Category: Four pillars

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been trying to stress the importance of dealing prudently with the Three Is of Information: Identity, Intellectual Property Rights and the Internet.  Recent events have only served to highlight why.

Most of you are aware of the tragic time that Kathy Sierra has had, her response, the polarised debate that ensued, the continuing firestorm, culminating, at least for the time being, in Alan Herrell’s e-mail to Doc. The blogosphere is a small world; you have seen me refer to Kathy’s writings many times; I have, and continue to have, enormous respect for her and her writings; and I know many of the people involved in the debate (at both extremes!), and count quite a few as my friends. Much has been said in the heat of the moment, and much emotion expressed. These are sad times.

Nobody should have to put up with the perverseness, hate, misogyny and bullying that was directed at Kathy. It cannot be defended or condoned. Full stop. So how are we going to prevent this from happening?

Not by knee-jerk attempts at “governing” what happens on the web; personal empowerment is a key attribute of the web, and should remain so. Let us be careful about introducing cyberlaw sledgehammers.

Not by McCarthyist hounding of people judged by innuendo and insinuation either; the presumption of innocence is not something the web can take away. If we do this, all we do is bring the worst of journalism into the digital world rather than the best, which we are still in a position to do.

Not by polarised emotion and blamestorming and flaming either; I am saddened to see just how many friends I have on both sides of the arguments right now, people I will continue to call my friends. I prefer to take the beam out of my own eye rather than look for motes in my friends’ eyes.

We live in a world that has a lot of evil in it, and the Web gets its share.  While I have seen many attempts to legislate ethics, I have also seen them fail. The community space that is the Web can only be “governed” by community ethics and community values. Civility and common sense are more important than legalism and legislation.

If we get Identity right, we can go a long way towards preventing the recurrence of what Kathy faced. Bullies, especially cyber-bullies, tend to be cowards.

If we get Identity right, we can also go a long way towards preventing Digital McCarthyism as well.

Getting Identity right will help ensure that the Web is a safer place for our children, at home or at school; that Web tools can be used more effectively to teach and communicate.

Getting Identity right will help us ensure that the Web is a safer place for us, as we get and spend and lay waste our powers.

Getting Identity right will allow us to ensure that the Knowledge Commons doesn’t become another Tragedy of the Commons, as we use Identity to push back against mindless DRM and IPR legislation.

It’s all about Identity, and the trust that is engendered when Identity is real. And the things that can happen when trust does not exist, or when Identity is not real.

The entire Kathy Sierra incident is a tragedy, one we can and should learn from. Maybe it’s time we became passionate about Identity. I have enjoyed reading Kathy’s blog; I have also enjoyed reading the blogs of many others scattered right across the spectrum of anger and argument engendered by what happened to Kathy. If we want to continue to enjoy reading such conversations, then we have to do something.

And Identity is where I would begin.

I guess some of you may have read Carl Honore’s book on the subject; one way or the other, I thought you might enjoy the following links:

If we had no Web, how else would we even begin to consider spending hours watching a cheese mature?

And how else could we enjoy this, a video of someone creating a Lego version of Mario and then laboriously crafting scenes in order to make it watchable?

I was born nearly 50 years ago in a building on Lower Circular Road in Calcutta, not far from Sealdah station. I have very limited memories of living there, so limited that I question whether they are real. But I’ve visited that building many times, my family technically owned it till 1980.

It seemed huge. Because it was huge. Floor upon floor of rooms laid out enclosing a massive inner quadrangle, vaguely turret-like towers at the four corners with gigantic reception rooms and hallways fronting all this. And a basement where the printing press used to be. A basement where I had the best of both worlds during a rebellious adolescence, a place I could vicariously call home every now and then despite enjoying all the comforts of home with the family elsewhere.

I wasn’t one of those people who discovered their love for their home town years after they left it, I started missing Calcutta while still on the train to Delhi en route London. It wasn’t one of these “absence makes the heart grows fonder” deals, I have always treasured the place and will continue to do so. Particularly the memories of the times I had there, family and friends and school and university and everything.

But you know something, I never knew it was called the City Of Palaces until a few years after I left; it was when I was reading an article about the works of the Daniell brothers that I first came across the term.

Since then I’ve been searching for, digging up and collecting a whole variety of artefacts that relate to the City of Palaces, somehow revelling in the fading grandeur and nobility that Calcutta represented. Can’t quite explain it. It was more than just arguing about India Coffee House or Eden Gardens or the Maidan or Tagore or Ray or Sen or what could become a very long list. It wasn’t about the capital city or the Black Hole or St Xavier’s or the movie halls or Clive Street or Mother Teresa or Joi Bangla or Amahdayr Dabi Mahntay Hobay or a democratically elected communist government. It wasn’t about the RCGC or the Tolly or the Swimming Club or Belvedere or Park Circus or the trams or minibuses or Nizam’s or Bihar’s or the bookshops on College St, on Free School St or in Gariahat. It wasn’t about the jhal mudi or puchkas or the Strand or Victoria Memorial or lounging at the British Council or quizzes and the DI and Neil O’Brien and Sadhan Banerjee and Francis Groser. It wasn’t about watching Sugarfoot form and play and grow. It wasn’t about Moira St and all that it represented.

It was about all of it. And I’ve been privileged to be able to afford and find and collect said artefacts, from Magnolia and Firpo’s menus to photographs of the City in the latter half of the 19th century to diaries and journals and family albums depicting life in the first half of the 20th century.

With all this in mind, I enjoyed looking through a collection of photographs provided in a comment by Stuart Isett. Go take a look, it brings to life the glory and the mundaneness that makes Calcutta Calcutta.

I’ve been on the road for the first time since going bionic, and for some reason I listened to my cardiologist’s advice. Which meant conserving my energy, going to bed earlier than I would have otherwise, resting as much as possible in general.

All this also meant that I didn’t get to blog. In fact, ever since the heart attack I haven’t been posting that often, and the eleven-day break since my last post is probably the longest I’ve had. So I thought I’d take a look at the effect of my laziness on the various ways people rank this kind of activity.

On technorati I have drifted gently from around the 5000 mark to around 10000; on alexa I’ve moved from nothing to nothing, too irrelevant to be measured (although I tell myself that it’s because most people who read this don’t use Internet Explorer <g> ).

For some reason my inactivity seems to have made me more popular on google. (Alright, alright, enough of the laughter). Since Christmas, if you search for “jp” on Google, I get included in the top 8 results. Seems to vary according to the time of day.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. I have no idea why the result is the way it is, given I’ve never Optimised For Search Engines, pay nothing for such things, sell nothing, buy nothing, and have relatively trivial rankings elsewhere.

But there it is. Google says I am more popular when I say nothing <g>.

It’s been a long time since I started out on the Four Pillars journey, sometime in the middle of 2003 I guess. At the time, I suggested that enterprise applications would converge to become one of four “pillars”: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

Most people got the Search pillar, where all I was stressing was that we would move from deterministic models of looking at information through to probabilistic ones, particularly as we realised the lack of accuracy of the information we were getting via the traditional forms-based or tree-structure approaches. I guess most people “got it” because search had been around for a long time, and everyone was familiar with the concepts.

While this was not the case in the middle of 2003, most people have now “got” two of the other pillars, Publishing and Conversation. RSS readers are common now, people understand the syndication of content; blogs, wikis and IM, the constituents of conversation applications (beyond the traditional e-mail) are also common, even if usage patterns show an inverse relationship with age.

What many people didn’t get was the pillar I tried to describe as Fulfilment. The process by which a customer gets what he wants. Buying a book, booking a train ticket, selling the contents of your garage, eating out, watching a film, whatever.

Fulfilment. A state of feeling that you got what you wanted, where you wanted it, when you wanted it and how you wanted it. A state of satisfaction.

I’ve written a number of posts on why customer experience is the only remaining differentiator in a commoditising world, particularly when guest blogging for Shane Richmond at the Telegraph last November: on the economics of the customer, on customers and differentiation, on customers and predictability.

One of the reasons I chose to work where I work is that everyone here is focused on this issue, on improving the customer experience. And with all this as backdrop, you can understand why I want to figure out ways of improving processes that serve the customer. Giving the customer what he wants, precisely what he wants, as quickly as he wants it.

This is not going to happen unless we get our processes defined right, refined right. So we spend a lot of time trying to work out what that means, making sure we are documenting the processes correctly, that they really do reflect the customer experience. Making sure that we understand where we’re losing time or accuracy. Making sure we understand what we’re going to do to gain back the time and the accuracy.

Which is where the opensourcing of processes comes in. Why Michael Hugos’ post on visibility resonated with me so much, and why I wrote my earlier post on the subject.

Many many years ago, probably in the mid-1980s, I remember reading an article called Don’t Allocate, Isolate. Probably in the Harvard Business Review or the Sloan Management Review. While looking at aspects of cost analysis, the authors were suggesting that enterprises spent too long arguing about who paid and how much, rather than really understanding what was spent and on what.

I feel similarly about processes. We should document rather than analyse or critique them. Just document the reality. There’s nothing magical or differentiating about processes per se, it’s how we execute them that matters. Which means that standardisation of processes should not be that difficult. Unless we want to make it difficult.

Maybe we do the same thing with the time and accuracy aspects of processes. Maybe we should avoid getting into the angels-dancing-on-pinheads syndrome. No finger-pointing, no blame cultures while we do something very simple. Measure how long it takes for the customer to get what he wants. Measure how often we get his want right.

These things need to be incontrovertible truths, not for debate. Truths that cannot be varied by the diktats of the Word-Excel-PowerPoint troika.

Expose the process, as if it were code. Expose the completion times and error rates, as if it were code. Let everyone see them. Even the customer. Particularly the customer. Why don’t we learn from the Fedex model?

Michael Hugos’ Universal Product Codes are elements that can be expressed adequately in the tag-meets-microformat spaces; when we do this, we have the DNA we need to track processes across systems silos as well as departmental silos.

When we expose the simple things, we may start seeing some of the magic of democratised innovation:

The Linus’s Law effect, as transparency attracts eyeballs; the peer ratings effect, as people compete for peer recognition by improving things faster and better; the collaborative filtering effect, as people learn from a people-who-did-this-also-did approach; the Because Effect, as customers flock and stay because of the experience and not with shackles and restraints.

There is so much we can discover as we do this. I’d like to believe that one man’s department is another man’s firm, that processes by themselves aren’t different in different firms, that we just like believing they are.

An aside. First we believe that our processes are different. Then we believe that our processes are differentiating (in order to keep the Emperor Clothed). And we keep on believing it, even though we also believe in open architectures and platform independence and the power of standardisation and Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Lemma and the War for Talent and and and.

You know what? Sometimes I think we make enterprise processes behave like vendor-lock bloatware. We work to ensure that any and all efficiency gains are absorbed by Topsy-related process growth.

We must find a way to apply opensource principles to core processes.