Category: Four pillars

Whenever I travel I tend to go through a goodly supply of books, papers and magazines. Yesterday was no different. And quite often, while I’m doing this, I tend to collect scraps of paper, articles that I’ve torn out of the newspapers and magazines in order to carry less.

Later, when I’m awake doing that early morning jet lag thing, I tend to read the ripped-out articles a second time and then dispose of them in the hotel room. That’s what I’m doing right now.

One such article was entitled How to destroy brand-new automobiles. Taken from the Wednesday-Thursday edition of the Wall Street Journal Europe, the article dwelt on the challenges Mazda had in getting rid of $100m worth of brand-new cars, in order to avoid the risk of brand damage via the Katrina car approach.

One particular paragraph really got to me:

It took more than a year to devise a plan that satisfied everyone. The City of Portland wanted assurance that nearly 5,000 cars’ worth of antifreeze, brake fluid and other hazardous goop wasn’t mishandled. Insurers covering Mazda’s losses wanted to be sure the company wouldn’t resell any cars or parts, thereby profiting on the side. So every steel-alloy wheel has to be sliced, every battery rendered inoperable and every tire damaged beyond repair. All CD players must get smashed.

I remembered the same thing happening during the run-up to Year 2000, when many institutions were junking computers in reasonable working condition, but weren’t able to donate the equipment to anyone or anything because of the insurance implications, or weren’t willing to donate because of the putative risk to the brand.

It just feels wrong, trashing something that still works and that still has value to someone. There is something weird about making sure someone else cannot extract any utility from a resource. It’s like putting poison in butter mountains in order to prevent someone from even thinking of doing something with the surplus.

I’ve spent a lot of time in charity shops and remaindered book sellers, and I had the same feeling when I saw covers purposely mangled (to denote remaindering). What is it about us, what is it that makes us do things like this?

And it’s not just physical resource. Sometime over the last thirty years, I worked somewhere where there was something really strange in the middle of an open-plan floor: a bunch of desks that had been chained off from the rest, with the equivalent of police tape across every possible entrance to that particular cubicle desert. Why? None of the profit centres wanted that space. So the people in Facilities figured that nobody should be able to use the space. Until that day, it was a useful ad-hoc meeting area, a place where informal meetings and workshoips took place. But the gods of Facilities decreed No Tickee No Washee.

All this made me think. For some classes of software, we need to write software that will last 200 years, as Dan Bricklin suggested. But that is not all. There are other classes of software, other classes that require different treatment. We also need to write software that does not damage “the environment” when we want to stop using it, for whatever reason.

We need to build applications where the cost of decommissioning is at least as low as the cost of commissioning them, to paraphrase Clay Shirky. [I quote his “when the cost of repair is equal to or less than the cost of damage, all is well” idea quite regularly.]

Software needs disassembly lines.

One more thing. The Mazda incident also brings out the issues and costs involved in dealing with toxic substances. I have this nagging feeling that we have something similar in social networks, from a privacy angle. Over time, social networks collect “toxic” or “hazardous” information, information that has to be disposed of carefully and securely. What happens, for example, if one of the major electronic social networks goes bust? Who makes sure that customer data is dealt with securely? We already have examples of secure disposal of physical information and of physical media.

The treatment of digital assets is still in its infancy, and we have a lot to learn about it. Like who looks after this blog when I die? Does it die with me? Should it?

Recently I spent some time considering the differences between traditional office e-mail and facebook e-mail: the lack of bc, cc and forward buttons, the way links and videos and sound files are attached, the absence of spreadsheet and document and presentation attachments, and so on.

All that got me thinking. For a while now I’ve been studying the youth of today and how they use the tools of today. For a while now I’ve been exploring the likelihood that when the youth enter their equivalent of what we call employment, they’re likely to enter it with their tools. Tools that they’re trained to use. Tools that they’re good at using. Tools that I know less than enough about.

Take cameras. Go talk to a couple of dozen people at random. Find out if they’ve ever sent each other mobile photos. Ask them if they’ve ever used MMS. Check with them if they’ve ever uploaded mobile photos.

I did just that. And it seemed to confirm what I thought. The bulk of people using their mobile phones as cameras were below 30. Try it. Let me know what you find out.

My assertion is that Generation M knows more about the usage of mobile phones as cameras than we do; that they will find ways of using it in the enterprise, ways we have not considered. I remember a time when we’d purchased one of these newfangled basketball nets; I was away at the time, my wife had asked the handyman to put it up, and he was having some trouble with it. My son had a friend who had the same equipment; a phone call, a photograph, and suddenly light dawned.

Even old fogeys like me find uses for mobile phone photographs. Take book purchases. A goodly number of the books I purchase today are based on recommendations or on collaborative filtering. [In fact, quite a few of the recommendations come from comments on this blog or via Twitter]. Which is fine, except for when I’m physically at a bookstore and I see a book I like the look and sound of. If I’d read the author before then it was simple. If I’d heard good things about the book before then it was simple. But what happens when I had no information other than what I saw in front of me?

Simple. I took a photograph of the book. A normal wander around the bookstore may yield eight or nine photographs. Later, when I was back in a connected environment, I would go through the titles one by one, check them out in a more leisurely manner, look at the reviews and recommendations and then order the titles that made the grade.

I’ve done similar things with flipchart and whiteboard sessions. Taken a photograph and then reflected on the contents at leisure. When someone is demonstrating something new to me, sometimes I do the same thing. But for all this I don’t tend to use the phone, I use a “proper camera”. And upload the photos on to Flickr.

Which brings me on to the use of Flickr and YouTube in the enterprise. I’ve now seen both used in anger within the enterprise, and I’ve been delighted to see their use. You want to share something quickly over a great distance? Take a photograph or video of what you want to share. Upload it, tagging it with something arbitrarily odd like “zv54yng31”. Send the tag to people with whom you want to share the image or video.

And bingo. It’s there, using the internet and commodity tools. Hidden in plain sight, a readily findable needle in a commodity haystack.

Like the story of the Fisher pen and the pencil, there are expensive ways of doing things, and smart ways of doing things. We’re going to see a lot of this. The youth of today are going to use everyday tools to do everyday things. It’s just that their everyday tools and techniques will differ from ours. We need to prepare for this.

New forms of etiquette will emerge to deal with these phenomena. New mistakes will be made, new lessons will be learnt. There is a lot we don’t know about this, but there is one thing we can be certain of:

The Web is normal and commonplace for the youth of today, and the web’s tools are as familiar as friends. They will use the web and its tools in ways that we haven’t dreamt of.

[An aside. About embarrassing photographs appearing on Facebook. When I was young there was an equivalent. People used to do the most amazing things on photocopiers. And then the photocopies would do the rounds amidst gales of laughter. Admittedly this was the kind of thing that happened at office parties.  I don’t remember any horror stories in the press, any calls to avoid going near photocopiers. ]

It’s been a frustrating time for anyone even vaguely interested in reading this blog: it’s been up and down like a yo-yo. My apologies.

Last Thursday my account was suspended by the hosting company, on the grounds that it had been reported as a phishing site. To my shock they were right. So the site was taken down, passwords changed, the offending file was located and removed, and, with a little help from friends, the site was brought back up.

I then decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 to try and improve site security. With a wobble or two, we got there.

Then on Sunday my account was suspended for a second time. This time for trying to send over 500 mails an hour. Something was rotten in the state of my blog.

So there was nothing else for it. Zap the blog. Reset everything. Start again from scratch. Hope the backups work. And again, with a little help from my friends, it was all right on the night.

There were many offers of help, many who did help, particularly at i-together and at osmosoft. You know who you are. Prepare for dinner. Sumptuous ones.

All this made me think. Common civility requires us to stay away from groups and crowds when we’re infected with physical viruses like the common cold. The same is true for the devices we attach to the web, and for the assets we deploy on the devices.

Bob Frankston pointed me at this Dan Bricklin piece a few days ago, suggesting it was good background for a discussion that a number of us were having about infrastructure. [Thanks, Bob. And thanks to Dan as well, great piece. Something to discuss over dinner next time we meet.]

Dan draws out a number of themes in the essay, each worth analysis in its own right. And that is not what I intend to do in this post. Another time, maybe even another place. Instead, what I want to concentrate on is the implications of one particular aspect of Dan’s essay, depreciation:

Today, hardware is capable enough that software can be written that will continue to run unmodified as hardware is changed. Computers are no longer new alternatives to other applications — they are the only alternative. Despite this, old thinking and methodologies have remained.

Computers and computer software have been viewed as being valuable for no longer than common short-term durable goods like an automobile or sometimes even tires. In accounting, common depreciation terms for software are 3 to 5 years; 10 at most. Contrast this to residential rental property which is depreciated over 27.5 years and water mains and brick walls which are depreciated over 60 years or more.

I’ve known about this for many years, yet somehow I haven’t appreciated something about depreciation. This may be because I’ve tended to work in environments where the preference is to treat software investment as cash rather than as something to be capitalised.

There were many reasons for this: the avoidance of burdening future generations, a sins-of-the-father variant; the frustrations of reviewing software asset portfolios at year-end, and having to cope with material swings in annual outturns driven by write-offs; the apparent illogic of bothering to capitalise software that was not going to be fit for purpose in less than two years.

I’ll say it again. The apparent illogic of bothering to capitalise software that was not going to be fit for purpose in less than two years.

Probably influenced by Nicholas Carr’s seminal article and book, many people have already classified IT as a utility: standardised, commoditised, scalable, infrastructural, available on tap. I only wish it were true. It will be one day. But we’re not there yet. [Incidentally, he’s written a very interesting mini-piece on Amazon and AWS here, a segue on this Wired article, something I will comment on in a few days.]

Reading Dan’s essay, I realise there is a simple way of my finding out when “IT won’t matter”. A leading indicator, as it were.

IT “won’t matter” when software depreciation periods start pushing out to reflect the periods prevalent in construction industries and utilities.

This has already begun to happen, particularly in infrastructural IT, an area where opensource software is dominant. [And no surprise!]

And it’s going to accelerate with the arrival of software as a service. When you’re providing a quality service at a competitive price, you’re not going to be fiddling around with the gubbins of the service every time it rains. Nobody can afford to.

Sure, we have forces operating in the other direction. People still get paid to design and deliver “planned obsolescence”. Even worse, bloatware is common, even endemic.

This will change. It has to. More and more of what we call software today will become infrastructure, reliable, consistent, with a long shelf-life. Carr will be proved right, as far as this is concerned.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because infrastructural software is necessary but not sufficient for a sustainable business, particularly one which relies on knowledge workers.

Innovation will continue, even thrive, “at the edge”. And at this edge, we will still build software. Mayfly applications that last for a day, a trade, a project. Disposable software. Radioactive software with a short half-life. And these applications will be built on a “cash” basis. Markets will move faster, not slow down. Exciting times, where software is both a utility as well as the engine of creativity.

For all this to happen, we need to see changes. Particularly an end to Bloatware.

Don’t Float Your Bloat. Because that don’t float my boat.

I’ve spent the best part of three decades immersed in large organisations: watching and observing them, working for them, working in them. With very few exceptions, I have found the following to be true of large organisations:

• We stress the importance of human resources, human talent, human capital
• We stress the importance of teamwork and collaboration
• We stress the importance of openness and transparency
• We stress the importance of trust

And then, mysteriously, we somehow manage to create an environment where we jealously guard information; where we seek to create and extend power as a result of this jealous guarding; where we then exploit this power in all kinds of ways, some less abhorrent than others (but all abhorrent, at least to me).

Given all the other values that are stressed, I’ve often wondered why this happens. And in a Sunday night frame of mind, I’d like to postulate one possible reason:

Let me try and explain it by using one of my favourite Peter Drucker quotations:

People make shoes, not money.

People aren’t interested in medical records, they’re interested in getting well, and staying well. People aren’t interested in bills and receipts, they’re interested in knowing that they did what they said they will do, or that they received what they expected to receive. People aren’t interested in financial statements, they’re interested in what they can do as a result of the security that income and savings and insurance and pensions. People aren’t interested in TV or radio schedules, they’re interested in watching things and listening to things. People aren’t interested in share prices and market movements, they’re interested in the things they can do as a result of performing their jobs well. It’s not the information that matters, but what we can do as a result.

People make shoes, not money.

Of course information has value in the sense that it lets you do things as a result of your having information. And not do things as a result of your not having information. But this value is not something we can impute to information per se.

It’s a bit like saying a car key has value by itself. Sure, it lets you drive the car. And if you didn’t have the key then driving the car becomes somewhat more difficult.

But by itself it’s nothing. It’s just a key.

Take a television schedule. Not much use without something to watch television with (even if it’s a Mac rather than a telly). Or take a telephone directory, not much use unless you have a telephone (even if it is a camera or game console pretending to be a phone).

[This is also why IT systems by themselves have no value; value is derived from adoption, from usage. If we don’t understand this, we’ll never answer the age-old question of the “business value of IT”].

I know I’m making a big deal out of this, but there’s a reason. Humour me on this.

Once we impute value to information, we create a reason for people to have secrets. To hide things.

And then it’s a downward spiral. Does it make sense to hide things from your customer? Does it make sense to have asymmetric information within the firm? Once we start acting as if information has value by and of itself, it is only a matter of time before people start using this information to gain personal advantage within the firm.

And once this happens, we can forget about all the nice things we say organisations stand for: openness, transparency, teamwork, collaboration, respect for the individual. Trust. We can forget about all of it, because we allow the very basis of this to be corrupted.

Take a completely different perspective on all this. Privacy. Why does someone worry about who has access to his medical records? Not because the records themselves have value. But because someone can misuse them. Because, for example, someone can refuse to insure, or raise premiums for, some hitherto undeclared medical condition. Or even worse, for some future projected medical condition, projected as a result of discovered habits.

It’s not about the information, it’s about what you do with it.

When we had no language, we may have had information, but I wouldn’t know how we knew that we had information.

Once we had oral language, we had information. Much of it was passed from generation to generation without fear or favour. Then, somewhere along the line, people figured out that hoarding information gave them some form of power. And out of that came caste systems and class systems. And a few wars.

It was all about power. Not value.

When we moved from oral to written language, we still had information. But now we could store some of it, and share some of it. But people figured out, if only there was a way to control who could read and write, then the power would remain.

Along came the printing press. Same story. If only there was a way to control who could print and distribute, the power would remain.

Minor skirmishes have been fought on this topic for the last 150 years or so, covering the post and telegraph, radio, film, television, vinyl, tapes, CDs, the lot. If only we could control the copying process and the distribution process, the power would remain.

Well, the genie’s out of the bottle. The horse has bolted. Choose your cliche. Because that’s all there is, cliche.

As reproduction, transmission and storage costs continue their drive towards zero, it’s going to get even worse. Information is an extreme nonrival good, needing artificial intervention to sustain its value. And every artificial scarcity will be met with an artificial abundance. Piracy. Cracking. Whatever you want to call it.

Ideas are free, and will continue to be free. So will information. Or, as Doc Searls keeps reminding me, in the words of our mutual friend Don Marti, information wants to be $5.99.

Information will continue to have value, but that value will tend towards the cost of collecting, processing, storing and retrieving that information. And while there is a cost, the price may still be zero, as ways are found to defray the cost with attention in one form or another.

There is something magical happening. We’ve had language for a very long time. We’ve had the capacity to read and write for a very long time. The costs of reproduction and transmission and storage have dropped remarkably, and that changes many things.

But there is a bigger change. A change brought about by the digital world. Now we can archive and retrieve information, search and find it. This has never happened before. And it is huge.

So.

Information is changing. And it is becoming more valuable to us all by becoming less valuable to any one of us.

Let us bear that in mind as we move on. We should concentrate on providing good service and good product, concentrate on providing that service honestly and diligently. And the money will flow. Not by hoarding information, but by freeing it up. Collaborating with each other, within the firm, with our customers, with our partners, with our markets. Even with our competitors. [Actually we do that already, but in a closed way. It’s called a cartel.]

[Incidentally, the working title for this post was one possible response to the question “but how do we make money if we don’t hoard information?”…..monetise this! But it sounded rude and so I dropped it.]