Category: Four pillars

…..and still somehow it’s cloud illusions I recall….
…..I really don’t know clouds at all….

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Now playing: Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now
via FoxyTunes

One of my favourite songs from one of my favourite musicians. I could listen to Joni reading a telephone directory. I would probably pay for it. In fact, if hers was the voice I heard when waiting in one of those interminable call queues, I’d probably be less stressed. I wonder…..

But enough of that. Talk like that will bring on clouds of frustration.

Let me talk about clouds of a different sort: the ones we use to visualise collections and populations and frequency and popularity. You’re bound to have seen them, they’ve been used for a variety of things ranging from tags to search terms to authors.

So far, I’ve seen clouds used for relatively discrete lists, both manual as well as automatic. Where they’ve been automatic, they’ve tended to scrape the contents of a particular data item within a database, such as “author’s name” in a book collection.

Sam Lawrence of Jive Software originally alerted me to IBM’s excellent manyeyes a little while ago, following on from something I’d tweeted re visualisation tools. And so I went there and took a look, and liked what I saw. More recently, as I was following up on something at that site, I was a little taken aback to find myself looking at this:

Whoops. Not what I was expecting, but interesting. And then today I was alerted to the fact that he’d just written this story; all I can say is that Sam’s a brave man. He’s not the first to call me names, and “thought leader” is pretty good as names go….but…. to boil me down to 10 words? In two words, im-possible, to quote a different Sam :-). Take a look at the results, they’re interesting. Chris Brogan also comments on Sam’s post.

And it got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be useful to display the stocks being traded as a cloud rather than just as a ticker feed? Volume would be depicted by the size of the “word”, in this case the name or symbol of the stock. You could use colour and font and style to add further meaning, while still retaining the cloud concept.

What intrigues me further is the more general application of what Sam (thanks, Sam! And say hi to Dawn.) showed us using manyeyes. Applications that get us involved in serious knowledge management; applications like showing the frequency of words in corporate e-mail on a given day, compared against similar word clouds for IM and blog and wiki in the same enterprise. All for the same day. Applications like showing how the frequency of words used in Powerpoint changed over time, to see if the “message” of change was being embedded in corporate-speak. [I shall resist the temptation to say that fourteen times, or however many times it takes….]

When things become digital, many things become possible. When markets become digital, many more things become possible, as my erstwhile colleague Sean keeps reminding me. Sean, who was probably born not that far from where Roberta Joan Anderson was born, albeit a few years later.

Talking about Joni Mitchell, I just love this project of hers: “The Annotated Joni Mitchell” Glossary Project
Just look at what she has to say: “Who cares what I mean? What does it mean to you?” It means a lot to me, especially when she comes up with words like…..

Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes true
I’ve looked at love that way…..

You may have noticed that I like quoting what Howard Schneiderman said, many years ago,  while he was at Monsanto, reproduced below. (I’ve referred to the quote thrice before, over the years):

When you turn down a request for funding an R&D project, you are right 90% of the time. That’s a far higher rate of decision accuracy than you get anywhere else, so you do it.

And that’s fine. Except for the 10% of the time you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you lose the company.

I was reminded of the quotation while reading Sean Park’s recent post on Boardroom IT, itself triggered by an article in FT Digital Business by Ade McCormack.

McCormack asserts that technology management is a board issue, and cites three reasons why IT management “fails to stem from the boardroom”:

• the “tech-free” careers of many of today’s business leaders
• the feeling, in many IT departments, that “users” should not interfere in IT decisions
• the power of the “vendor” in undermining the relationship between board and function

He then goes on to recommend five steps to “move technology management into the boardroom”:

• Investing in boardroom development to ensure that the board grasp the strategic importance of IT
• Ensuring that the “IT function” has strong management
• Demonstrating that top technologists are valued
• Insisting that best practice is normal
• Considering outsourcing, but giving the function first refusal

Sean, while endorsing what Ade has to say, goes further. He indicates that he only invests in companies where the board demonstrates its understanding of the strategic importance of IT.

There are some important points being made here, and I’d like to add my sideways-on view:

1. It’s about access. I am less concerned about whether the CIO is on the board or not, what matters is that the CIO has access to the boardroom. Easy access. And one way of measuring access is the number of times that IT topics make the board’s agenda. I regularly hear about companies with CIOs on the board which would not meet Sean’s criteria. Putting a CIO on the board is a bit like joining a gym. Value is only obtained when you exercise.

2. It’s not about measurement, it’s about outcomes. Boards need to know where the company is going, and the role that technology must play in getting the company there. Too often boards abdicate that responsibility and seek to govern via ratios. That’s a bit like managing a war by looking at the body counts on either side. If IT is a construction industry it should be run like one, with fixed prices and penalties for change or delay. If IT is an investment business it should be run like one, with clear expected returns and the willingness to divest when required. If IT is a sales and marketing business, then IT estimates and forecasts would be expected to have the same level of confidence as sales forecasts, tightening over time. The trouble is, the word “project” covers all these types: construction, investment, sales/marketing, with different behaviours and expectations. This issue is made worse by the current “battle of professions”, particularly between finance and IT.

3.  This time it’s personal. Enterprise 1.0 was an easy ride for most boards in this respect: the understanding of the strategic value of IT was consistent across the boards of different companies: consistently low, that is. And as a result, the failure to derive value from IT was common and consistent. Now, with Enterprise 2.0, the rules have changed. As Andrew McAfee has noted a number of times, what Enterprise 2.0 does is to accelerate a company’s capacity to differentiate, so the gap between winners and losers has increased sharply more recently. IMO one of the reasons for this acceleration is the entry of Generation M into the workplace. Today is about acceleration, tomorrow, as more of that generation gains employment, we’re going to see ballistic growth in that difference.

Too often we argue about the strategic value of IT, and allow that argument to descend into measurement farce. As we continue to move into a digital age, understanding the strategic value of IT is now “table stakes”.

What matters is understanding what’s at stake. It’s called the company.

Finished reading Cathi Unsworth’s The Singer while on a plane a couple of days ago. Did it almost at one sitting, found it that enjoyable. Riveting. A searing, soaring Punk novel, with visions as dark as Erebus. Strongly recommended to all who connect with that generation.

The book criss-crosses between the late Seventies and the early 21st century in dramatic fashion. In passing, Cathi refers to the hoodie generation as “children brought up in front of the CCTV”. Children who knew how to keep their faces averted away from the camera, who used their hoodies and baseball caps to best effect.

The overlap between the Hoodie Generation and Generation M is one worth thinking about. It’s the same generation, intensely public and intensely private at the extremes.

There’s money flowing from log cabins to the White House. I quote from the Washington Post:

Sen. Barack Obama has set a new online record, raising more than $28 million online in one month.

To put this into context, Howard Dean, known as the first Internet candidate, raised $27 million — during his whole campaign.

A spokesman said $28 of the $32 million that Obama raised last month came over the Internet. Ninety percent of the online donations were $100 or less; forty percent were $25 or less.

In January, more than 10,000 people gave between $5 and $10 on the Internet, he said.

Football clubs being owned by its members, members who gathered online. Bands being funded by its members, members who gathered online. Presidential candidates being funded by supporters who gather online.

Whatever next? Maybe we will see “Western democracy” start meaning something again after all, rather than remain the oxymoron it’s been reduced to.

Time to re-invoke my favourite Mahatma Gandhi quote:

What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,   1869-1948

The same goes for Western democracy. And maybe the web brings us closer to that possibility.

[My thanks to Brittany Bohnet for reminding me about this by linking to the techPresident story in Facebook].

The diagram above is from an article headlined “The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You” which appeared in Wired about a year ago. Go read the original, the diagram is interactive and instructive.

Why instructive? After all, doesn’t everyone in the blogosphere know about ping servers, search engines, aggregators, ad servers, data miners, ad servers and text scrapers? What’s so instructive about spam blogs? And surely everybody knows about social bookmarking, about linking, and about making comments?

The instructiveness for me comes in the word I left out. Corporations. Enterprises.

In the 21st Century, the web is two-way; as Doc Searls often says, it’s writeable. So, if we take these ideas into the enterprise, build enterprise applications around the web, what are the analogies? Should there be any analogies? Should enterprises be using exactly the same tools as their customers? Why not?

These are the things I’ve been thinking about for a while. Why it makes sense to have a Facebook for the Enterprise without actually competing with Facebook, in fact actually collaborating with them. Why a form of Twitter should be used in the enterprise. What the enterprise equivalent of YouTube is, what the enterprise equivalent of Flickr is. Why all this matters.

You see, I no longer think the diagram (or the article, for that matter) is about blogs. It’s about information. As a result of the writeable web, information has become more liquid, it flows better. Static information required snapshots, and that’s what we’ve been doing for 30 years (or maybe more). Learning about snapshots.

The snapshot analogy led to a plethora of sins, to the way we designed databases, to the way we “inserted”, “amended” and “deleted” data. As we tried to force the snapshots to move around between systems, we hit DRM version 1. Enterprise Application Integration. Otherwise known as paying to bury our data, paying to dig it out again, and then, just in case we haven’t had enough, paying to move it around. And we could do so many wonderfully silly things as a result. Hire armies of people to write code to synchronise things, then hire more armies of people to write code to reconcile the data. Sometimes we missed out the “writing code” bit and just hired the reconcilers direct.

And the platform vendors prospered. And the database guys prospered. The storage guys prospered. The EAI guys prospered. The code writers prospered. The reconcilers prospered. Everyone prospered.

Except the customer.

The writeable web changes all that. Now, very time a knowledge worker does something, we can classify it as search, syndication, fulfilment or conversation. We’re going to look deeply into all this, and we’re going to find……find what? That knowledge workers spend most of their time in conversation. They use search and syndication to augment the conversations, they use fulfilment to execute every now and then, but they spend most of their time in conversation. Within the enterprise, and beyond the enterprise. With their colleagues. With their trading partners. With their customers. With everyone.

Markets are conversations. [Yes, it’s Cluetrain all over again, not just Four Pillars.]

So we’re going to see some things change in the enterprise. Conversation is going to be captured and archived and retrieved and enhanced and allowed to flow. We’re going to use blogs and wikis and twitter and IM and audio and video, we may even have tiny pockets of e-mail and fax and (dare I mention it) telex. Every conversational action will hit an enterprise ping server, populate search engines, aggregators, data miners and online media and even text scrapers. [An aside: The single biggest creator of spam is the corporation.] Every conversational action will have the capability to be bookmarked, linked to, commented upon, ranked, rated, added to, enhanced.

I can even visualise a time when Microsoft and Google and Amazon will have to pay corporations for the right to “serve ads” to their staff and customers. Every time I fire up a Microsoft program they are advertising to me. In the enterprise. At the enterprise’s expense. So maybe we’re going to see brand-free applications in the enterprise, or large sums of money paid to corporations for the right to advertise on the desktop. This could be one of the unintended consequences of consumerisation.

The boundary of the enterprise will continue to grow more and more porous, as enterprises work out that bringing customers into the enterprise is a GOOD THING. Suddenly, we will start seeing these ping servers and search engines and aggregators and data miners shared in communities, shared between participants in the community. The extended enterprise will grow and morph until it becomes a market.

And we’re going to have to ask ourselves what a firewall means in all this, what privacy and confidentiality mean in all this. Because they’re changing. As the enterprise boundary shifts, the “perimeter” concept also shifts, and starts becoming “personal”. It’s already happening.

Just musing. More later. What do you think?