InformationWeek

Distributed Computing: Let Your Agent Handle It

Software agents will sweat the details when users lack the time and patience needed to tackle routine and repetitive business chores

By Dan Richman
Issue date: April 17, 1995

Businesses need help. In the midst of the information age, workers are more likely to be buried than elevated by information--coping with the daily onslaught of electronic mail, marketing pitches, and financial reports. And when that information doesn't reach the proper destination, workers hav e to search for it across myriad networks and databases.

The help that companies need may come from agent technology--software servants that do users' bidding across interconnected networks of client-server computers. Just imagine having a digital assistant boot up your PC each morning before you arrive at the office, automatically download a new version of your favorite database query tool, and even arrange your E-mail in order of importance.

How about an agent that scans your daily calendar of appointments, noting that you plan to meet with a prospective client today? Next, the agent searches a variety of online news services for information on that client, placing the retrieved files into a folder on your PC. The agent then E-mails your favorite restaurant, making a luncheon reservation for the two of you.

So what are these software savants that are able to execute multiple tasks without so much as a click of a mouse? Software agents are small, efficient pieces of code that combine the job execu tion properties of a scripting language with the communications capabilities of objects. Agents carry out specific, repetitive, and predictable tasks on behalf of a computer user, business process, or software application. And like software objects, agents have programmable properties and behaviors.

"Agents at their best are able to process many more variables more quickly than humans can," says Jim Bair, research director for the Santa Clara, Calif., office of the Gartner Group Inc. research firm.

Catching On
The notion of agents originated in the mid-1950s with the artificial intelligence (AI) movement. While AI has fallen out of favor, agents are now starting to catch on in the mainstream of corporate computing.

Many organizations today use agents without even realizing it. Agents are built into operating systems, E-mail applications, workflow tools, mobile computing software, and network devices. While agent technology holds the promise of fundamentally changing the way peopl e work, making them more efficient and well-informed, it also poses many technical, organizational, and legal challenges. "Unlike spreadsheets, agents are a cultural phenomenon," says Michael Shrage, a laboratory research associate at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Media in Cambridge, Mass. "And they pose some huge social issues."

Does an organization have the right to use agents to monitor employee productivity? Should agents be allowed to automatically execute financial transactions without human intervention? Will agents do away with the need for certain types of workers? These issues and more will be debated and hopefully resolved in the coming years as agents become more deeply ingrained in corporate information systems.

There are two broad classifications of agents: organizational and personal. Organizational agents execute tasks on behalf of a business process or computer application. Personal agents carry out tasks on behalf of users.

Fairly simple organizational agents have been a par t of PC and network administration for the past five years. Compaq PCs and servers, for instance, employ agent-based utilities to monitor CPU usage and input/output rates.

Corporate use of agent monitoring software is becoming a key component in the drive to cut support costs and increase computer productivity. Edward D. Jones &Co., a Maryland Heights, Mo., financial-services provider, is installing management agents on 3,300 Pentium servers nationwide. Jones is using Emanate, a development toolkit from SNMP Research Inc. in Knoxville, Tenn., that allows network administrators to create management agents based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) standard. The management agents will provide systems administrators with the real-time status of network servers, says Rich Malone, chief information officer at Edward D. Jones, "enabling us to be proactive and have the right resources in place to address problems as they occur."

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView is a prime example of an agent-base d network-management application that monitors network performance. Each network device has its own agents that interoperate using a common language, in most cases SNMP. One agent may reside in a network router, keeping track of corrupt packets of data. When the incidence of bad packets reaches a certain threshold, the router agent sends an alert to the management server. If the problem is deemed urgent, the server agent sends a message to the LAN administrator's pager, indicating that a network crisis is imminent and human intervention is needed.

BeyondMail from Banyan Systems Inc. in Westboro, Mass., is an example of agent-based messaging. BeyondMail was one of the first E-mail applications on the market to offer intelligent agents that filter, sort, and prioritize mail by sender or topic on behalf of users, says Alexander Cullen, BeyondMail product manager.

Since the advent of BeyondMail, a number of other messaging and groupware products have implemented agents to help users manage and access data. The Lotus Notes groupware application employs agent technology to help users manage document databases. Notes Release 3.0 features macro scripts that can forward, create, or update Notes documents based on user-specified criteria such as time and subject matter, says Peter O'Kelly, Notes senior product manager at Lotus in Cambridge, Mass.

Topic Agents
For more powerful agent search capabilities, Notes users can buy Topic Agents from Verity Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., maker of database search tools. The Verity platform supports Mac-, Windows-, and Unix-based agents capable of searching through most major relational databases on the market today.

Topic Agents was used by the Knight-Ridder New Media Center in San Jose, Calif., the online publishing arm of the national newspaper chain, to create Newshound, an interactive service that searches through several hundred articles from Knight-Ridder, the Associated Press, and other news sources on behalf of online subscribers. The service is currently offered to San Jose Mercury News readers, who are required to fill out profiles listing the keywords most likely to occur in articles of interest to them. The most relevant articles are then E-mailed directly to subscribers.

While Newshound agents cannot yet go out over the Internet to search distributed databases, the Knight-Ridder service is a simple and useful example of how businesses and individuals can use agents, says Chris Jennewein, the center's director.

Other computer users ready for agent assistance include mobile PC users needing to access corporate databases. Oracle Corp. in Redwood City, Calif., offers Oracle Mobile Agents (formerly Oracle in Motion). The software lets laptop users interact via wireless or conventional modems with Oracle and other vendors' SQL (Structured Query Language) databases. SQL statements that take milliseconds to execute from LAN-based clients can take seconds or even minutes via wireless hookups. When wireless clients interact with agents, the agen ts then interact with the server, the delay is slashed, and connection times can be much shorter, says Jay Verkler, senior director of Oracle's mobile systems group. That saves time and money, and it minimizes chances for lost connections.

Telephony
Telephony is another area where businesses are realizing the benefits of agent technology. Edify Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., sells an agent development platform that is widely used with voice messaging, telemarketing, and customer-service applications.

Edify agents can respond to touch-tone and voice prompts as well as keystroke commands. Edify's Agent Trainer visual development environment, running on its Electronic Workforce platform, turns out OS/2-based agents with telephonic and data-gathering capabilities, says Tom Glassanos, VP of marketing.

Most of Edify's customers use their agents to automate customer-service functions. Interactive voice applications let callers obtain information on account balances. With one agent need ed for each incoming phone call, some users--such as DHL Worldwide Express--have several hundred agents operating at once, Glassanos says (For story click here) . A LAN-based voicemail system called Wildfire, from Wildfire Communications Inc. in Lexington, Mass., responds to live voices with prerecorded phrases spoken in a human voice. It can take messages, hold calls, schedule conference calls, issue reminders, and announce incoming calls, says Wildfire's VP Nick d'Arbeloff.

"Wildfire is exquisitely tuned to the needs of phone users who are on the road a lot and use the phone constantly," says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a Menlo Park, Calif., think tank. "It's brilliant at making the most ubiquitous computer in the U.S.--the telephone--an order of magnitude more usable than it was."

When it comes to databases, agents are ideal at automating procedures that humans find monotonous or too time-consuming. Agents are also good at navigating through t he complexity of computers. Open Sesame from Charles River Analytics in Cambridge, Mass., automates tasks on the Macintosh menu. It learns which folders a user opens most often and in what order. Then it offers to automate the sequence.

Meet Bob
Another desktop user tool is Bob, a suite of eight household applications due out April 1 from Microsoft Corp. Bob uses agent technology to provide novice users with step-by-step on-screen instructions. Like Open Sesame, Bob learns users' habits. It then offers to demonstrate shortcuts, such as hot keys. It suggests which of the applications might be helpful in the user's current situation. It even offers to refresh a user's memory with techniques and features that haven't been used in a while. Bob offers 16 different "personalities," each purportedly with different qualities.

But critics charge that Microsoft has oversold the benefits of Bob. "The so-called personalities are rigid; they don't learn and they don't adapt," says Erick Bretheno ux, a senior research analyst with the Gartner Group.

Apple Computer Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., plans to offer extensive agent technology in Copland, the next major release of the Macintosh operating system, due out in mid-1996, says Bob Hagenau, Macintosh product manager. The current Macintosh System 7.5 contains Apple Guides--precursors to agents--that are designed for developers. Guides let programmers create on-screen instructions for users and icons to simplify the execution of routine tasks such as reading E-mail.

A leading provider of agent development technology is General Magic Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of Magic Cap, an agent-based operating system tightly integrated with several vendors' personal communications devices, among them Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy.

Another General Magic tool, TeleScript, has been licensed by AT&T for use in its PersonaLink Services, which consist of electronic shopping, E-mail, and online news. TeleScript agents can be dispatched to gather info rmation, negotiate deals, and perform transactions, according to General Magic.

Early Stages
Though General Magic's products are backed by major vendors such as Motorola, Apple, and Fujitsu, they're still in the nascent stage of development and deployment. "We're at the very beginning of creating the electronic marketplace," says Jim White, VP of technology at General Magic. "What we offer is a platform for developers, who can create the buying and selling agents that will make that marketplace happen."

Samuel May, an analyst with the Yankee Group Inc., a consulting firm in Boston and PersonaLink user, says AT&T has achieved a qualified success with TeleScript. AT&T says PersonaLink will begin supporting AT&T's MarketSquare online marketplace next quarter, which will offer goods from Lands' End, Tower Records, and 800-Flowers.

At least two other concerns also offer agent-scripting software. First Virtual Holdings created Safe-Tcl, an agent toolkit based on the Tool C ommand Language (Tcl). A freeware version of the software is currently under development, says Tcl creator John Ousterhout, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

And Quasar Knowledge Systems Inc. in Bethesda, Md., offers the Agents Object System for creating Smalltalk agents that run on the Mac, Power Mac, Windows, and by year's end on OS/2.

As helpful as agents are, they do pose problems. Now anyone who can afford a computer can end up having problems with "the help." Users must ask themselves, "Will my agents behave responsibly toward me and others? If not, will I be held accountable for them? Is my agent competent? Could it damage another company's agents or computer systems?"

Vendors and researchers are pondering many of the same questions. "Since agents are essentially viruses, security concerns are real," says Mark Porat, CEO of General Magic. The company's TeleScript agents carry a digital signature ensuring that their origins can always be identified. They are encrypted usi ng technology from RSA Data Security Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., in an effort to make them less vulnerable to attack.

In the sphere of electronic commerce, two researchers are trying to design rules of engagement. Gilad Zlotkin, a fellow at the MIT Sloan School, and colleague Jeffrey Rosenschein recently published Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions For Automated Negotiation Among Computers (1994, MIT Press). Zlotkin says the book lays out "specifications and rules for how the game of negotiating must be played by agents in order to maximize efficiency and problem-solving and minimize information hiding." While Zlotkin's rules are intended only to govern how agents behave toward each other in public, they may implicitly affect how agents are programmed and used as well. Agents also raise questions about the ethics and culture of the workplace.

Who Has Control?
Should your boss be able to create an agent that monitors your phone calls, counts your keystrokes, or notes how of ten you access key files? Can the boss demand to see your collection of agents, to assess how well you've delegated your responsibilities? There are no answers today to these perplexing questions, very little real work experience or established corporate policy, and certainly no case law. Despite the problems agents pose, they will play an increasingly large role in our lives, most authorities seem to agree.

"In the future, a computer room will contain a collection of agents rather than a collection of applications," says Henry Lieberman, an MIT Media Lab research scientist. "A lot of the stumbling we do over not having the information we need, of being frustrated at computers, will be eliminated. It's not magic. It's just thinking about human skills and giving that capability to software."

In the short run, agents will certainly provide the help businesses so often cry out for. Agents already help administrators manage the computer systems we all use. And soon all users will have a battery of digital a ssistants on the desktop to carry out far-flung tasks. But with the freedom agents offer comes the responsibility of managing these new-found helpers.

Photo Illustration: Studio MD/Jeese James Doquilo

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