Category: Four pillars

Legacy costs come in many shapes and sizes, and the more I look at them, the more I realise how much of an albatross they can be. They really obscure people’s vision and can corrupt decision-making unless care is taken.

• It is said that the first $3000 spent on building a US car goes to retiree healthcare, making the industry less competitive.
• During the run-up to Y2K, I was asked to look at the preparedness of some Polish banks; their systems, post 1990, were too new to have the problem. It’s the banks with older systems that had to spend money checking everything.
• Many firms (like the one I work in) capitalise software development, creating a sins-of-the-father problem for later years.
• Having lived in Calcutta and in London, I have seen first-hand some of the problems of being “the first city” to do something, particularly in transportation or utility. You can’t get rid of it as easily later.
• The spaghetti of regulation covering two areas, telecoms and intellectual property, behave similar to tax regulations. They are complex and people exploit the complexity and there are winners (who would do anything to hold the status quo) and losers (who will do anything to change it).
• The minds and hearts of the people used to the legacy.

Regulation and bad law. Infrastructural investment requirements. Accounting policies. The difficulties of having to perform complex change operations on “living” things, much like skin-graft meets open heart surgery. Human inertia. So many legacy costs.

It is so much easier to start from scratch.

That’s what I used to think.

Until I saw more and more of what today’s emerging technologies could do.

Step 1, in the mid 90s, was to wire up static pages and queries. Step 2, in the late 90s, was to wire up transaction initiating pages and forms. Step 3 was to connect these things together and form mini business models.

But step 4 is to allow co-creation. Not just co-creation between people, but between applications. SOA allows for co-creation if we understand the power of things like search and syndication. We need to rethink data mining and EAI and all that jazz, we need to understand that the marginal costs of storage are trivial, that we can afford to record everything and tag everything.

Twenty years ago, if I said that the most important component of a trading system would be a Visicalc lookalike, people would have laughed at me. Now even though I want to, I cannot get rid of the stuff.

We need to understand the value of syndication without being bogged down in all our yesterdays. Legacy does not mean albatross. But we have many Ancient Mariners.

More later.

[Before I begin, I have to declare something, almost as a conflict-of-interest. Some years ago, I was talking to the guys (at work) who were really committed to semantic web concepts, and promised them I would never set up a project called semantic web. There’s something about the interplay between emergence approaches and detailed structure I find truly fascinating]

Niall Cook followed up on my last post re tagging and Cogenz, and pointed me towards the Lucent and IBM studies and achievements.

Very interesting. You can read Niall’s post here.

Somewhere in my head, I’m still not sure. You see, I view Flickr and last.fm and oodle as variants of the same theme, the disaggregation and reaggregation of search and publishing.

Here’s what I think:

• 1. We provide people with simple tools to tag and post simple details about a “something”. It can be photos, books, music, cars, whatever. But it is ONE “asset class”.
• 2. The “we” that provides the simplest and most convenient and easiest-to-use tool starts getting “liquidity” for that asset class.
• 3. For a while it’s game over, because network effects rule and first-mover-advantage means something in this sort of digital scaling. Collaborative filtering makes it even stickier.
• 4. Then we learn more things about said “asset class” and find ways to differentiate yet again. And new tools emerge and new liquidity points emerge.
• 5. And then the cycle continues and we all enjoy ourselves.

All this works because (a) people know where to go (b) it is easy to add or remove things and (c) there are few, if any, format issues.

This format issue is no different from DRM in some respects. From my viewpoint they are one and the same thing. Where am I going with this?

Simple. When the asset class we speak of is “information” we have some real problems to contend with. I can’t just bookmark the things I want to bookmark and share with the rest of my community, even within the firm, because of variants of the format/DRM problem. Sometimes it’s called format. Sometimes it’s called authentication and permissioning. Sometimes it’s called image rights or intellectual property rights or even plain old copyright. And sometimes it’s called confidentiality or data protection or secrecy.

So while I like what I can see of the IBM and Lucent work, and I understand what is intended by Cogenz, my jury is still out. The market for socialising information as an asset class is still unformed, nascent, with some real problems to overcome. I can’t even provide sensible library/information services within the firm as yet. Tagging within the enterprise will help me solve this, for sure, but the impact will be marginal until and unless I can allow people to access more of the external sources of information sensibly.

But there’s enough in the premise to make me think. Can I create a skills matrix for a firm “at source” by asking people to post their CVs into a pool? And make it a simple profile, a microformat, with tags that enrich the meaning. And get over the confidentiality thing by asking the owner of the info to post voluntarily and without force. Where else can I do this sort of thing, avoid a format/DRM problem by transferring responsibility to the “beneficial owner”?

This CV thing, by the way, is another fossilfools thing I can’t get over. All firms hire people with specific skills and competences and experience and then make it quite difficult to find out about those skills or competences. Even the ones who believe in knowledge management and invest heavily in related systems. Something broken here.

Neville Hobson (who appears to have had a change of address) pointed me towards a company that seemed to believe that enterprise tagging was somehow different from tagging. You can find the full text of his post here.

That started me thinking. Which is probably a bad thing, as most people who know me will aver. But so be it.

I like tags because they’re simple. Because they don’t have to be predefined pieces of some gigantic reference data model for the universe. Or even the enterprise. Reference models are to information what Gantt charts are to projects; ways to make the intermediate product (the database or the plan) more important than the goal. Okay, rant over.

I like tags because they allow one person to say tomahto and another to say tomayto and still figure out they mean the same thing. There is value in letting people describe things exactly as they see them, because that’s probably how they would intuitively look for them.

And if we land up with lots of synonyms, even misspellings, so be it. Use heuristics and collaborative filtering techniques to weed out or let atrophy those things that need to.

I can see “free, unfettered” tags helping with:

• crossing language and geography barriers, translating between cultures
• cross-referencing between systems, translating between data formats
• bridging individual perceptions, translating between perspectives

My gut feel is that we should avoid being prescriptive about these things. Otherwise we will land up with modern versions of the e-mail folder systems I love to hate.

Which brings me to what started me thinking about this in the first place. What is the difference between tagging and enterprise tagging, and why would I need specialist software to help me do it? I can understand privacy and data protection and secrecy and all of that ilk, and if that’s the reason and all we are doing is a behind-the-firewall implementation of the same thing, then I need to understand why I need something separate for it. I’d be interested in other opinions.

More later.

 

 

 

Before ConfusedofCalcutta, this blog was meant to be called NotWavingButDrowning. Why? Two reasons. One, because I really like Stevie Smith’s poem, there’s something about it. And two, I thought it was a strong metaphor for what we face with information.

So I went ahead and bought the domain name. But could I figure out for sure which particular set of permissions I needed to use a domain name that quoted four words in sequence from a poem written probably sixty years ago by someone who died thirty-five years ago? So it lies unused. One day….

Martin Geddes commented on something I’d said earlier, and is someone I “know” through the web and (I shudder to admit it) e-mail, trying to make sense of bad law around that marshy and smelly mess where telco meets internet meets regulator meets cableco. He keeps an interesting multilogue going here.

[Martin, I agree with you. But people really get wound up when I point out the zillion reasons why e-mail is bad. It’s a long hard fight.]

Back to my NotWaving point. I’m used to believing that man spends maybe 3.5 hours a day “consuming information” and that this figure has stayed pretty constant over the last forty years. Say since Moore. During that time, but particularly after the Web, the amount of information that can be consumed has grown by multiple orders of magnitude. There’s probably a Someone’s Law out there telling me that rate of growth.

Something’s gotta give, and each of us needs ways of attracting information, filtering it, retaining what we choose to, enriching it, passing it on. We need better search and syndication and collaboration and communication and visualisation and and and.

None of this is new to anyone out there, I’m sure. What was new to me was how complicated all this was. The internet and telco and ICANN and net neutrality and governance stuff. The IPR and Digital Rights and Mickey Mouse Acts and “just what is patentable” stuff. The incumbent vendors and their lock-ins and proprietary formats and permissioning and authentication issues. How easy it was to build accidental walled gardens inside organisations, to augment the ones we already have.

And the ones we have are called e-mail and proprietary content management and. I shall stop there.

One of my favourite poems is Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”.

Extremely powerful. When I was 15, and I read it for the first time, what really struck me was that the airman flew because he loved flying. Not because of glory or honour or duty or war or pestilence or whatever. He loved flying.

I love working with information. And in a digital world, with costs of reproduction and transmission tending towards zero, we can really make a difference to our world today and tomorrow, particularly in education. Which is why I’m excited about reading Judy Breck’s book; I’ve been trudging around her site and like a lot of what I see. Take a look.

Thanks for the heads-up, Judy. [Another serendipitous meeting through blogs].