Category: Four pillars

Of late there’s been more kerfuffle about security implications of The Semantic Web and of Web 2.0. And it makes me wonder.

We spend a lot of money making sure information is buried under at least six foot of concrete, flying a variety of flags of convenience: Privacy; Confidentiality; Secrecy; Competitive Advantage…..
We spend a lot of money then exhuming the buried information, also flying a variety of flags of convenience: Openness and Transparency, Sarbanes-Oxley, Freedom of Information, Right to Personal Data, Disclosure, Eliot Spitzer…..

And the reason why we spend so much money doing all this is that we find the most complicated ways of locking up the information in the first place….

And you know/ it makes me wonder/what’s going on/under the ground/Do you know? Don’t you wonder?
[Crosby, Stills and Nash: Deja Vu]

I’ve been poring over a recent presentation given by Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, entitled The New Media Ecology and How It Will Affect Work And Learning. You can follow a link to the pdf here.
I quote from its coda:

I think it is safe to say that those reared in this Information Age, those doing the work of learning and those who need to learn at work are likely to be:

• More self-directed and less dependent on top-down instructions
• Better arrayed to capture new information inputs
• More reliant on feedback and response
• More tied to group outreach and group knowledge
• More open to cross-discipline insights, especially those that form during the creation of “tagged” taxonomies

And

• More oriented towards people being their own individual nodes of production

As a researcher, I see this new world as a fantastically target-rich environment for things to study.

Your role is much more complicated, scary, and exciting. You have the privilege of reacting to and shaping the new environment for these emerging workers.

As the parent of four of these neo-workforce participants, I would only ask you to be brilliant at what you do.

Thank you.

That’s how I feel about Generation M. Privileged at having the opportunity to react and shape the new environment for them. Enjoying the complexity. Slightly scared. Excited.

So thank you, Lee Rainie, whoever you may be. [BTW for the first time in many weeks, I could not use Wikipedia to link to a person’s name, or for that matter to Pew Internet. All I could do was link to an organisation stub for the parent, Pew Research. ]

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the presentation starts with an analogous reference to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe and is itself worth a look.

Rainie also provides us with “ten new communications and media realities”, fodder for the list-hungry:

• Reality 1 is that we’re surrounded by media and communications tools and the bit-flow around us is as available as the air we breathe.
• Reality 2 is that these tools are no longer-place-bound. Not only does this untether Americans from their phones, it also means they can carry a lot of computing power in their pockets.
• Reality 3 is that use of the internet has become the norm in America and broadband connections are the norm amongst internet users.
• Reality 4 is that multi-tasking is a way of like and we live ion a state of “continuous partial attention.”
• Reality 5 is that the rise of these two-way technologies has enabled Americans to become their own publishers, movie makers, artists, song creators, and story tellers.
• Reality 6 is that the online environment is becoming a privileged information and communications space — and that changes expectations and behaviour in the user population. As people gain experience online — and as the online workld itself becomes ever-more-useful — people become more serious in the things they do online.
• Reality 7 is that the mass market is fragmenting and heavy internet users are different kinds of media consumers — and communicators — from lighter users and non-users.
• Reality 8 is that power, influence, and relations between media producers and consumers change in a “prosumer” world.
• Reality 9 is that people’s social networks matter more and more in the “long Tail” world and where personal tagging and taxonomies are commonplace.
• Reality 10 is that everything will change even more dramatically in the years to come as advances continue in computing, communications infrastructure, and storage capacity.

Yes I know we all have read the book, seen the film, bought the T-shirt. But remember that hard data about social software and Generation M is hard to come by, and we should look out for people with the time, the inclination and the funding to get this data. So we need the Pews of this world.

The more we understand about Generation M, the more we can be brilliant in our preparations. Most of them wouldn’t know a Local Loop or a Last Mile if it hit them in the face. And, with a little bit of luck, it shouldn’t matter. That’s what we have to do. Make sure their path is not polluted.

Dave The LifeKludger has really made me think.

It’s not about Net Neutrality and Two-Tier Internets and Who Pays? and Look at All this Video Uploading and Of Course Google and eBay can afford it.

It’s about people putting stairs and turnstiles everywhere and building doors too narrow for wheelchairs and baby buggies; it’s about cluttering up fire routes and emergency exits.

It’s about disenfranchisement of a large body of people, disenfranchisement in the context of affordability of lines and devices, in the context of access to information, in the context of free speech.

The innovation and co-creation are actually byproducts; the core issue is the level of unnecessary and wasteful disenfranchisement, bordering on criminal insanity. Those are the grounds to use.

At the rate that contributions are growing, there’s going to be a whole section of the internet dedicated to Senator Stevens. I think it only fair that it gets called HeTube.

Thanks to Cory for this PowerPoint presentation, which will make everything clear to people who have not been able to follow the articles, comments, transcripts and MP3s.

:-)

The kernel for this post was a comment made by Jeff Nolan (Hi Jeff!) on apparent complexity biases in enterprise software selection/development, and a follow-up by Jeff Weinberger, both relating to one of my recent posts. And before I commented further, I felt it was appropriate to link back to an earlier post of mine that new readers may not have seen.

It is within that context that I write. Sure we have complexity bias in enterprises, but it’s worse than that. We also have purveyors of complexity bias on the outside.
As the two Jeffs say, the enterprise immune system kicks in whenever something looks simple and easy to implement; it is a variant of “real projects have a zillion people working on them, cost the earth and are at least twice as long as Pinocchio’s nose”. That’s the easy bit.

The harder bit is the role played by unscrupulous consultants and vendors. I like markets. Markets have buyers and sellers and intermediaries. For seller read vendor, for intermediary read consultant. So the model’s OK in principle. What goes wrong?

Vendor lock-in is something most people understand. The subtlety, something I didn’t quite understand, was the passion with which in-house IT department staff back the vendor view, and create polarised debates about anything and everything. The classic Microsoft/Open Source debates exemplify this. Even terms like Microsoftie and Penguinista show the polarisation. It’s almost as if people define and sustain their identity within such polarisation. Once that happens the complexity issue is almost a guaranteed byproduct, as people plot ways to make implementing their bete noire as humanly difficult as possible. [And as you know, they don’t have to try very hard, such hybrid worlds are easy to mess up.]

Similarly, the classic “consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and keeps the watch as payment” is pretty well understood. There are consultants who prove this rule by being exceptions to the rule, but they are few and far between. I tend to think of them as belonging to one of three camps:

• Those who know the answer
• Those who know how to get to the answer
• Those who know how to put off the answer

The Know-the-Answer guys give you time-to-market and TCO savings. They know where you need to go, they know how to get you there, they’ve got the intellectual firepower as well as the experience. This type is rare, and in my book the only consultants always worth having.
The Get-to-the-Answer guys give you TCO stabilisation. You can rely on them to get you there, they are kings of process. MethodOne meets the 21st century. They have been militarised, do things by the book, always get you there, but it takes time and is like watching paint dry. You need them sometimes, as extensions to your labour force, when you have a skill or workload mismatch, or when you are prepared to fully hedge your project risk (and most of the reward). This type is less rare, and legitimises the existence of consultants.
The Put-off-the-Answer guys are the ones to watch for. Teflon types with the political nous to make sure nothing sticks, their projects never end, the “collateral damage” to in-house staff can be very high, nothing ever gets delivered, nothing ever gets stopped either. Unfortunately this type is too common. Sad but true.
And their route to doing this is classic smoke-and-mirrors. “This is complex, you won’t understand it” followed up by the careful introduction and seeding of as much low-level complexity as possible. Their goal is different. Perennial billing. Project names can change, deliverables change, timelines change. One thing stays constant: nothing of value gets delivered.

That’s why we (with the consultants’ help) spent so much time in the nineties mangling “off-the-shelf” products, customising them beyond redemption, ensuring that they reflected yesterday’s business model as faithfully as possible, then letting them come in on their white chargers (which you paid for anyway) to do the same thing with today’s business model…. that’s why implementation costs for standard enterprise software tended to be nine times the licence costs.

Once we realise the root causes of complexity bias, we can do something about it.