Now ask yourself this question: In the offices of the future, which skill set will today’s kids draw upon in their day-to-day tasks?

I love Steven Johnson. The headline above is from an article he’s published in Time Magazine, which you can find here. It says everything I wanted to say about learning from our children, only better. I particularly like the following: (all emphases mine)

“Any time a new technology comes along, an implicit cost-benefit analysis gets made. The trouble with the current debate about Generation M is that we have a phalanx of experts lined up to measure the costs but only a vague, intuitive sense of the benefits.”

And

“this dramatic spike in digital participation is, for the most part, sharpening the minds of Generation M, not dumbing them down. But it’s hard to see that improvement without the right yardstick. The skills they’re developing are not trivial. ”

And

“They’re learning to analyze complex systems with many interacting variables, to master new interfaces, to find and validate information in vast databases, to build and maintain extensive social networks crossing both virtual and real-world environments, to adapt existing technology to new uses. And they’re learning all this in their spare time–for fun!”

Read it. Read all of it. Because tomorrow’s staff, customers, competitors and CEOs are all Generation M. Well, maybe just the odd CIO as well.

And if we want to attract them, retain them, develop and release their potential, then we need to design systems that will help them do that.

Right now, we are still looking at how better to design bridles and bits while the metamorphosis of the car is complete.

I guess I could say “legacy costs”. Or “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Or “Henry Ford’s faster horses”.

Four pillars: The costs of “legacy”

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.

Four pillars: Musings on tagging

[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.

Do right, use your head

…everybody must be fed.

No, it wasn’t Bono meets Geldof. It’s from what I was listening to.

Taken from a song called Do What You Like from another of my favourite albums, Blind Faith, by the group of the same name. [Incidentally, one of the Amazon reviewers waxes lyrical about how Clapton thought that Ginger Baker, the writer of the song, was the world’s greatest drummer. Reminded me about Lennon’s rumoured response when asked the same question about Ringo]

Supergroups like Blind Faith and Bloomfield Kooper Stills point to something magical that happened in the 60s in terms of talent coming together.

But I still think the model for the way forward was set by Jerry Garcia. Like many others of that time, he played for a number of bands.

But Jerry appeared to play for all of them at the same time. And keep his solo career going. And keep everyone in those bands apparently happy.

I’ve mentioned before that the Grateful Dead approach to people recording their concerts (and they played live often) probably defined some of the principles of opensource and digital rights for me. But Garcia’s approach to “employment” is also worth studying.

Four pillars: Thinking about tagging

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.