Day: 2 January 2010

Everywhere around me I see more and more examples of resources, interactions and even entire marketplaces converted into virtual constructs. Abstracted. Expressed in ways that allow for sophisticated models and simulations. In fact that’s one way of looking at what’s happening at the Singularity University.

Everywhere around me I see more and more examples of situations where the core problem people are trying to solve is that of trust. There appears to be a lot of work being done trying to distil trust into something formulaic, data-driven.

And this is good. Data-driven is good. Feedback loops are good. Abstractions and models are good.

But.

There’s something very human about trust. Something more related to the Age of Biology rather than the Age of Physics.

We’ve seen what happens when we rely on mathematics for ratings and values and decisions. Last time round it was called the Credit Crunch. A decade earlier it was called LTCM. Whatever.

You cannot legislate for ethics. Enron would have been SOx-compliant. Basle II may well have triggered some aspects of the recent financial crisis. Michael Power at LSE has been banging on about the implications of “managing” second-order risks for some time now. And he’s been right.

Some of us believe passionately in the power of what’s happening today, in terms of democratisated tools and access and community-based approaches to many things, from home to work to government and beyond. In fact, I’m personally somewhat at a loss as to why no one has really put together the right community-based vehicle for “climate change”, built as an open and transparent platform, on opensource principles and in a global inclusive manner.

Trust is about covenant relationships, not about contract relationships. In a contract you await breach and effect recourse. The question answered is “who pays?” In a covenant the question that’s answered is “how do we fix it?”

I think we’re going to spend a lot of time in 2010 learning about covenant relationships and their role in society. At home. In the community. At work. As a nation. As the world.

Stewardship, my word for 2010, is based on platforms. Those platforms need to be underpinned by trust. Not the trust of physics but the trust of biology. Because that is how value is going to be generated.

Imagine an “enterprise” world where:

• You chose your own phone
• You chose your own portable computing device (which may be your phone)
• You chose your own desktop computing device (which may be your television)
• You chose the operating systems you put on these devices

In other words, the IT department had “lost control of the device”.

Imagine an “enterprise” world where:

• Your identity was actually yours and independent of the company you worked for
• Your network of relationships actually described the people you spoke to, spent time with, worked with
• Your “company” profile looked the same as your web “profile”

In other words, the HR department had “lost control of the profile”.

Imagine an “enterprise” world where:

• You signed up to the subscriptions, alerts and services you wanted to sign up for.
• You downloaded the apps you wanted to use.
• And, if the services or apps needed paying for, you used your credit card to do it.
• You did what the “job” needed you to do

In other words, the IT, HR and Finance departments had “lost control of the job description”

Imagine an “enterprise” world where:

• You could use your own email id
• You could use your own phone number
• You could use your own usernames and passwords

I could go on and on. But I won’t. I hope you see my point.

Generation M (the mobile, multimedia, multitasking generation, born post 1982) is in the workplace. They don’t have to imagine any of this. It is how they live their lives. And if we want access to their talent, we need to change.

Which is where the enterprise needs to look a bit like Facebook. Responsible for identifying, authenticating and permissioning people, making sure that appropriate controls are in place from a privacy and confidentiality perspective. Responsible for providing an environment, a platform, for people to congregate electronically. A marketplace, a bazaar. A place where people converse with each other, share their interests, identify inventories, discover prices, negotiate, trade. A place where the things that need to be recorded get recorded, as in everyday life. Cash withdrawals, credit card usage, access to secure premises, and so on. A place where the things that need to be shared are made simply shareable, without the nonsense of bad DRM.

I’m being extreme, just to drive the point home. Of course people can have job titles and departments and cost centres and functions and job families and a whole lot else. But these are not the main event. They’re meant to be things that help people get work done.

Of course people can be asked to annotate what they did with their time, in environments where customers are to be billed in accordance with that time. But the main event is to do with the quality and quantity of output, not inputs.

Of course people should have their phones and laptops encrypted if sensitive customer information is held on their devices. But let’s also look at ways of avoiding holding sensitive information on devices that can be mislaid or stolen easily. Encryption again is not the main event.

As Keynes said, the engine of a healthy enterprise is not thrift but profit. For any business, the best strategy is to hire good people. Once we hire good people, why keep telling them what to do and how to do it? Be there for them. Teach them. Expose them to the problem domain. And provide an environment where their safety and security (and that of the customer) is sacrosanct, where they understand what they have to do, where the tools they need are available, where they can share with each other and learn from each other.

We make a lot of noise about teamwork, about collaboration, about knowledge management. None of these is complex per se. But they can be made that way.

We have to stop putting sand where we need oil, sugar where we need petrol.

Otherwise the engine of the enterprise will sputter.

So.

The next time you look at Facebook, think about your IT department. Think about your shared service functions. Think about your company. Are you doing the important things?