Day: 21 June 2006

I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that the first law of usability is “Words matter”.

The kernel for this post was a piece in Ed Cone’s Know It All blog, pointing me at an interview with Jakob Nielsen in the Wall Street Journal today.

Now Nielsen is someone I like and trust, but the tone of the article surprised me. It is almost as if the article was summarised and quotes taken out of context in order to provoke and excite comment. Well, if that was the case, the article succeeded.

Read the article for yourself. My takeaway is simple. Don’t say blogs and wikis and IM. Say conversation. Say chat. Don’t say RSS. Say syndication (or in Nielsen’s preference, news feeds). And so on.

Largely I agree. Four Pillars is based on using more consumable terms. But I’m happy with Syndication Search Fulfilment and Conversation.

Where I disagree is that RSS is just for news. Or that blogs are the playground of those on the edge. Syndication is the disaggregation of publishing, and not just about news feeds. And I meet people every day who read blogs (including, occasionally, mine :-) ). You can characterise me as edge if you want, that’s your prerogative. But that’s not a reasonable stance to take for blog readers in general, not even for bloggers.

Today, generation M blogs. They needed Flickr and MySpace before they took to it, but blogging is now part of what they do. I expect to see that within six months, Pew Internet reports that fully half of all new blogs are authored by Generation M. And they’re not one night stands.

Calling bloggers “edge” is unreasonable, does not reflect reality.

More later.

Thanks to Ed for the pointer.

The kernel for this snowball was Metric 2.0‘s question in a recent comment on one of my posts.

Does IT have strategic value? I shall resist the temptation to quote Paul Strassmann or Nicholas Carr, or even to rebut them.

My thoughts on this are simple:

• First, you can no longer separate information and communication from the enabling technology. IT, or ICT, can therefore be deemed as not having strategic value in any industry or sector where information or communications have no strategic value. [I shall desist from the temptation to try and find such an industry or sector, it would be nothing more than an academic exercise full of sound and fury, signifying nothing]. As long as information has strategic value, ICT will have strategic value.
• Second, there is no doubt that commoditisation of ICT is increasing, and the speed of that commoditisation is also increasing. But the commoditisation of ICT does not mean a consequent loss of strategic value. All it means is that ICT will gently shift from being a With object to a Because Of object. Chris Messina has a good post on this, working off Doc‘s snowballs. [Yes I have linked to this post before, it’s good enough for me to do it again.]
• Third, no matter which way I try and interpret the word “strategic” I come up with the same answer. Is ICT important or essential in relation to a plan of action for a given business? Usually. Is ICT essential to the effective conduct of a business? Usually. Is ICT useful in destroying the effective potential of a competitor? Usually.

Enough blather. If a business has a strategy, it is very likely that ICT will form an integral part of that strategy, on a Because Of rather than With basis.

Businesses don’t always have visible or perceptible or for that matter even tacit strategies. Many are happy to operate in a market at the whim of their competitors. In such environments it is arguable that ICT has no strategic value. Neither does anything else, for that matter.

I am more than happy to accept that ICT does not always deliver the strategic value required of it. Again, neither do many other things. Why? That’s a whole different ball game.  But part of the reason is blame cultures, part of the reason is poor expectation management, part of the reason is silo-ed approaches within the business, part of the reason is ICT people acting hoity-toity, part of the reason is the lack of worthwhile and implementable standards, part of the reason is a vendor-dominated market, part of the reason is a surfeit of “big whatever” consultants, part of the reason is Conway’s Law, part of the reason is lack of adequate numbers of skilled resources, part of the reason is organisational politics, part of the reason is just bad execution.
In summary:

• Information and Communication have strategic value
• Where a firm has a strategy, ICT will have strategic value, on a Because Of basis
• This strategic value is not necessarily easy to extract; history does not show ICT in a good light
  
• But things are getting better as a result of the Web and opensource and Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder