by creating a chain of distrust, which is apparently a false sense of security, considering that the chain of distrust is easily broken if the proxy between the distrusting two has a malicious intent.

We are heading into the very difficult times, where the security engineers ought to secure the chains of distrust as well as the chains of trust.

Reference:
[1] Blumenthal, M. S. and Clark, D. D. 2001. Rethinking the design of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 1, 1 (Aug. 2001), 70-109. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/383034.383037