I’m on vacation and will not be blogging as often as I might have otherwise. Depends on what the family wants to do and how lazy I feel. And I suppose partially on the weather as well.
I have not quite finished the Facebook meets Four Pillars post, I know I wanted to complete it yesterday, but it was not to be. I will do so soon.
Normal service will be resumed in a few weeks time.
Declan made a recent comment about the need for a Behind-The-Firewall version of Facebook, perhaps even appliance-based, a sort-of Facebook-in-a-Box. In my reply, I indicated that he echoed my thoughts precisely…. but with one small proviso…. that was the way I thought a few years ago. That I had since changed my mind.
What Declan wants is what any self-respecting CIO wants: control and predictability over the content, its access and even its behaviour. In fact, there’s a growing body of regulation that demands such services from CIOs; so much so that a CIO can actually go to jail in some jurisdictions if some of the content isn’t appropriately cared for. And, as I said, it’s what I would have wanted. So I would have done exactly what Declan asked for, and lived happily ever after.
Now I wonder whether it’s the right thing to do. Let me try and explain why.
Let us assume I have a Behind-The-Firewall version of Facebook, delivered as an appliance. [The appliance bit doesn’t really matter, it isn’t really germane to the discussion.] Let us further assume that many other institutions do exactly the same thing. What have we achieved?
We’ve managed to pave the cowpats. We’ve managed to lay concrete over crap, as it were. What we have done is replicated our traditional e-mail system approaches. Walled gardens carefully designed to keep people out, with some sort of selective process to let people in. Walled gardens that we had to tunnel holes into so as to allow the customers and partners and supply chain in. Walled gardens that started letting in mice through the holes, so that we made an industry out of building bigger and better mousetraps. Spam filters that regularly managed to keep people out and not just mice.
These walled gardens, these islands of information, also led to a pile of other industries, not all of which were necessary. Because we had these islands of information, we had to replicate information about our customers and supply chain in each of the islands. These pesky customers would refuse to deal with just one island, so information about them had to be captured and stored in every island.
Then it got worse, the pesky customers insisted on changing their information, so every island had to change its copy. Another industry was born. And it didn’t work too well.
And because it didn’t work too well, because changes were not synchronised between islands, something else happened. Transactions between islands broke down because of mismatches in the customer information. So we needed another industry, one that reconciled these broken-down transactions.
You see, that’s what happens when we build “vendor-centric” approaches, where we try and visualise customers and partners and supply chain participants as almost-unwelcome invaders into our fortresses and fiefdoms. The model only works when a customer is enslaved by a specific vendor, which is what the extreme version of a lock-in looks like.
Those days are gone. In most markets, customers deal with more than one vendor; there are many models emerging where multi-vendor is the norm rather than the exception. This inversion, from a vendor-centric approach to a customer-centric one, is, as far as I can make out, precisely what drives Vendor Relationship Management.
What’s all this to do with Facebook? Everything. Facebook is really a collection of customers all dressed up with nowhere to go. Since it’s an open multisided platform (OK OK, I hear you, it’s not as open as you want, but humour me just this once) it means that vendors can set up shop, but they can’t lock the customers in. Facebook is about enabling conversation. Connecting islands together by using a complex array of firewalls is tantamount to having firewalls on telephone lines or in coffee shops.
In Facebook, I can make sure I only “talk” to people I want to “talk” to. I can make sure that only the people I choose see the things I choose to show them. So why do I need further protection?
In Facebook, personal information is managed by the person whose information it is. Which seems reasonable. Who else can keep it up to date? Who else is interested in keeping it up to date? Furthermore, the information is only held once and in one place, so there’s no need for synchronisation and replication, there’s no need for transaction breakdown, repair and reconciliation as a result of “static” mismatches.
You’re right, this post is really not about Facebook. And yet it is. I find it a useful example to try and think through some of the things I face, so forgive me for rambling. Incidentally, I don’t expect Facebook to release a BTF version or appliance. It’s not the business they’re in, or indicate their intention to be in. They are not a product company, they’re an open multisided marketplace.
Looks like Prince really does get the Because Effect, as I wrote earlier. Take a look at this first night review in the Evening Standard. Here are a few excerpts:
The star has made himself available to Londoners with supreme generosity, charging just £31.21 for a concert ticket with a copy of his new album, Planet Earth, thrown in at the door.
Music stores and his latest record label, Sony BMG, were infuriated, but they must now acknowledge that the move has placed an artist well past his songwriting peak right back on top.
Prince has recognised, correctly, that these days a new album is just one money-making opportunity of many for a major star, of little more significance than ringtones.
Mainly, though, the giveaway has prompted even more interest in Prince the performer. It was evident right from his emergence from a cloud of smoke, flanked by Amazonian identical twin dancers, that the stage is where he most wants to be.
When he finally relinquished the spotlight, he had spun and slinked his way through a fabulously entertaining set that demonstrated that, unlike that omnipresent album, talent like this only appears once in a generation.
Albums are abundant. And free. Talent like this only appears once in a generation.
One of the commonest criticisms levelled at social software is that of wasting time. Wikis were whined at, blogs were barracked and now we have social networking sites (particularly Facebook) getting slammed.
Now I can understand the arguments about “too closed”. I can even understand the arguments about “too open”. What fascinates me is the number of people that take a different tack altogether….Facebook wastes time.
This takes me back a very long time, to the days when Visicalc and Wordstar and Storyboard were coming through, and corporate e-mail was just settling down. To the days before Microsoft Office, and the days soon after.
There were people playing with Visicalc, and they were followed by people who played with Excel. Digging around to find out how it worked, using it for all kinds of purposes. And all around them, people stood accusing. Accusing them of wasting time. Spreadsheets weren’t real work. they said.
Many years later, I had reason to audit many servers worth of Excel files at one particular institution. To my surprise, most of the files had nothing to do with “business”. Fantasy football and cricket teams. Tea and coffee rounds. Stock portfolios. Expense claims. Shopping lists. Lists and lists and lists and lists.
The spreadsheets per head ratio was in the region of 3000:1. Yes, you read that right. And over 80% of the spreadsheets had absolutely nothing to do with “work”.
But hey, it was Excel. So it must be legitimate. After all, whole businesses are run today on Excel, aren’t they?
I’ve seen the same thing happen with other so-called “productivity tools” or “end-user computing tools” or, more recently, “collaboration tools”. And the patterns are the same.
Phase 1: Bunch of people start playing with software. Nobody cares.
Phase 2: Large bunch of people start playing with software. Now everybody cares, and the Wasting Time card is played.
Phase 3: Slowly, more and more business uses emerge. But still no enterprise adoption. People get more proficient at using it, though.
Phase 4: Proficiency gets higher, enterprises begin adoption. Site licences emerge.
Phase 5: Users break up into three groups: SuperPower, Effective and Don’t Care.
Phase 6: New tools emerge. Play begins again.
or something like that anyway……
I’m flabbergasted. There’s a lot for me to read and to catch up on, a lot for me to digest, a lot for me to learn from. My thanks to all of you. Now I need to do justice to the comments and suggestions and criticisms, and it’s going to take a little time.
I’m also working on the fourth post I promised, critiquing Facebook in the context of Four Pillars. I hope to have that done by Thursday.
[Stephen, as far as I know, I used Customer Exploitation Management in public around the middle of 2002, and in print a year or so later. By all means use the phrase, cite me if you need to, I am not hung up about “owning” phrases. Language, like ideas, must remain free, and its evolution does not take place in a vacuum. I’m sure others have used the phrase before….]