Social objects in the enterprise: some early thoughts

Origins of “social objects”

Nearly four years ago, Jyri Engestrom introduced us to the concept of social objects, and Hugh Macleod built on that theme, and what they said really resonated with me. As a result, I’ve been writing about social objects for a while, as you can see here from three years ago here, or more recently here and, only three months ago, here.

During that time, there’d been something gnawing away at me, driven largely by my gaining an increasing understanding of what consumerisation really means and implies. And what’s been gnawing away at me is this: are there social objects in the enterprise? If so is there a difference between the behaviour and characteristics of social objects in the enterprise and in the world at large? And does any of this matter anyway?

It seemed to make sense that the answer to these questions would be found in a better understanding of the systems used to create, publish, enrich, comment on and even exchange the digital social objects, so that was what I did. I engaged as passionately as possible with each wave, played with them for a while, sought to define analogies for them within the enterprise, and then refined them further by publishing my views on this blog and learning from the comments. This was what I did with blogs and wikis to begin with, then with facebook, and then with twitter. More recently, since joining Salesforce, I’ve been able to look more deeply into some of these aspects, particularly as I immersed myself in Chatter.

Systems of Record

The first layer of learning was about the differences between the enterprise world and the consumer world when it came to some of these systems. The thinking goes something like this:

  • For centuries firms were viewed as hierarchies of customers and products. Naturally, this view permeated into the way firms accounted for what they did; everything in a firm was recorded as relating to customers or products, under the broad headings of costs, revenues and overheads. More recently this perspective of the firm has changed: as Boston professor N. Venkatraman has been telling us for a decade, firms are now networks of relationships and capabilities. Human and social capital are therefore rising in prominence; the conventions and systems to recognise and value and account for them are, however, somewhat lacking.
  • The first “systems” to be computerised, comprising the processes, records and conventions underpinning what people actually did, these systems related to the ledgers and books of record that were being automated. So what we did was to enshrine the centuries-old way of looking at firms as hierarchies of products and customers. The way cost and profit centres were set up, the codes used, the way things were aggregated, “rolled up”, everything we did was redolent of the original thesis: firms were hierarchies of products and customers.
  • These first systems, over time, became the backbone of the firm, the “books and records” that were inspectable, auditable, audited and reported. As the years went by, people started calling them enterprise resource management or ERP systems.
  • The 1980s and 1990s provided firms with two shocks. The first shock was a real hard one. They discovered they had “customers”. Life did not actually begin and end within the walls of the organisation they worked for and often revered. So firms began to think of customers as something more than account numbers, and tried not to show their irritation when these “customers” actually wanted some help or advice or attention. Retail outlets actually began to think of the space they used for administration, in contrast to the space they reserved for “customers”. Utility service providers such as banks and water companies and transportation providers and telcos began their painful paths towards recognising the very existence of the customer, a path they continue to be on.
  • The second shock was not quite as hard, but it was a shock nevertheless. Firms discovered that they had “supply chains”, that vertical integration was no longer guaranteed, that they needed to partner with others, source from others, in order just to survive. [At this stage I shall resist the temptation to speak of the tremendous damage done to industry in general as everything in sight was “re-engineered”, an age of some truly appalling waste in the context of misguided and suboptimal reorganisations and outsourcing.]
  • So during the decade between 1990 and 2000, the world of ERP had been joined by at least two more TLAs, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). [While I saw all three terms active in the mid-to-late 1980s, they were slow to come out of the gates from a computing perspective].
  • This ERP-SCM-CRM world was just beginning to toodle along as the Web emerged and grew, and as a result a fourth classification emerged, that of e-commerce or e-biz or sometimes just “fulfilment”. And this whole shebang begat a slew of forks and joins and renames as they evolved, and billing, payments, complaints, enquiries and so on all took their place somewhere within that pantheon. Some went the way of CRM, others disappeared into the ERP camp, yet others wormed their way into e-commerce.
  • And so the stage was set. These were the transactions of old, the full-grown equivalents of what started off as TP systems, laying out the books and records of the firm in all their glory. The Systems of Record were present, ready and accounted for.

Systems of Engagement

The second layer of learning dealt with the systems I’d become more familiar with over the past decade or so, in my post-Cluetrain state. [Note: I love The Cluetrain Manifesto, I think everyone who enjoys reading this blog should read that book at least once; I’m privileged to call the four authors my friends, and honoured to have been asked to submit a chapter to their 10th anniversary edition, now available in paperback as well.]

Cluetrain taught me many things, but three things stand out as the most important for me: one, that firms make money because their customers like what they stand for and what they do; two, that good firms have real, active relationships with their customers, they are in constant conversation with them, that the conversation is the way that values and needs and wants and aspirations and intentions are discovered and shared; and three, that for some reason firms keep forgetting this and morphing into command-and-control fortresses that “lock in” customers, “target” them and various other forms of corporate waterboarding.

Right now my thinking is somewhere along these lines:

  • Systems of engagement make it easier for people to communicate with each other; the original telcos and post offices provided systems of engagement; as we added ways to communicate, these agencies had to change; Microsoft was the leading “system of engagement” provider for most of the last twenty-five years; facebook has now usurped their place.
  • Initially, systems of engagement start very open and informal for a given communication medium: post, telegraph, telephone, email, IM, SMS, twitter, video calling. Then, as critical mass forms, many things change, search costs increase and the need for directories emerges. Classification systems enter the fray. Better search tools evolve.
  • Each medium of communication comes with its own jargon, its short cuts, its conventions. Some of these fade away as a greater level of formality is afforded, others become a part of the furniture. [A friend and erstwhile colleague, Stu Berwick, used to remind me “It’s polite to be silent” when talking about chat. What I’ve learnt since is that this is true for most new communications techniques. When I began using email, you didn’t have to reply to every one. The same was true for chat, for SMS, for twitter. But now….]
  • In a digital world, as the “system of engagement” matures, something else happens. The process of communication gets embedded with objects. Attachments to emails: documents, presentations, spreadsheets to begin with, all kinds of files later. Attachments to SMS: just pictures and sounds to begin with, soon video. Attachments to twitter: links to begin with, then photographs and sounds, now all of the above, usually presented as a shortened link.
  • The internet changes the way systems of engagement work. All communication becomes at least two-way. Attachments disappear, to be replaced by everyone “looking” at the same object. The ability to comment on, enrich, amend, annotate is a powerful change agent, transforming the value of the embedded object. As a result, the tools change: digital social objects are editable, amendable, commentable, taggable. Archivable, searchable, findable. But in a new form, with a plethora of comments and other actions wrapped around the object.

The emerging role of social objects in the enterprise

We’re only just learning about these two layers, the systems of engagement and the systems of record. But one thing we know already, they’re fundamentally different. Systems of record tend to get built like Fort Knox: robust, imposing, unfriendly, hard to enter, hard to exit carrying anything at all, a place known and loved by very few, yet relied upon by many. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, are diametrically different: entry is available to all and sundry, there’s a level of openness in all interaction, the core behavioural style looks positively promiscuous in comparison to systems of record.

This fundamental difference, open versus closed, appears to permeate throughout what passes for social objects in each layer.

So when you look at “social” objects in the “systems of engagement” layer, at first sight they appear very anti-social indeed. Reports and enquiries generated by the systems of record are made available and accessible using the same rules as the systems of record themselves, Fort Knoxian security.

Appearances are deceptive. Because the way the reports and enquiries manifest themselves in systems of engagement is usually through e-mail and, more accurately, through e-mail attachments. Which are about as secure as …. well you all know the story of Cablegate.

As against this, the social objects that tend to manifest themselves in the systems of engagement are fundamentally social in character. Web urls are the most common, often shortened for convenience. The social objects pointed to are usually public in origin and availability. Most multimedia “attachments” are essentially uploads to public sites rather than mail-like attachments.

The problem space

These are very interesting times. The two layers of systems, the systems of record and the systems of convenience, are coming closer together, tectonic plates sliding gently across each other. No one has a problem with the anti-social objects that remain closed and private and confidential within the confines of the systems of record. No one has a problem with the social objects that remain open and web-based and public within the “unconfines” of the systems of engagement.

The problem is really to do with the export of private objects from the systems of record into the public space of the systems of engagement.

The first time we tried to do this, we exported the private objects either partially or completely into documents, presentations or spreadsheets, then proceeded to make them uncontrollably public by attaching them to e-mail. And look where that got us.

This time around, with tools like Chatter, the binding and orchestration between systems of record and systems of engagement is granular and controlled, down to individual data elements. Access security is much simpler to implement. And there is no confusion between what forms a social object and what doesn’t.

Outlook for social objects in the enterprise

Objects per se aren’t social; it’s the community around the object that makes it social. As long as enterprises are about communities, we will have social objects in the enterprise. As we  continue to morph from product-customer hierarchies to relationship-capability networks, as we continue to bring human and social capital to the fore, as we continue to engage with our customers and supply chain, the enterprise will be more and more about communities.

And communities need social objects. Real social objects, not inadvertently publicised private objects.

More later.

Why Platforms Leak: The Impact of Artificial Scarcity

[Note: This is a follow-up post to one I wrote earlier this month]

For nearly a decade, I have espoused the view that every artificial scarcity shall be met, and ultimately overcome, by an appropriate abundance. I think it’s time to view this statement in the context of platforms and “leakage”. Let me explain what I mean.

By now many of you should have heard of Karen Murphy, the pub landlady from the Red, White and Blue pub down in Portsmouth. She did something very simple: she installed a decoder that let her pub regulars watch English Premier League soccer matches beamed over from Greece, paying a lot less for the service than she would have had to pay Sky for the privilege.

I quote from the article: “Juliane Kokott, one of the eight advocate generals of the European court of justice, advised that selling on a territory-by-territory basis represented a “serious impairment of freedom to provide services”, adding that the “economic exploitation of the [TV] rights is not is not undermined by the use of foreign decoder cards as the corresponding charges have been paid for those cards”.”

Selling on a territory-by-territory basis represented a serious impairment of freedom to provide services.

Hmmm. This is a serious point, and all that this post is about.

When you make something digital and connect it to the web, it becomes available everywhere, it becomes available immediately. That is the essence of the abundance that the web represents. Instant. Everywhere. An extreme nonrival good.

This was not the way business was done in the past: for analog goods, territorial rights and licences were normal and natural; exclusive rights were less common, but nevertheless could be found, acquired, exercised.

As we’ve moved from the physical world to the digital world, incumbents in many industries have sought to preserve the historical structures and ways of doing business. Which, in effect, were attempts to create and exploit artificial scarcities.  When it comes to digital assets, there are four primary ways to try and create artificial scarcity:

1. Sell the rights to digital things on a territorial basis, and then sue those who seek to overcome those territorial barriers. The Karen Murphy case is just the example of the day…. the Bosman ruling in football was a similar case in point; every attempt to enforce gardening leave may also be seen as an attempt to restrict the freedom of the individual.

2. Encrypt the assets regionally, as done with DVDs and some classes of video games. [As I’ve stated so many times before, region coding on a DVD is the best example I know of a technological invention adding zero value to the customer or her experience].

3. Slice releases of digital assets not just over geographies but over time as well, drip-feed the releases into the world, again to protect a historical business model. I reviewed a Hugh Macleod book a couple of days ago, and a UK reader pointed out that the book will not be available here for a few months.  Hugh, the author, saw the comment and confessed that the publishing world seemed to insist on working that way.

4. “Lock” the assets to a particular device, provider, connection type. If you want to watch Premiership football, you must buy from Sky Sports. Or for that matter iTunes and iPod. That kind of thing. Walled gardens.

All these have been attempted. All these have failed, and will continue to fail. You cannot make something that is essentially abundant artificially scarce.

Where the law is called upon to intervene, as in Karen Murphy’s case, the law may decide to fight back against the artificial scarcity. Even if Ms Murphy loses her case, there will be another. And another. The artificial scarcity cannot hold. Where new monopolies are created, as in Sky’s exclusive rights to Premiership coverage, there will be Ofcom-like rulings to wholesale the content.

Where encryption or walled gardens are used, the fearful power of the web will be unleashed; encryption algorithms will be cracked and made available to all, as happened with iTunes or iPhone. DVD players will be “chipped” to support multi-region play. Ways will be found to unlock walled gardens.

Where time-slicing is used, and releases are artificially suppressed from specific territories, outbreaks of piracy will be more common, pushing back against the “second-class citizen” implications of being made to wait in the queue.

All this becomes very interesting when it comes to the cloud. Some months ago I wrote about cloud principles; at a level of abstraction, many of the comments can be viewed as requesting abundance where the scarcity is artificial. Portability of data, metadata, code is a classic example.

Tonic for the trance of compromise

A lovely turn of phrase. Not mine, though. It’s what Danielle LaPorte of whitehottruth.com, author of the Fire Starter Sessions, had to say about Hugh Macleod’s latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun On The Road to World Domination.

I agree completely with her. I got my hands on a copy earlier today, and it was a bracing, enjoyable read. Refreshing. I’m not usually one to read books about world domination. But with this one I made an exception.

Why refreshing? For a number of reasons. Firstly (and this is particularly true for a long-term fan like me), it blends the familiar and the known into the undiscovered and the unknown. Smoothly, subtly. An effortless read. Secondly, as human beings, we live through stories, we learn through stories. And Hugh has been doing what he does for so long and so well that each chapter is a story, each cartoon is a story, each anecdote refreshes in its telling and its retelling. Thirdly, Hugh manages to tell you things you think you may know already, but in a way that lets you discover it again for yourself.

An example:

We may all have learnt about the democratising power of the internet by now, yet despite it Hugh manages to bring the lesson back to life in a way that leaves you feeling you learnt it afresh.

You see, in some ways, Hugh inhabits a corner of a foreign field that is forever Hughland. When you read Dilbert, your normal reaction is “Dilbert must work here!”. When you read Hugh Macleod, your normal reaction is “I wish he did work here!”.

Sometimes Hugh can be an uncomfortable read: he spends time reminding you of the clothes you’ve been trying to put on the emperors that inhabit your life, gently ensuring you’re aware of the nakedness. Awaking you from your trance of compromise.

The core theme of the book, that of unifying work and love, comes through in every argument. The challenges spoken of are largely to do with work, with creating, with creativity; those challenges are repeatedly discussed in the context of differentiation and uniqueness and entrepreneurship; these two threads are themselves deeply interwined with the heart of the book, which is the passion, the love, the hunger that drives all this.

Unifying work and love.

That’s Hugh. All the way.

And so is this book. Hugh. All the way. Uncompromised, uncompromising.

A different perspective on things you see everyday, things to do with work and love. A welcome “tonic for the trance of compromise”.

I’m not going to say any more, it would spoil the book for you. Which would be a shame.

So go out and buy the book. If you know where you can find an analog bookshop. If one still exists near you.

Or let your fingers do the walking. The book launches today, so you don’t have to wait.

[Disclosure: I’ve known Hugh for many years, and count him as a friend. So much of a friend that, if I’d panned the book, we would have remained friends. But I didn’t pan the book. You know why? Because I loved it, that’s why].

Learning from my children… and Radiohead

I’m blessed. I have three children, born early 1986, late 1991, mid 1998. There is so much I learn from them.

My daughter, the eldest, told me all about Facebook in 2004, and even became my first friend there after I received an invite from Dave Morin, now at Path. Before that I’d done things like watch her converse across multiple MSN Messenger channels in parallel (forcing me to have Microsoft in an Apple-only house!), seemingly while doing her homework and while watching television. It reminded me of the time she was just a few years old, watching TV while reading while eating while playing with toys. I would gently walk over to the TV with the intention of switching it off, only to be stopped by a plaintive “Dad, I’m still watching it”. She was three when the web was written about, five when it became real. And it was a joy to learn about the web through her eyes, the sites she visited, the sites she knew about, the tools she used and why.

She was about 14 when she got her first mobile phone, to give you an idea of how long ago it was. Imagine a 13 year old without a mobile phone now. And SMS was in her DNA, all the way from the start. [While I can’t take credit for it, I do love the definition: “A teenager is someone who can send a text message without taking her phone out of her pocket“]. She was extolling the powers of eBay and YouTube to me before she was old enough to have a credit card. And her choices of phone were (in chronological order) Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. She now has an iPhone.

She’s now a schoolteacher, and it’s a real privilege for me to learn, by watching her and talking to her, how teachers use the web to build their class and course plans and material. A few weeks ago, when she was visiting us, I had the chance to observe her at work in the living room, preparing her material while the TV was on in the background, and it all came flooding back.

Next up was my son, who was less about Facebook and more about Bebo, as social networking did its Benjamin Button thing and went younger. And skateboarding. And cameras. So the sites he took me to were different: it was through him that I discovered places like daily dose of imagery and metacritic, as examples.  His first phone turned up when he was about 12, and his choices were different. Nokia to begin with, Samsung soon after (influenced by camera quality), and then settling with the Nexus One. Android is very important to him.

And then came my youngest, and she introduced me to stuff like Stardoll and Club Penguin, as social networking went younger still. This had its dark side: as the age by which children engaged with such technologies dropped, there appeared to be an unwelcome consequence, that of increased cyber-bullying. So my wife and I found ourselves having to learn about the dangers of formspring and “underage” facebook, a hard time to be parenting. Nothing in our past prepared us for the environment; yet we had two advantages, the older children, there to advise and guide us while not interfering or participating themselves. Parenting was our job, not theirs.

She was 10 when she got her first phone, and it was an iPhone. A hand-me-down. From me. She stayed with that for a while, and then, exactly as predicted by my old boss Ian Livingston at BT, she went all “BBM” on me and insisted on a BlackBerry. [A couple of years ago, as the first commercially available Androids were coming out, and I was telling Ian about the preferences my son had shown, he’d predicted that the next child would be a glutton for BlackBerry Messenger, given her age. He was absolutely right.]

During their lifetimes I have seen the fat TV disappear completely, the CD become a shiny plastic relic to place in the same category as “desktops”,  the mobile phone become a prosthetic device, and the laptop a fashion accessory. Their facility with sound and picture and video, the ease with which they navigate cyberspace, the way they put all this to use and create value from it….. all reasons to make a dad’s heart sing. Of course I’ve had to learn about how to help them combat fraud, how to avoid going to the wrong sites, how to protect their privacy. But largely they’re the ones doing the learning and the teaching, not me.

Except for one or two things. Many children seem to believe that printers get cartridges replaced and paper restocked the same way clothes fly off floors, get washed and ironed and turn up in their bedroom wardrobes. Something needs to be done about this. But that’s a different post.

Where was I? Oh yes, learning from my children. Today my son came to me to tell me about the latest Radiohead album, and to ask whether we can order it.

So we went to the site, pictured below:

EMI may be in trouble, the dinosaur BPI and IFPI may bleat and rant about Numbers of Mass Distraction, but, despite all that FUD,  there is still a lot to like about the way the music industry is going. Because some people are really trying to do things differently. [Ed: enough with the TLAs, JP!]

Global releases. Simultaneous releases. None of the cowpath-paving regional carving-up of territories or times. All formats in one bundle, without the evil of salami-slice torture thrown in. A distribution process that is in keeping with the modern world, all designed and executed by people who appear to have read Kevin Kelly’s fantastic essay Better Than Free and, more importantly, appear to have understood it and taken it to heart.

Of course there were, and continue to be, glitches.

The site was too busy to take the load 14 minutes after the announcement of the album, brought to me by my son quoting Pitchfork. My order wasn’t going through, I was getting a false “decline”. But there was a way to ask for help, an email address. Which I wrote to. And got a reply forthwith saying that the site was very busy, the “decline” was likely to be a function of that volume, and that I should try again in a few hours. Which I did. Successfully.

I’m not a fan of cookies, and bristled at being told “in order to buy any product you must have cookies enabled”. But I could live with it, in the expectation that things will get better.

I had to pretend that I lived in China, just to see what happened. Nothing. If I clicked there I went precisely nowhere. Everything just went quiet. Ominous.

The £3 price differential between MP3 and WAV was enough for me to feel “why don’t you include the MP3 in your WAV bundle then?”. But I didn’t make a big deal of it. Radiohead have done so many things right in this venture that I can live with the rest. Not perfect, but continuing, positive proof that there’s a better way to improve the music business than the nonsense engaged in by people like BPI and RIAA.

I hope Radiohead break the record for money collected on pre-order for this album. Pour encourager les autres.

It will show others what is possible, following on from the brilliant work done by people like Nine Inch Nails, and for that matter, Radiohead themselves, earlier with In Rainbows.

In the meantime, I continue to learn from my children. And will remain ever grateful at having been given the opportunity to learn from them

Why platforms leak

There was a time when institutions, both public as well as private, were intent on vertical integration. And it made sense. For a number of reasons. Firstly, it was the industrial age, and linear repetitive processes with low standard deviation was considered good. Secondly, land, labour and capital, the things we used to call the “factors of production”, were intrinsically immobile. Thirdly, the process of vertical integration genuinely reduced friction in manufacturing processes: transaction costs were lower as a result. And finally, consumer choice was unheard-of; any colour you like, as long as it’s black.

That was a long time ago. The bulk of humanity has moved out of the agricultural sector, leaving only the mega-corporation and the boutique, the military-industrial agronomist and the guerrilla smallholder. Soon this will be true of the industrial sector as well: the low-touch cost-leading hyper-global, and the high-touch quality-leading hyper-local will soon be all that remain.

For some time now,  the services sector has been where the action is. We’ve experienced the Information Age for over half a century; the knowledge worker has replaced her predecessors. Capital has been mobile for some time now, and labour increasingly so. A different world.

And now of course we have the internet. And the web. With their concomitant flattening and democratising. Where everyone’s an actor, with the power to write, to edit, to delete, to publish, the tools of trade of the knowledge worker. A worker who now has the power to access, edit, alter and disseminate information at high speed and low cost to all and sundry, in the language of their choice, to the device of their choice, when and where the recipient wants. A world where the distinction between information consumer and information producer no longer exists.

Which is where the problem lies. We’re going through a process of horizontalising of everything, of “small pieces loosely joined”, of “high cohesion and loose coupling”. Platforms are now no longer hierarchical, they’re closer to being independent layers, often of different sizes and shapes. Almost counterintuitively, the glue that reduces friction between layers is the API, that which allows the small pieces to be loosely joined, that which ensures that the small pieces are loosely coupled. It is this loose coupling, this high cohesion, that allows for the flexibility that underpins adaptive systems, and makes that which appears to be complex simpler.

In the Information Age, these small pieces start acquiring new roles; some consume information; some produce it; some do both; some make lists of information, index them, tell people where to find information; some translate information, change format, change language, render for different devices; some make the devices that support all this; some make the software that empowers everyone to do the consumption, editing, publishing; some transport the bits; some manage access and use rights.

All this happens in a digital world, where reproduction and transmission of information is becoming cheaper by the minute.

Attempts to implement end-to-end control in such environments are doomed to fail; in essence there is no point in attempting to tighten what is designed as loose coupling, it doesn’t work. Which is why platforms leak.

You can reduce leakage, by concentrating on keeping the information cohesive within the layer, and making sure the APIs work securely. You can reduce it further by increasing inspection and usage, by ensuring that the APIs are open. You can reduce it even further by testing each layer against as many conditions as possible, by avoiding lock-in between layers, by making sure the pieces remain small.

The horizontalising nature of the internet and the web, of the digital age, needs to be understood. Layers must be independent of each other. Where they are not, the joins will come apart. And leakage will happen.

Of course, given what happened with Wikileaks, given what happened with Egypt, there will always be attempts to recreate vertically integrated control.

And more leakage will happen. Because the internet, and the web, route around obstacles. By design.

[Note: I will attribute the photographs in this post in half a day or so, I closed the tabs by mistake; my apologies to the people whose works I have used, I will rectify as soon as possible].