You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you

You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this song is about you

Don’t you? Don’t you?

You’re So Vain, Carly Simon, 1972

The song may not have been about you.

This post, however, is.

This post is not just about you, it’s about why so many things are going to be about you.

One of the reasons I speak at conferences is in order to learn. I learn by the comments people make. I learn by the questions people ask. The comments and questions help me refine my thoughts, adjust them, strengthen them, sometimes even discard them altogether. All that goes for Confused Of Calcutta as well: when I write a post, in a sense I’m doing the same thing I do when speaking at a conference. Expressing a set of ideas, explaining my rationale, responding to feedback and learning from that whole process.

For some years now I’ve been writing and speaking about a world where everything is connected, everything is capable of sensing, everything can publish, everything can subscribe. The Four Pillars theme I started this blog with is fundamentally based on publish/subscribe, and much of how I’ve viewed the enterprise world has been with pub/sub at its heart.

When everything is a node on the network, strange things can happen.

Take healthcare. I have had the privilege of watching people hard at work in hospitals a few times over the past two decades. Watching what they do. Watching how they do it. Watching the systems and processes they use, and the (often unstated) cultural values that bring it all together.

Last year, the reason for my extended stay at a medical facility was a relatively large tumour in my colon. Benign, but past its sell-by date. An urgency accentuated by the adjacent presence of a particularly vile attack of e.coli. So for nearly two weeks I found myself in San Francisco’s CPMC ; (salesforce.com, and Marc Benioff in person, ensured I had the best attention possible, something I will always be grateful for).

I couldn’t do very much. So I slept. And observed. And thought. And slept.

Lots of people rushing around. Some in serial patterns, some ad-hoc, some hard to describe. Machines and instruments everywhere. Some of them were static, some were wheeled around as needed, some were portable. Most had digital displays of some sort or other. Measuring my pulse and blood pressure. My oxygen intake. My temperature. Sometimes the measuring process was in stages: take samples of my blood and go somewhere with it, analyse it, come back with the results. Sometimes the instruments used were human beings, as specialists came and examined me at different angles and in different stages of undress.

Tons of information. Not just the things that were measured, but other things as well. Records of what medication I was given and when, what drips I was on and what the drips contained. X-rays and CT-scans. Records of the meals I had had, what I could have and what I couldn’t have. Records of my height and weight and even records of my bowel movements.

Tons of information. In tons of silos.

All brought together by someone writing it all out on paper, in notes that resemble a news feed. Some of it also brought together on the whiteboard on the wall facing the bed. Everything usually up-to-date, or at least close to accurate. Swivel-chair integration of the highest order.

Silos of information threaded together to create a composite view of the patient. Me.

These silos of information represent specialism; each specialist discipline comes with its own group of manufacturers and operators and providers and consultants. Heart stuff here, blood stuff there, insurance stuff in the other place. All brought together manually. With concomitant risks of error. Not always persistent; not always archivable; even if so, not always archived. Not searchable. Hard to retrieve. Even harder to share.

In some ways this was nobody’s fault. All these devices and instruments were built to do what they did, and nobody asked for their outputs to be shareable. Things were integrated, in their own peculiar way, but the integration took place around the discipline, the topic, the product. Heart things worked with other heart things. Blood things worked with other blood things.

Now, when everything’s a node on the network, we can break these silos. Take each sensor that relates to a particular person, and build a composite view of the person rather than of the discipline or product.

That’s one of the key benefits of the internet of everything, the ability to aggregate feeds around concepts that were hard to aggregate around before.

Concepts like patients. And actually being able to see all information to do with a patient in one place. The 360 view of the patient. Accurate and up to date. Persistent, archivable, retrievable, searchable. Shareable.

Concepts like passengers. Information in the airline industry was often organised around their product, the flight. Passengers were not as important as flights. A passenger was associated with a flight. And her luggage was also associated with a flight. Change the flight and the risks of passenger and luggage travelling together were reduced…. because often their association was nominal except at the flight level.

Concepts like drivers. Concepts like citizens.

Concepts like customers.

Getting 360-degree views of patients, passengers, citizens, drivers, students, customers. Taking the siloed strands of information out of the siloes, strand by strand, and rebuilding them around the person.

You don’t have to be vain any more to think that this song is about you.

Because it is. Because, for the first time, it can be.

 

If there’s anything that you want,
If there’s anything I can do,
Just call on me and I’ll send it along
With love from me to you.
To you, to you, to you.

From Me To You (McCartney/Lennon) The Beatles, 1963

Photo credit: Logan Abassi UN/minustah

[An aside for Beatlemaniacs. Apparently From Me To You was the third and last song to be credited McCartney-Lennon, as opposed to Lennon-McCartney].

Sharing is serious business.

Sharing creates value, and that value gets paid for in a variety of ways. Not all of those ways are understood, or for that matter even visible. Some years ago, Bruce Schneier, an erstwhile colleague and must-read blogger, put it quite bluntly: Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re the product. Its customers are the advertisers.

When I first saw that quote, I laughed. I’d heard the equivalent many times, in variations of “if you’re not the customer, you must be the product” or even more cynically “if you can’t spot the patsy at the poker table then it’s probably you”.

The quote still makes me smile. But it doesn’t deter me from sharing. It doesn’t deter me from joining services like facebook or Google+ or Chatter or Twitter or LinkedIn. Or for that matter the World Wide Web and the internet. [Disclosure: I work for salesforce.com, the makers of Chatter. And I have good friends who are involved with every one of the services named.]

It doesn’t deter me from writing posts like this, and sharing my thoughts with you.

People who know and trust each other can do amazing things together when they are connected and when they can communicate with each other. This has been the case from the time we learnt to talk; when all that connected us was air, we used sound and gesture and light to communicate across the open air. We shouted. We used tools to make our shouting louder. We used mirrors. Sent smoke signals. Whistled. Drummed. Waved flags. All these worked, but distances weren’t great. We could concatenate, daisy-chain our way to distance, passing whatever we wanted to pass from hand to hand. But it was slow, time-consuming, inefficient. So we didn’t do it that often, usually only in emergency.

We learnt to standardise, so that each participant understood what was being communicated in the same way. It didn’t always work, but errors were reduced and the process was accelerated. We moved data around; we got better at it. But it wasn’t persisted, and so it was hard to recall, to analyse, to aggregate, to gain insights from. Then came the telegraph and telephone and radio and television and the internet and the Web and email and chat and SMS and microblogs and and and. Analogue things became digital; broadcast models became networked, sometimes even peer-to-peer; transient data was persisted, then classified and archived. Search got better, so retrieval got better.

And that is how I think of social networks today. Places where people are connected. Where people can communicate with each other. Where they can share with each other. People are social. And they don’t worry too much about monetisation or business models. What they worry about is trust. Can they trust the person they are sharing with, can they trust the person or people who makes that sharing possible, can they trust the people involved in picking up, moving, delivering whatever is being shared? Trust. Not monetisation. Not business model. Trust.

As a result of the web, in our personal lives as well as in business, it has become possible to share pretty much anything. And magical things are happening. We can share our thoughts and ideas, just like I am doing now. I have no monetisation plan, no business model. I share in order to learn and to teach. Many of the people who read this post are people I count as friends. And many of those people share their views with me in similar ways. Platforms like WordPress and Typepad exist to make the sharing of thoughts and ideas possible.  We can share our opinions, we can review products and services, as happens in TripAdvisor or Amazon; and we can share our experiences of buying and selling, as happens in eBay or etsy. We can share our learning via sites like Wikipedia; we can answer questions as in a Quora.

Sometimes we can even use some of these services in ways that weren’t part of the original design: there is a humorous side to what we share. [I particularly love how “The 2009-2014 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China” gets a review of

“I was thinking, ‘Sweet! Finally a version of Outlook that will run on my wooden Chinese toilet seats!!'”

But we know all this. We know about how the web makes sharing possible, easier, more enjoyable. [As a child I hated the idea of sitting and watching someone else’s holiday photographs or film while visiting their homes. Yet now, because I can choose the time and the place, I’m happy to do just that. Times change, conditions change.]

Sharing is serious business.

And with social networks and social logins, sharing has become even more serious business. Now we can share inventory among friends, in the form of food, beds, cars, whatever. We can share other forms of “assets”, such as our wireless passwords; our lifestyle-linked purchasing power; even our intentions (in going to a concert, even down to where we plan to sit), as shown in the snapshot below from ticketmaster:

We have to think of social networks as exchanges. Historically, exchanges came with high barriers to entry and access criteria, many were formed initially as exclusive clubs. Social networks, in comparison, come with low barriers to entry. Search costs are low, you can find out who else is there quickly and cheaply. Engagement and contracting costs are similarly low, as are execution and transaction costs.

We started off just communicating with each other; then we shared our photos and our activities, our opinions and our intentions. Now, particularly via the use of social logins, we can discover more and we can share more as a result. Who else (among our friend network) has done something, is doing something, wants to do something?

The ability to discover the experiences, opinions, actions and intent of our friends is powerful just by itself; when we augment that with the ability to share and exchange our inventory, it becomes truly magical.

Our experiences are themselves assets, when expressed in a codified, shareable, findable, retrievable form. Of course our experiences in terms of food and travel and hotels and buying and selling are valuable.

But not as valuable as our experiences in medical terms. Yet there are many many barriers to sharing medical information.  Initiatives like the Open Data Institute are focused on the larger problem of making the taxonomies available and useful. Smaller, medically focused enterprises such as DNAdigest.org try and fight for the right to secure and share DNA data for genomics research;  the Supreme Court has had to be involved in ensuring that human genes cannot be patented.

Our ability to share our experiences, often as stories, is part of what makes us human. Our ability to learn from those experiences has contributed to our capacity to exist. We have to fight to retain those rights.

It has become easier for us to share those experiences, to aggregate them, to learn from them. Because we have tools:

• tools that simplify our ability to share, to aggregate, to learn;
• tools that reduce the transaction costs involved, in terms of search and discovery, engagement and contracting; execution;
• tools that help us standardise in order to share;
• tools that help us have the vocabulary to make that sharing possible and valuable;
• tools that allow us to associate what we share with verified identities, places, times

I’m used to seeing headlines about people who manage to get asymmetric access to information that was not shared with them in the first place, in an environment where there is neither relationship nor trust.

This is not about those stories. Only today, a friend pointed me towards a story about how Google is working on a service to share clothes and gadgets and stuff with friends; he reminded me that services like Yerdle already do this. Those are the stories I need to see.

We need to see headlines about how value is generated from the sharing of information, between individuals, between groups of friends, across society as a whole. That’s really what social networks are about, at home and at work. Reducing friction and latency in engagements between people. Simplifying access to the ability to discover and share knowledge and inventory; accelerating the capacity to contract and to trade as a result; providing the tools to identify the trends and patterns, the insights that can teach us how to do things better.

And until we see those headlines, I will keep writing posts like this one.

He roller coaster
He got early warning
He got muddy water
He one Mojo filter
He say one and one and one is three
Got to be good looking
Cause he’s so hard to see
Come together right now
Over me

Come Together, The Beatles, 1969

Calcutta is a city of communities, something that becomes very visible during Durga Puja, a riotous festival held in the autumn. Every community, called a para, builds its own shrine to the goddess Durga, idolised in clay. That shrine becomes the centrepiece of the festivities throughout the six-day holiday, culminating, on the last day, in the ritual immersion of the idol in the waters of the Hooghly, following a frenetic parade through the city. It’s loud, it’s colourful, it’s very crowded, and it’s great fun. An experience not to be missed. When I was a child it also meant I was given new clothes and festival sweets, something I was very partial to. [Bengali sweets are something else, if you haven’t tried them then you haven’t lived].

In those days house ownership was rare except for the very rich, rents were often fixed for life, and job mobility was low. So everyone tended to stay within the neighbourhood, and community spirit was strong without being particularly visible. There was an active neighbourhood watch, an outcome of that peculiar, often Eastern, trait of people who sit on the side of the road and watch the world go by.

Geography has always been a strong driver towards the forming of community, as has religion or culture or for that matter any special interest. Communities tend to form around shared roots and experiences, interests and aspirations, a tendency exhibited in virtual as well as in flesh-and-blood communities. If you want to delve deeper into the topic of virtual communities, I would strongly recommend the writings of Howard Rheingold, Amy Jo Kim, Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler, John Seely Brown and John Hagel. All underpinned by a healthy dose of The Cluetrain Manifesto and its writers Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine. I’ve read their stuff; I’ve met them; I’ve spent time with them; with some, I’ve even had the privilege of seeing them regularly and getting to know them. They’ve all been significant influences on my thinking about communities in general; my thanks to each and every one of them.

When the purpose of the community is driven by shared experiences or aspirations, it adds a certain permanence to the entity. Interests and aspirations change slowly, if at all; roots and experiences, by definition, are matters of fact and shouldn’t be vulnerable to change. So for the most part communities can be considered to be permanent, or at the very least long-term in essence. That long-term nature facilitates the working of the community, since people get to know each other, get used to each other, understand the conventions and rituals of the community, share the goals and ideals.

Around thirty years ago, I started noticing that this permanency wasn’t necessarily an attribute of all communities. It started with my interest in sport in general, and in cricket, soccer and golf in particular. Club form didn’t always translate to country form; there were often conflicts between the needs of one and the other, which meant that training together wasn’t easy. And teams of people who hadn’t played together that often couldn’t just turn on the collective sparkle on demand. I saw this happen most often in soccer, when collections of very talented people produced far less than their perceived ability. It was less obvious in cricket, and I suspected that it was because international cricket teams toured regularly, thereby resolving the conflict between club and country for the period of the tour. Golf was a different ball game altogether: the camaraderie shown in the Ryder Cup stood out as an example of how people who hadn’t played together often could still gel as a team. I reasoned that it was largely because they still played relatively solo games; fourballs and foursomes needed collaboration in strategy and tactics, but execution was still an individual responsibility.

I began to think of national teams as transient communities, coming together for a specific short-term purpose and then disbanding once the purpose has been achieved. And I began to think about what made them tick. Or not. As time went by, in the early 1990s, the idea of co-opetition began to gather momentum, and examples of companies coming together for specific projects, opportunities, bids, became common. Companies that would collaborate on one bid competed on another, often in parallel. As was the fad at the time, no such phenomenon went unjargonised. So we started seeing the term “the holonic organisation” to describe this temporary coming together of strange bedfellows.

A few years later, I joined what was then Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. And again, perhaps because I’d begun to become a transient-community hammer, I saw transient community nails everywhere. The M&A department was a closed community, separated from others by formal “Chinese walls”. Whenever an advisory opportunity arose, a “pitch team” was assembled, drawing from a plethora of disciplines, often including people who were not part of the M&A department. When that happened, the outsiders were brought in “over the wall”; once the assignment was completed, they returned whence they came. A classic transient community, one that operated with skill and at speed.

That really intrigued me, coming on the back of my earlier observations on variations in levels of performance. How come these clusters of people worked so well together, despite their different origins and interests? That was about fifteen years ago, and I’ve had the opportunity to study the phenomenon more closely since.

A few years ago, when reading The Big Shift and The Power Of Pull, I began to visualise creation spaces, the places where collaboration curves were encouraged and fomented, as enablers of transient community. The hammer-meets-nail problem began to get worse: more recently, when I delved into Gartner’s “extreme collaboration” model, I couldn’t help but keep seeing transience and community Siamese in their twin-like-ness.

I came to the conclusion that traditional communities, be they flesh-and-blood or digital, were at their core permanent or near-permanent in nature, and often single-purpose. This model has served us well in the past, and, in many respects, will continue to do so in future. But it’s not the only model in town.

Spurred on by the accelerating pace of change and increasing complexity, there is a growing need for multidisciplinary communities, inherently transient, with membership drawn from communities with diverse purposes, coming together for a single relatively short-term objective.

Transient communities. Using the parlance of the Big Shift, I started thinking of them as “flow” communities rather than “stocks” communities, dynamic rather than static in nature.

The more I’ve thought about them, the more I’ve observed instances in practice, the more I’ve realised that there are some core principles that make such “flow” communities successful.

And here’s where I’m at with those principles:

A flow community comes together to solve a specific class of problem, one that cannot be solved by traditional communities.

The class of problem is characterised by the need for multiple and disparate skills, know-how and discipline, usually across diverse cultures and geographies. But those are not the core characteristics.

The core characteristic of a flow community is that of having to align a complex array of purposes within the community, derived from and represented by the diversity of membership.

Flow communities tend to come together for a finite time, and then disband. Entry to, and egress from, the community, needs to be kept simple yet respect the separations called for by the diversity of membership mentioned earlier.

When they come together, the members of the community “leave their titles at the door”; for the community to execute successfully, this is what makes the difference. Disparate people explicitly ejecting their bag and baggage in order to fulfil a short-term purpose that has the support of their originating communities, despite contention, sometimes even conflict, in purpose.

As a result, the behaviours inherent in traditional communities (which, particularly in the enterprise context, often resemble company departments or groups) are minimised. These behaviours, very tribal in nature, tend to replicate the very reasons that the problem couldn’t be solved in the first place, and must be explicitly excluded from the flow community.

Lacking the permanency of interest and purpose, flow communities need to resolve interpersonal trust at speed and at scale. Tools must exist to simplify and ease the process: of finding the right person or people; of validating that person’s reputation and skill “by inspection”; of discovering, in real time, what is happening in the community; of providing feedback effectively.

Most importantly, the flow community respects the boundaries of the community for the duration of the assignment. People can be invited into the community; people can leave the community; everything happens under the Chatham House Rule.

There’s a lot more I can say on the subject, but I’ll stop for now and await your comments, in whatever style or channel you choose. I try and contain my posts to around the 1500 word mark.

I can see for miles and miles
I can see for miles and miles
I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles

I Can See For Miles (Pete Townshend), The Who, 1967

 

UTA Flight 772. On Tuesday 19th September 1989, flying from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, having landed and then taken off from N’Djamena in Chad en route Paris CDG, the plane blew up in an explosion while cruising at 10,700m. A suitcase bomb planted by Libyan terrorists. All passengers and crew died. 170 human beings perished in midair. The wreckage was littered all over the desert below. There but for the grace of God.

Most of us find it hard to remember the crash. Most of us haven’t heard of UTA. Many of us wouldn’t know precisely where Brazzaville was. For that matter, few amongst us would know how to spell N’Djamena. And the Sahara isn’t the world’s most populous place. Not that many witnesses or passers-by.

170 souls. All but forgotten.

Except for the families of the victims. They remembered. They will never forget.

And so they built a memorial to the victims, a memorial that deserves to be seen. Go see it now.

The victims deserve it. The families of the victims deserve it. Every victim of terrorism deserves it. Every family of victims of terrorism deserves it.This memorial is a fitting response to acts of cowardice, powerful yet humane, creative yet stark.
My thanks to those who envisioned it, who built it, and who chose to share it with the rest of us.

 

 

 

Listen

Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell?

Do You Want To Know A Secret, The Beatles

A few days ago, the Pew Internet And American Life Project released a detailed report on Teens, Social Media and Privacy. Worth reading whether you’re a teen or a parent. Especially worth reading if you’re a parent.

I’m not going to go through in detail here: those of you who are interested will read the whole report anyway, and those who only want a useful summary will probably be better off reading danah boyd’s excellent post on the subject.

So this is not a summary. Instead, I’m just sharing some of the findings that I found remarkable, in the sense of their being worth remarking on.

• While I’d seen some research on it, and noticed some things anecdotally, this was the first time the issue of race-based divisions in social media really stood out for me. Twitter usage in general stood out, as did “following” and friending habits in the context of celebrities. That made me think even more about the importance of role models.
• I wasn’t surprised to see that teens were largely comfortable with handling their Facebook privacy settings, but I didn’t expect to see that 70% of teens are Facebook friends with their parents. All three of my children have friended me, two are no longer teens but remain friends; I had the impression that the number friending their parents was lower than 70%; perhaps I hadn’t allowed for a difference between voluntary and enforced friendship.
• It was good to see that over half the teens say they have had “an experience online that made them feel good about themselves” …. too often, I hear the opposite, stories about bullying and victimisation. As with most technologies, there are both good and bad ways to use social media.
• Interestingly, while they restrict access to “friends only” they don’t really bother to differentiate within that; it may be that they don’t think it’s worth the effort.
• For some time now, I’ve known that people have “Facebook birthdays”, separate and distinct from their real birthdays. I have occasionally wished a colleague only to be greeted with a bemused look, and, upon investigating, realised they’d put up a fictitious date of birth on Facebook. It appears that teenagers have learnt to do this, and related stuff.
• I was delighted to learn that they prune their presence regularly, removing social objects that hadn’t received enough positive feedback, reviewing their friend lists, and so on.
• I was also intrigued to know that they’ve learnt to hide in plain sight, use coded messages in the open.

Overall a fascinating report. I may write a longer post when I finish reading it twice over, something that is likely to happen when I fly to Sydney at the end of this week.

Let me know what you think, and if you’d like me to cover or comment on something specific in the report.