Category: Four pillars

[As always, I could rely on Andrew McAfee to post something that made me think hard about things. Thank you Andrew.]

As far as I can make out, enterprise immune systems tend to try and reject the implementation of social software on one or more of five grounds:

• The McEnroe Defence. You cannot be serious. This isn’t work. It’s a waste of time. Just look at the terms used: blogs, wikis, chat, Really Simple Syndication. You’re paid to do hard work, do you think this is a holiday camp? Next you’ll be asking for massage parlours and pedicures and pool tables. Get real.
• Ostrich-Head-Meets-Sand. I have enough trouble trying to manage my e-mail and voicemail, now you want me to look in more places for more things and spend more time doing that. What are you, some kind of sadist? Just make my e-mail work, will you? And leave me alone.
• It’s All Rubbish Anyway. Just look at the crap that gets published and circulated. What’s the matter, suddenly you think everyone’s an expert? if you really think so, we don’t need you, do we? So go fire yourself and leave us real experts to get on with our jobs.
• Say It Ain’t So, Clayton. Look, I just want what I already have to work faster, cheaper, better. What do you mean, Innovator’s Dilemma? I’ll give you Dilemma. Some of us have real jobs and don’t have time to read.
• Where’s The Beef? So show me the ROI, get the business heads to sign up and commit, get the finance guys to vet independently, then do it. No tickee no payee.

Each of them merits a separate discussion. Nero Wolfe would probably just have said Pfui. But mere mortals like me need to understand the objections and find ways of overcoming them. The good thing is that the objections are there and open and visible; ironically, we tend to capture the objections in the conversations enabled by the social software being objected to. But that’s another matter.

Today I want to concentrate on the It’s All Rubbish Anyway objection, and its cater-cousins, Dumbing Down and Lowest Common Denominator.

My contention, similar to Andrew’s, is that particularly in enterprises, social software has the opposite effect. Rather than Dumb Down, it raises the Lowest Common Denominator.

My reasons?

1. To paraphrase Eric Raymond and Linus’s Law, given enough eyeballs all information-bugs are shallow. People have an incentive to correct things that are inaccurate or inadequate. The incentive is simple. Will it help them do their jobs better? Where I work, one of the first things I saw in the internal blogosphere was some sort of “worst intranet site” contest. That was Enterprise 2.0 cocking a snook at Content 1.0, and I am confident that something similar will come up for blogs and wiki entries. Sure we will have crap posted and entered, but when the crap is about something important, it gets corrected. Fast. And if it’s not important, who cares anyway? If a blog post falls and there isn’t anyone to hear it, does it make a sound?

The quality of the information and opinion posted will be sustained in direct proportion to the perceived putative value of the information or opinion.

Crap is created. It is rarely, if ever, co-created. Or even endorsed.

2. Social software allows us to make the information live, keep it up to date and relevant. The costs of maintenance are low, the burden of maintenance is shared. Go back to the Given Enough Eyeballs statement. If there aren’t enough eyeballs, then we should question whether there is a society in the first place rather than quibble about the value of the social software. Orchestras tend to be pretty poor when there’s just one guy trying to play all the instruments simultaneously. When I compare wiki usage to that of written manuals and policy documents, or to that of the traditional intranet, it isn’t even worth trying to make a case. Game over.

Good stuff lives. Crap dies.

3. The value of recommendations and ratings and collaborative filtering should not be underestimated either. You don’t have to get knee-deep in crap unless you particularly want to, in which case I’d suggest you have a different problem, nothing to do with social software…. although social software might help you find a solution. The collective intelligence and knowledge of the enterprise exposes itself most actively via the recommendation and collaborative filtering approaches. Stage one may well be Top Ten Lists or Star Posts or Most Read or whatever, but soon the recommendations kick in. And the eyeballs travel accordingly. As the boundaries between different disciplines continue to blur, expertise has new connotations. At least one of which is Trusted Advisor, Recommender-Worth-Listening-To.

 

4. While each subcommunity is characterised by having a core, a moderator, a 1000lb gorilla, don’t make the mistake of believing that this core is incredibly tiny and therefore easy to manipulate. Just not true. Opensource activity distributions operate. Something like for every 1000 observers and lurkers, we will have 80 activists and 20 hard-core editors. Twenty not one or two. Wikipedia has scaled, it has a thousand such people at the core. This is an incredibly powerful development in the context of guardians of quality.

5. It’s not just about the lowest-common-denominator being raised, there’s a long-tail effect as well. Enterprise implementations of social software are really not about a horde of people congregating and looking at one piece of crap. There’s a lot of uncommon denominators as well, and they’re not particularly low. I haven’t done the research, but I would guess that matching the population of viewers to the entries being viewed will have a long tail distribution. Small groups of people finding value in sharing and improving and co-creating small pockets of information, of little relevance to the world at large but incredibly important to the particular subcommunity. This did happen before, but the subcommunity was constrained by organisational structure and silo mentalities. The power we see now is in the lateral and viral nature of the subcommunities enabled by social software.

 

6. Finally, despite all this, there will still be some crap that doesn’t die, doesn’t atrophy, doesn’t get corrected or improved, yet is important. It’s called satire and irony, and is a critical part of the conversation. Crap is in the eye of the beholder.

There’s a lot we can learn about consumerisation and Generation M. But determining the value of social software to the enterprise by looking at the faeces of popular sites is zen koan-ish. Like looking at a reflection of the moon in a stagnant pond and believing it is the sun. Games and humour and satire are pretty normal ways of working out how new forms of communication work, how they can add value. But soon they grow up.

In the late 1990s as B2B exchanges proliferated wildly, we saw the term “butterfly market” gain immense popularity; it was used to describe a market where very large numbers of buyers and sellers congregated.

Ross Mayfield pointed me at a very interesting paper on How Not to Build an Online Market, well worth a read. You can follow the links from Ross’s post on the subject, to be found here.

There were large numbers of buyers and of sellers, but they weren’t buying or selling large numbers of the same thing.

If there was anything they had in common, it was trust. If there was anything to keep them together, it was trust. They related to each other.

So a butterfly market was in itself an aggregation of narrower smaller markets, an aggregation of relationships and conversations. Not one market but many. And any attempt to make one homogeneous market out of them failed.

Yesterday I quoted extensively from Drucker, labouring his point that we no longer have unique technologies for a given industry, nor unique end uses for a given product or service.

This is important to bear in mind when we look at Four Pillars.

We should not constrain the tools we have, nor constrain the tools we have yet to see, by placing anchoring and framing qualifiers before the word “tool”, or by appending the word “tool” to Pillars.
Search is a meaningful term. Tool is a meaningful term. But search tool runs the risk of constraining our thinking.

Over the last year or so, I have regularly used blogs to initiate searches via conversation. [Today, after many years of looking, I found out that Big Mo was Moe Norman, see earlier post and comments. ]

There have been many occasions when I have used search to refine or cleanse information.

Wikis can be very useful for structured note-taking, a graphics-free mind map tool of sorts.

At conferences I use blog software to make my own notes, save links and even comment on things, without any real intention to use that material in situ as a post.

Even if I do use parts of the material later.

The point is to allow the tools to have as much value as possible, and this can’t be done if we pigeonhole them too early.

One of my favourite Fowler quotes is “All right is quite right; quite right is all right; but quite all right is all quite wrong.”

And that’s the way I look at these terms in Four Pillars. Search is all right; Tool is quite right; but Search Tool is all quite wrong.

You should be used to my twists and turns by now. But cricket and DRM? That’s not just any turn, I hear you say.
It’s been a lazy weekend for me, spending time with my family, watching some sport, catching up with some chores, some reading, some listening to music, and the occasional blog post.

[An aside. In some northern areas of the UK, they use the word “messages” to mean chores. They’ve been doing this for a long time. Well before e-mail. How did they know?]

After the disappointment of watching England crash out of the World Cup yesterday, it was with some trepidation that I turned on the cricket after everyone else had gone to bed. Wikipedia entry for the convenience of readers who haven’t come across this glorious game. Would India win the Test and the series in the West Indies tonight, or would they be denied again by resolute tail-enders? Well, Denesh Ramdin nearly pulled it off, but in the end Rahul “The Wall” Dravid implacably led India to their first overseas victory over the West Indies since 1971.

And it made me reminisce. Of famous victories over the West Indies. And 1983 came to mind, when India won the cricket World Cup, after setting the Windies a paltry target. And wandering down memory lane, I remembered watching Kapil Dev score 175 not out, his highest one-day score, to rescue India against Zimbabwe that year, in an earlier World Cup match. He came in when India were 17 for 5, so that took some doing. Amazing innings.

Many years later, I was with some other cricket-loving friends, and the conversation moved to that Zimbabwe game. We were there together. And someone remarked that the BBC had lost the tape of the game, so it had never made it to DVD or similar. Now I think I have a tape of the game, if only I can find it.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Suppose something is in copyright, but for some reason the copyright holder has no copy. Suppose there is only one “copy” in existence. And further suppose there is a lot of time and care and effort that has to go into retrieving and restoring the sole existent copy. Does the owner of the copy have any rights, according to the DRM and IPR gang? Does the restorer have any rights?

If I find the tape, I will give it freely to the BBC for them to restore and to make money from. Naturally. I’d probably expect that they give me a free copy on DVD in exchange, though :-)

The point is, in this particular instance, the copyright holder (BBC) has no copy, the copy owner (me) has no rights, the effort needed to retrieve and restore the copy is high (like wading through a garage of junk for individual videotapes and playing each one in order to find the right one). What will the pro-DRM pro-Mickey Mouse Act pro bad IPR people make of this? :-)
It just made me wonder. Is some of this pushback against digital freedom perversely a consequence of sharply reduced costs of reproduction? When the product is physical, are there some copy rights attached to the copy, especially if it becomes the only one? I remember reading about the great efforts people went to in order to find an original of Moore’s Law in article form. Does Moore have rights to it? Does the magazine? What happens when a title is “deleted”? Can Google make copies of all “deleted” titles? Why ever not, if the title holder has chosen to abdicate?

Just musings. Googlies and doosras.

So said Peter Drucker in one of his last books, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.

You’ll get your fill of Drucker quotes in this post, but I want to bring one more of his quotes into the front and centre of your attention:

The American regulation of business rests on the assumptions that to every industry pertains a unique technology and that to every end use pertains a specific and unique product or service. These are the assumptions on which antitrust legislation was based.
These are interesting times. Many would say the Net Neutrality debate is over, the incumbents have won. Many would say the same about Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Rights Management. Many would say that my views on identity and confidentiality and privacy are utopian and impracticable.

It would appear that the three Is that I have spent time arguing about are no longer worth arguing about: the internet, intellectual property and identity.

Time for dinosaurs like me to go quietly to the grave. Or so it would appear.

At times like these, I read. And think.

So I delved into Drucker. And chanced across something I hadn’t read for a while, entitled Technologies and End Uses. For those who haven’t read it, Drucker makes some very simple and worthwhile points:

• The assumptions about technology and end uses to a very large extent underlie the rise of modern business and of the modern economy altogether. They go back to the very early days of the Industrial Revolution.
• …..it was assumed — and with complete validity — that [each] industry had its own and unique technology.
• By now this assumption has become untenable…. In the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, it could be taken for granted that technologies outside one’s own industry had no, or at least only minimal, impact on the industry.
• Now the assumption to start with is that the technologies that are likely to have the greatest impact on a company and an industry are technologies outside its own field.
• Today’s technologies, unlike those of the nineteenth century, no longer run in parallel lines. They constantly crisscross.
• Constantly, such outside technologies force an industry to learn, to acquire, to adapt, to change its very mind-set, let alone its technical knowledge.
• Equally important…. was a second assumption. End uses are fixed and given.
• This was accepted as obvious not only by business, industry and the consumer, but by governments as well. The American regulation of business rests on the assumptions that to every industry pertains a unique technology and that to every end use pertains a specific and unique product or service. These are the assumptions on which antitrust legislation was based.
• But by now it is clear that it is not just one material moving in on what was considered the “turf” of another one. Increasingly, the same want is being satisfied by very different means.
• It is the want that is unique, and not the means to satisfy it.

These two lock-in layers are fundamental. One that says every industry has its unique technology, the other that says end uses relate to unique and specific products/services.

These two lock-in layers have coloured our thinking, our investment processes, our valuations, our regulations.

These two lock-in layers are dead. Defunct. As in the Python Parrot.

It does not matter to me just how entrenched the incumbents and their lobbies are, it will not be possible to protect the lock-ins ad infinitum.

The ability to transfer disruptive technologies from one market to another, and the ability to vary end-use way beyond what the “inventors” ever dreamt of, these abilities are as American as motherhood and apple pie. They are the essence of innovation, something America has excelled at. And will excel at again. I’m not American, but I love innovation, and believe that the US of A got many things right in supporting and enhancing innovation. Now it looks like there are going to be a few backward steps taken. Tough. Frustrating for all concerned. But ultimately unsustainable.
It is these abilities that will be held back if the battle for the Three Is (Internet, Intellectual Property, Identity) continues the way it seems to be continuing. Held back, yes. Suppressed, no.

It is the want that is unique, and not the means to satisfy it.

It is the customer that does the wanting. The signalling of his intentions.
In markets that are conversations.

[Note: quotations from Drucker and the illustration from Monty Python appear here on a fair use basis; my thanks to the copyright holders]