What I said last year

The headline of my closing post last year, written on 30 December 2012, was “…and then you win….Gandhi, platforms and 2013″. In the two posts on either side of that one, I’d majored on platforms as well: On habanero dosas, platforms and makers and On platforms and sharing. I’d fairly and squarely nailed my colours to the platform mast a year ago, when it came to choosing themes for the year ahead. Here’s a quote from that year-ago post:

Platforms enable ecosystems. They are “multi-sided” like exchanges and marketplaces, focused on simplifying interactions between participants. As David Weinberger said recently, the smartest person in the room is now the room. In 2013, there’s going to be a room born every minute. A very smart room. Those rooms are going to demand support for their interactions and their creativity, as they change the way they live. That support is going to come from platforms. Platforms. Open, adaptive, enabling. Allowing ecosystems to be formed and to flourish.

Other predictions I’d made: subscription, search, conversation and fulfilment

Let’s stay with the topic of predictions for now. A decade earlier, I’d said:

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing/syndication, search, fulfilment and conversation.

Those sentiments were paraphrased and re-published when I set up the public-facing version of this blog eight years ago, in the section About This Blog. And when I started writing external-facing posts regularly, this is what I had to say:

I’ve been fascinated by information all my life, and, serendipitously, been allowed to work in the information sector for most of it. The Moore-Metcalfe-Gilder Laws continue to have their effect, and with telephony becoming software, I feel we’re at a wonderful inflection point in the sector. And what I want to do via this blog is to catalyse conversations about some of the things that really matter to me in this context. How search, publishing, fulfilment and conversation become the core applications of the future. How we can prevent the unintended consequences of walled-garden approaches to content. How we can avoid DRM holding up innovation. Why identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are important. Why emergence theories and “democratized innovation” matter. How we can take advantage of the opportunities that mobile devices offer us.

Putting all this in context

Let’s take a wander down memory lane.

When I started work 35 years ago, the term “knowledge worker” was already a couple of decades old. And I was meant to be one of those knowledge workers. Here’s what I’ve been using as a definition of “knowledge worker”:

A knowledge worker is a person who interacts with people and/or information in order to create, curate and/or consume knowledge

People buy from people. People sell to people. People teach people. People learn from people. People work with people.

People interact with people.

Knowledge workers are no different. But the environment in which the knowledge worker works has changed, and changed dramatically. In my first job, most things were still very “analog”. I had a physical desk, with an in and out tray. People used to send each other letters called inter-office memoranda or memos. These memos were usually typed, on typewriters. The person sending the letter wasn’t usually the typist, that was the work of someone else, sometimes called a stenographer (if the person “took dictation”) or a typist; an aggregation of such people was called a “secretarial pool”. Memos went from person to person inside strange orange envelopes, designed for re-use, with the ability to scratch the previous recipient’s name and add a new one. If you were a regular recipient of internal mail, you would find yourself scratching your own name off.  Sometimes the envelopes were green or even white, these were “special”. The way memos went from person to person was special as well. You had your own pigeonhole, your inbox. If you were senior then your name would have a yellow highlight through it. If you were really senior then your name would be in CAPITAL LETTERS and highlights as well. And if you were really really senior you had your own office.

There was a telephone on your desk, but all you could do was make internal calls. For which you had a telephone directory of internal extensions. If you were senior you could call out. If you were really senior you could call out internationally.

If you were not at your desk people would take messages for you. Write them on slips of paper, leave them on your desk. The only way you knew someone had called was if you went back to your physical desk and read the physical piece of paper. [One year, soon after I came to the UK, there was a message left for me to “Call Liz, urgently”. My boss at the time was a woman called Liz. Assuming it was her, I called the number and asked for Liz. And found myself apologising profusely before I quietly put the phone down. Buckingham Palace did not take kindly to oiks like me calling and asking for Liz. I’d been had. Royally.]

Computers existed, but not PCs. If you were lucky, you had a “dumb” terminal on your desk, connected to a mainframe somewhere else. Personal productivity tools for document creation and management did not exist. Neither did spreadsheets, nor simple database programs. Presentations were usually done using overhead projector cells, which were “transparent” copies of something that had been created on a typewriter. E-mail existed, but principally text-only, we didn’t even have SMTP as an RFC, much less a standard, then. And it didn’t matter anyway, because your dumb terminal was only connected to the mainframe some floors away. You could dial-up the modem remotely, using a 4800 baud line, and watching paint dry while you sent “screens” forward and back. The “screens” were how you referred to a screensworth of data on a “green screen”, usually with a maximum of 80 characters width and 24-25 lines depth. Most of that space was given up to field names and delimiters, so that a screensworth was actually very little data being passed. It’s not just screen real estate that was scarce, so was bandwidth, so was memory, so was processor power, so was everything. Everything was vetted and cleansed before it went anywhere, because scarcity ruled.

These non-PC computers had text management programs that were based around SGML. WYSIWIG probably hadn’t even been invented as a term. You “wrote” documents in a markup language (initially using punch cards, later using electronic files); the printed outputs came back later … if they printed. Errors in the source document led to pages and pages of listing paper waste, you didn’t even have the facility to test-run the source document.

When you wanted to “know” something, you asked for a report. Which meant making a small set of choices in order to receive a ream of listing paper, one day later, most of which you didn’t need. There was no ability to schedule meetings except in analog form. You were invited to a meeting via a typewritten memo. You called an extension to say you were coming. And you turned up. Or not. There were stationery cupboards with things called pens and pads and erasers. Staplers. Typewriter ribbons. SnoPake correction fluid. Sellotape. Scissors. And files. Lots of them. And bloody great filing cabinets to put them in. The bigger your cubicle, the more filing space you had. There was no such thing as a conference call. And nothing portable or personal. It was less than ten years since Marty Cooper had called Joel Engel, it would be another ten years before the mobile phone went mainstream.

No internet. No PC. No mobile phone. No ability to schedule events. Everything analog, hardcopy, disconnected. Search was a manual thing in a confined space. No ability to collaborate or share.If something could be repeated, it would be repeated. No learning. Nothing. Nothing but a pile of interactions that were lost as they happened. With frictions and latencies abounding.

Platforms that enable interactions

Fast forward to today, and it’s a whole new world. What I saw as “conversation” a decade ago is now the feed, the stream: stream processing has become (forgive the pun) mainstream. The firehose of the stream needs filters in order to become useful, in order to allow people to create and curate knowledge and value. Which means you need the ability to subscribe to people and things you’re interested in, to separate them from the rest of the noise. “Subscription” is fine for situations when the need is regular; “search” (and good, global search) is what you need for the ad-hoc as opposed to the routine and regular. Search and subscription are used to enhance conversation in order that the knowledge worker has the information needed to act. Which is where fulfilment comes in.

What I saw as search, subscription, conversation and fulfilment is now available on steroids, as we move into the stream/filter/drain model that is the essence of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. And Salesforce1. Which is why I am so excited by what’s been happening in 2013, and what’s to follow in 2014.

Today’s leading platforms are all about enabling interactions. “Social” is about making those interactions easier, in terms of discovery of value within the network; it’s about signalling the interactions of value, using the RTs, the Likes, the +1s, the votes, the ratings, the reviews. It’s about doing all this not just with the what, but also with the whom and the where and the when. Which is where the metadata associated with the interactions comes in. And where “mobile” enters the fray.

These interactions are becoming more and more valuable as we move from simple networks to the “internet of customers“, as we move from connected computers through documents and sites through people through devices through concepts to a connected everything. And behind every single thing in this everything is a customer.

The stream is the place where interactions happen. The filter is what makes the interactions valuable. And the metadata allows patterns associated with person, place, time, topic, to be surfaced and understood, initially as correlations, and later, after deep investigation, from a causal perspective. There’s a whole new world of analytics that has opened up as a result.

Why is all this happening now?

The industry I joined all those decades ago was, like the Gaul of Asterix and Obelix, divided into three parts: general systems; telecoms; embedded systems. People still argue about why those divisions happened, but they did. It took the best part of two decades for the distinction between IT and telecoms to disappear; it’s taken the best part of another two decades for the distinction between general and embedded systems to feel the same pressure. Now you can make a phone call using javascript; now you can control an actuator or a sensor using javascript. So the distinctions are fading.

This is happening at a time when everyone and everything is getting connected, and when it’s possible to identify, auto-geo-locate, auto-date-and-time-stamp, everything. It’s happening at a time when finding out what your friends think is cheap (though it may still be relatively hard to find out just who your friends are…. one friction at a time). It’s happening at a time when the cost of CPU cycles, storage and bandwidth continue to decline apace.

And it’s happening at a time when we are truly moving from the hierarchical to the networked world, from stocks to flows, from the linear process to the nonlinear interaction as the way value is created.

We’ve spoken about this for decades, it is now part of the way we work.

What next?

In 2013 we saw the maturing of the stream, the filter and the drain. We saw people stop worrying just about interfaces and concentrate on interactions as well, and on the “UX” of those interactions.

There are still many frictions and latencies to remove from our interactions. More ways to add stuff to our streams. More ways to remove stuff from our streams. Other ways to add, improve and refine our ability to filter. As individual producers, consumers and curators of knowledge.

There are still many silos to break and bring into the stream, demolishing the swivel-chair integration of the past. We have to be able to “act” within the stream and not have to leave it to take action.

In my next post I will spend time on expanding on this. Subject, of course, to your comments and what I learn from them. If I see a lot of comments come quickly then I’ll definitely write the post before the year-end. It’s up to you to let me know whether I’m doing something useful or wasting your time and possibly mine.

A coda

While writing this post, I noticed that someone else had linked to one of the year-old posts. Went investigating, and found this site, Platform Thinking. Excellent stuff. And the video at the end of the post is well worth watching. I will make references to what they say there in my next post.

They say a dog’s not just for Christmas.

That’s the way I feel about forgiveness. It’s something I think about every day, not just at Christmas. It’s something I’ve been thinking about in the context of how relationships work.

One of the authors and thinkers I’ve been dipping into lately is Gregory Bateson, often quoted as saying:

A business is best considered as a network of conversations

Stowe Boyd referred to that quote some months ago in a post on the Future of Work in a Social World, and it reminded me that I must delve deeper into Bateson’s work. But park that to one side for now, I digress.

Regular readers will be aware that I’m a big fan of the Cluetrain Manifesto; I find it hard to believe that it is now fifteen years or so since the publication of the manifesto. Messrs Locke, Searls, Weinberger and Levine have my immense gratitude for making sure my eyes stayed open when they could have been in the act of shutting.

The manifesto is full of memorable phrases; one that has stayed with me “front of mind” is:

Markets are conversations

I’ve spent time talking to Doc Searls about this particular phrase, especially in the context of how conversations exist and flourish because of the relationships they represent. Which is why, borrowing from those sessions with Doc, I have been known to intone the mantra:

Relationship before conversation before transaction

Again, regular readers will also know that I’m a big fan of Peter Drucker’s work. He too is someone I can quote from frequently and at will; two of my favourite Druckerisms are given below:

No financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result.

And:

The purpose of business is to create a customer.

I’ve tended to take these four statements together as part of one holistic model. People buy from people, people sell to people. It’s people who do business, not brands, not organisations, not companies. People. Business is conducted as a series of conversations between people; those conversations take place because there are relationships between the people involved; those conversations can, when appropriate and relevant, lead to transactions. Markets are conversations in aggregate, taking place across a network or multiple networks. When those conversations take place, transactions ensue. What is real in those transactions is the product that is bought or sold, the service that is provided. That’s what’s real. Money is an end result, a way of portraying those transactions, and not to be confused with the transaction.

Everything that we consider business begins with a relationship of some sort. For decades, perhaps longer, we’ve lived with weak relationships between institutions and the customers they serve. In many cases the institution did not even know who their customers were; those that did get at least that far failed soon after; they recognised customers only via complex hieroglyphics bestowed by the institution: customer account numbers. But even they failed to evolve any further, refusing to view customers in the context of the products and services they’d contracted for. A rare few enterprises got to the point of knowing their customers as well as the products and services they’d acquired; but they had no sense of who their customers really were, in the context of their interests and preferences, their needs and wishes, their dreams and aspirations, their experiences and their intentions.

So the very idea of a customer relationship is one that was rudimentary to the modern enterprise until a couple of decades ago. No relationships. No conversations to speak of. But there were transactions aplenty, and so nobody cared.

That’s changed; businesses are finding that customers do care about the relationship, that they do care about the conversation. Capital that had been consistently invested in optimising back-end processes was now slowly being deployed into improving customer engagement. Into knowing more about customers. Into simplifying conversations with customers. Into reducing friction and latency between customer and company.

Investment was being funnelled into systems of engagement as well as systems of record, to use the phrases popularised by Geoffrey Moore.

[An aside. I have wondered about the recent statements about the centre of gravity of IT expenditure moving from the CIO to the CMO. I’ve been CIO at a number of institutions, and I think the construct is false. We should analyse IT budgets according to the sponsor for the investment and expenditure. Most of the time, the CIO is not the sponsor. For much of the past, the primary sponsor has been the COO or CFO. In capital market institutions, the “front office” would flex their muscles and insist on a reasonable dollop of the capital being made available to develop their business (in terms of new products, services, markets, customers) rather than have all of it driven by the “back office” of operations, finance and risk. In this context, what I see happening is that sponsorship is moving from COO/CFO to CMO/CEO, away from process optimisation to business growth, away from systems of record to systems of engagement. Which is not surprising, given the level of investment made in systems of engagement for the previous forty years].

Where was I? Oh yes, the shift of investment into systems of engagement. Into facilitating conversations between customer and business. [In fact, into facilitating conversations between customer and partner, customer and supply chain, customer and distribution, even customer and customer].

Facilitating conversations.

Which occur as a result of relationships.

Relationships. Which is where my interest in the role of forgiveness comes in.

Relationships make the world go round. I’m very tempted to quote John Donne here, so I will.

No man is an iland intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the Main; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

What a beautiful poem. … because I am involved in Mankinde. The sooner we learn that we are all involved in Mankinde, the sooner we will begin to solve the problems we’ve been unable to deal with thus far.

Relationships are between human beings. Irrational, unpredictable, given to a diverse array of desires, prompted by a diverse array of motives.

Human. Warts and all.

One of the most beautiful things that makes us human is our ability to forgive. And to forget. Two conscious acts. Acts born of true relationship, “covenant” rather than “contract”. [In a contract relationship, when something goes wrong, the question is “who pays”, how is recourse to to be obtained. In a covenant relationship, on the other hand, when something goes wrong, the question is “how shall we fix this?”].

The act of forgiving takes place within a relationship. It is a conscious act that requires sacrifice by all involved. It is a conscious act that all involved to make themselves vulnerable. It is a conscious act which requires and involves trust.

It is difficult for me to explain human relationships (or for that matter even begin to understand them) without emphasising the importance of the vulnerability, the sacrifice, the trust of forgiveness. Of forgiving, and of being forgiven.

I have been forgiven much. And I have forgiven much. I am privileged and blessed to have a good family where forgiveness is practised; to have friends and colleagues where this continues to be true.

So when I think about designing systems that enable conversations to flow and grow, to become more effective, I think about the role of forgiveness. In order to forgive, I must be able to forget. What does that mean in today’s world? In time to come, part of the act of forgiveness may well come to include the ability of the forgiver to expunge the record of that which has been forgiven. How many times have you seen a conversation go nowhere fast, when age-old transgressions are dredged back up? That’s not the sign of forgiveness, that’s not the sign of a healthy relationship.

Our ability to forgive is an integral part of our humanity. As we build frameworks that enable better conversations, we need to understand, and design for, this ability to forgive.

That’s why I spend time thinking about the teenager’s “right to be forgotten” and what that would mean. How the official record is sometimes expunged of entries, how convictions are “spent”. How people are “pardoned”.

These are all instruments of human engagement, at work and at home, for business and for pleasure.

There was a time when institutional memory was a constant, when attrition was low, when people stayed in one job all their lives. So when a person “took a bullet for the team” the others remembered, not just when it happened, but for years to follow. They were the institutional memory. Today, when it is more common for people to change jobs regularly, institutional memory is weakened. The conversation-enabling frameworks we build are going some way towards solving this problem, by allowing institutional memory to be persisted, archived, searched, retrieved.

That’s a good thing.

Similarly, our ability to turn parts of the conversation into social objects that can be rated, reviewed, commented upon, enhanced, augmented, shared and re-shared is fundamentally a good thing. Our ability to have that conversation asynchronously as well as synchronously, face to face as well as remote, these are also good things. Our ability to embed that conversation with images, documents, sound, links, that too is good, as conversations get enriched. And the metadata that is available for all this allows us to glean rich insights, see patterns we could not have seen earlier, improve our planning assumptions, understand root causes of problems better.

Transaction costs drop dramatically as a result, as we find it fast and easy to find the right person, the right product, the right company, the right service, the right anything. Not just find it but negotiate to acquire/bond/engage with it, with the knowledge of what our network thinks of it (whatever it may be).

There are many things that are made more effective as a result of technological advances. But to remain effective they need to bear in mind that in the end it’s all about us.

Human beings.

Connected by a series of relationships.

That emerge in a network of conversations.

Some of which lead to transactions.

Some of which are represented by the end-result of money.

We have to remember we’re human beings. And as human beings, one of the most powerful things we do is to have covenant relationships, not contract ones.

Covenant relationships have tacit components to do with trust and sacrifice and vulnerability and forgiveness.

We need to learn how to model all this, this ability to trust and to make ourselves vulnerable, this ability to sacrifice, this ability to forgive, in the systems we design to conduct business. Because those abilities are what make us human. And business is conducted between humans.

In weeks to come I will be spending time looking at “incomplete contracts” from this perspective. Feel free to share your wisdom and learnings and experiences with me, using whatever channel makes you comfortable; I promise to reflect everything I learn in succeeding posts.

 

 

You may have noticed that aviation in the UK is throwing a little tantrum today.

Flight delays and cancellations. Because of a “technical fault”.

And here I quote:

Difficulty switching from night time to daytime operation.

Now that’s what I call jet lag.

Some people think that the internet was made for Hollywood and for the music industry, giving them infinite distribution for minimal investment. Maybe they’re right. We’ve had a decade or two of furious debate about this, some of which has been translated into law. And some of the law appears to be related to Equus Asinus.

Yet others think that the internet was made to fill the yawning gap left in spy-versus-spy activities by the end of the last Cold War, giving them infinite reach for minimal investment. After all, they did pay for some of the research. Maybe they’re right as well. We’ll probably have a decade or two of furious debate about this too, and some of it will be translated into law. And yes, some of that law will relate to Equus Asinus.

There’s also a growing bunch of people who think the internet is broken, that it shouldn’t work, that it doesn’t work, that it will stop working very soon, that everything will have to be demolished and rebuilt “properly”. Maybe they too are right. We’ll probably have a decade or two more of furious debate about this….. you get my drift.

…………………………

They may all be right. In their own way they are all right.

But you know something? So is the internet. Yes, the internet’s all right. It’s doing fine, thank you very much.

Continuing to defy economics and gravity and physics and government and a host of others. Routing round obstacles as is its wont. Refusing to do what it is predicted to. Resolutely converting everything in its path to digital state. Every day, the internet gives me reason to smile, reason to wonder. Despite everything.

Just yesterday, I saw this. A reconstruction of a conversation between YouTubers “Sophie Danze” and “JilianLovesTheBiebs”, taking place in the “corridors” around the video One Direction: What makes you beautiful. A reconstruction carried out by trained actors. A reconstruction that had me in tears.

A year or two ago, I was similarly entertained by the prospect of people creating poetry out of the autocomplete suggestions that Google makes to your search term input, creating a whole genre called Google Poetics. I’ve provided you with an example below.

 

For some years now we’ve had people using the review space in Amazon to create beautiful things. I touch upon that here in a post I wrote some years ago, on unintended consequences of the internet. You can read more here about humour in the review columns.

Digital space is infinite. And people will find infinite ways to create things in that space, and to share it. And, despite all the naysayers and the corrupters and those who insist on suborning the internet for their own, sometimes nefarious, purposes, the internet will continue.

It will continue to tell me stories like this one, about Michael Paul Smith and what he does.

As with any other utility, people will try and create hidden monopolies out of the internet.

As with any other communications infrastructure, people will try and find ways to control every aspect of it.

As with any other technology, people will find ways to use it for good as well as for evil.

And in the meantime, the internet will go on.

And I will continue to marvel. Lazily. And try and do my bit to ensure that it does go on. And on. And on.

Because it’s a wondrous thing, the internet.

 

 

Many years ago, I read a story about two neighbours. One of them bred pedigree dogs with almost-human ability to show emotion; the other grew the most beautiful flowers, with a tragic flaw: the petals were poisonous, they killed all who touched them. One day, the inevitable happened. One of the dogs managed to get through/over/under the hedge between the properties, played with the petals that had fallen off the beautiful-but-deadly plant, and proceeded to die a horrible death.

The dog neighbour took the flower neighbour to court. Wanted an injunction preventing flower neighbour from growing any more beautiful-but-deadlies. The judge thought about it, and then delivered a Solomon-like judgment.

The flowers could still kill. But only if the buyer had paid for that function. Accidental touches could no longer kill. The court ordered the flower neighbour to redesign the flowers that way.

It all happened in cyberspace. I believe it was in an early Larry Lessig book, probably Code.

Ever since I read John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace I’ve been curious about just how much the world I knew, (and still know, though to a steadily declining extent) will change as a result of digital transformation.

That curiosity, underpinned by childhood and youth in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s, built on the foundations of being part of a Brahmin journalist family and an education based on fifteen years with the Jesuits, continues apace. It’s why I found the stuff put out by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant and Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly intoxicating. It’s why I was fascinated by the world as described by people like Cory Doctorow. They were all pointing to a magnitude of change I could barely imagine.

As Roy Amara said, we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. When it comes to the rollout of digital infrastructure and the consequent digitisation of everything, we’re now in the long run. And we’re busy making sure Amara’s Law continues to hold.

Earlier this afternoon, I read that millions of people in the UK were being threatened by some unusual spam. The email comes with an attachment, some clever malware. The “ransomware”, as it is now called apparently, encrypts files on the computer, in effect kidnapping them. You have to pay to have them released; you effect the release by paying the ransom and receiving instructions on how to decrypt the files.

And to cap it all, the ransom has to be paid in bitcoin.

This may look like a trivial scam, but to me it represents a serious inflection point. One that was signalled to me when I heard that many purchasers of Defense Distributed’s 3D printed gun paid for their purchase using bitcoin. One which started taking real shape when I learnt that Cody was working on a Dark Wallet for bitcoin.

For too long, too many people have been labouring under the misapprehension that the internet and the web were convenient distribution mechanisms for the entertainment industry, and much of the heavy action in legal terms was in that space. Hollywood, the music industry, the publishing industry in general, have all been happily breathing sighs of relief of late, as the tablet form factor and the app-store philosophy seemed to give them back the control they were angry about losing. Paywalls are now two-a-penny.

More recently, the focus shifted to espionage and snooping; some of the players changed, privacy took centre stage, and piracy exited, followed by a bear.

All this is just a prelude.

When the Maker Generation, 3D printing and open source P2P money (as bitcoin is often described) come together, the first act will begin to take shape.

Governments will be watching, as will disaffected people everywhere, of every age, political persuasion and socio-economic status.
And the tendency will be to underestimate what’s happening. To be complacent in the belief that the hard work is over now that the internet has been tamed for content and for espionage.

Sergeant Esterhazy time.

Let’s be careful out there.