DISQUS

Will Google acquire Identi.ca ?

I'm thinking about attention-driven advertising ... highly relevance-matched advertising from the get-go with the ability to focus relevance with one-click search for THE right advertising ("halfway between a Google search and a wolfram search, or something like that).

Ever read "The Society of the Spectacle" (tranlation from French) by Guy Debord ?

Well, we're in it now.

Chris' Gonzo Marketing was very well done, in my opinion. I think it must have been one of the most-unnoticed books about marketing ever published .. perhaps because of the tile, perhaps because of when it came out. Worth reading ... again, in my opinion.

Twitter isn't / wasn't necessary to confuse the moral compass of many of us ... there's already been lots of impact on it from those who are likely to generate the most noise in backlash, and from the way(s) traditional media has fed us what we are supposed to believe and know.

I left a comment earlier (similar to below, but not verbatim), guess it got eaten by the comment system.

There's an issue with respect to the false dichotomy of "hierarchy versus flat" that has to do with the common method of job design, directly related to the arcane (and boring and dry) practice of job evaluation (job size and weight, not the evaluation of performance on the job). Job evaluation determines the positioning of the jobs in the boxes on the (hierarchical, in almost all instances) org chart. HR typically carries responsibility for this 'service", with the core 'design' inputs coming from the C-level, with input from the the line or staff managers they 'own'.

All the major JE methods (Hay Method, Aiken Plan, Towers Perrin, Elliott Jacques) were invented anywhere from 55 to 40 years ago, and they all rely on a basic framework of inputs (knowledge), throughputs (problem solving) and out puts (accountability). In almost all instances the dominant factor is knowledge, which is arranged in hierarchical semantic scales, as in your boss knows more than you, and her boss knows more than her, and so on .. and knowledge is either domain-specific or gained through experience (and as you go up the hierarchic chain of command, the knowledge is dimensionally broadened through what is called "breadth and complexity of management").

This is essentially livable-with in a networked environment, but lacking in sophistication.

The next two factors become more problematic.

Problem solving is sub-defined into Thinking Challlenge and Thinking Complexity .. and these are again hierarchically arranged such that the higher-ups define the problem and to what degree past practices, policies and procedures and protocol are brought to bear on a given problem if one thinks about how issues are defined, addressed and come to terms with in a networked environment, the ineffectiveness begins to become apparent.

Accountability is dominated by two sub-factors; Freedom to Act and Magnitude (typically measured in budget terms or the closest tangible proxy to budget ... could be revenue targets or marketing spend or some such). However, the weight of the Freedom to Act factor is typically about twice that of magnitude, and is derived directly from the reporting relationships arranged on the org chart. This factor too bears less and less relevance to the way work is happening / carried out in networked environments (but of course its useful to understand when and how to act, but the factor implies "getting permission" from one's boss.

Job evaluation effectively forms the skeleton of the organization, and increasingly is (in my opinion) causing dissonance with / amongst networked knowledge workers who have to think on their feet, define problems clearly and quickly, respond effectively, and have accountability for carrying out key aspects in a chain or web of activities that are unfolding in parallel if not simultaneously.

It's an area almost no one writes about, or thinks about much, mainly because it is so deadly boring and basically taken for granted. this issue is exacerbated because much of the process, in many organizations, has been either encioded into Job Evaluation applications driven by algorithms (I know, I built some of the early algorithms in the mid-90's) or carried out by a wet-thumb-in-the-air benchmarking exercise.

Basically, the fundamental assumptions of job size and weight in these methods, and their pertinence / usefulness / applicability for increasingly networked environments wherein hand-offs and effective horizontal knowledge-based collaboration is more and more necessary, have not been (and are not being) deeply examined, and revised in ways that account for the complexity and dynamics of knowledge work in networked workplaces.

I think that your analysis and elaboration of the points instantiated by Hamel are very sensible and grounded in practicality

I think the idea that you explore in this brief post is solid .. and thank goodness for the migration of quite a bit of the twaddle to Twitter and Facebook, and others networking and expressive formats. Many of the people who are exploring issues relatively seriously, or even just thinking with decent rigour, already know each other and interact on the other newer media (of course as the years go on others will find others) but yes, blogs (content, rhythms of reading, commenting and linking) are supportive of individual learning and serve as an expository and reflective form of interpreting and distributing information ina certain context .. much like what academics do in formal papers that they circulate to relatively small circles of colleagues and students for review and commentary. Blogs are less formal and more accessible and open, generally.

Plus that analogy is so flawed, a smoother ride Porsche, with more legroom, doesn’t feature-transform itself into a Volvo. It’s just a roomier, smoother Porsche,

I guess everyone's so busy twittering and FB-ing that they haven't heard that Porsche is coming out with a new roomier, smoother four-door Porsche.

Hmm ... I wondered if they started listening to Volvo S80 owners or sumpin' ...

This item now #32 on Google search for BMW Blogs, with no quotes

Remember www.untied.com (with respect to United Airlines ?) ?

Same thing, same kind of issue ... around the years 1999 / 2000. Along with your work, some of the start of bring-complaints-to-the-attention-of-the-company blogging. United Airlines resisted like crazy (as BMW dealer seems to be doing). It did not do the company any favours.

1. Twitter is primarily one-to-many, where email is primarily one-to-one.

It is also just as much many-to-one, and you get to pick what you want to pay attention to or not (you knew this).

I think that you are correct in outlining the arc of adoption, adaptation and evolution of such tools and the sociology that accompanies their adoption and then learning what they are for, and then ... almost everything moves on. Even the purpose(s) of sex (or the context for it) ...

And it seems clear (to me) that we keep on fragmenting and fragmenting and fragmenting what we do, how we do it and why we do it.

Whew .. hard to keep up with you guys. I am going to have to block if a say to just think harder about this.

But ... I am going to venture a small comment now. I started thinking about this early on when reading this post, and wondered if I would come across "it".

And I did ...

In case 1, you offer full control to the end-users to choose the tool they want, but this would inevitably result in a costly mess to maintain. In case 2, 95% of the control is given back, but the tool is standard. The ROI will of course differ widely in the two cases. Standardizing always brings cost-savings, and can more and more be done without impacting the returns on the applications.

Within the larger context you offer ... implementation and pricing on a large scale where value-added and value-obtained are movable targets (let's take as a given that the organization is reasonably serious about social computing and that crossing the basic ROI hurdle is taken for granted .. a large assumption, I know, but one I believe is appropriate), I keep wondering about the ongoing issue of the personalization of knowledge work tools, the "mass customisation of work" if you will.

I think it's basically an unknown, but maybe an even bet, that increasingly people will want to an organization to use systems and tools that let the users choose what and why they want to use certain tolls, and helps them adapt their own style(s) of working and yes, of collaborating to the objectives at hand.

Yes, there must be a common substrate for mission-critical information and knowledge (that's [probably the ERP + system in the guise of SAP etc.), but because of the influence of the consumer web 2.0 people are going to get fussy about tools and services, I suspect. And I think that massive personalisation is a long term, inescapable trend.

You state that it would be a "costly mess to maintain". I think that's probably true today, but I think there's a decent chance that needn't be the case in the relatively near-term future. What the implications for pricing models are I am not sure, but I think some of the advanced platforms from some of the leading smaller vendors are anticipating this eventuality.

But both of you guys know more about the technicalities of information systems than do I. It's fun just trying to think alongside you two.

I agree ...

I'll comment more later, but for now ...

In general, the argument you have set out has articulated en brouillon the thinking I have been doing about what I call ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction). For that I thank you.

Re: Adopt your client’s point of view: if your deployment is very successful, they will pay an expensive price but derive lots of value from it. Additionally, if the deployment needs to be phased to convince stakeholders of the value potential, they will also pay a matching price that will enable them to scale its use. Reversing the price structure lowers significantly the risk for the client, increasing the chances of a pilot happening.

A positive externality of such a pricing strategy, at its peak for Enterprise Social Computing offerings, is the credibility and confidence about their product projected by vendors. Nearly all are using arguments about how easy it is to engage employees, how they will want to use it, collaborate with each other, etc. So don’t limit yourself to the market pitch, embed this in your pricing and demonstrate your confidence.

I think that this is essentially the inverse of (for example) a $50 million dollar SAP implementation.

Which I think speaks to timing and attention scarcity. SAP for me is (still) an example of a transition technology, as the evolution of IT applied to business and work processes began the major move from paper to information systems in a real and pervasive sense. If you think about it, it wasn't really that complex .. take existing processes, align them horizontally instead of vertically, strip out obvious redundancies (everyone remember the "Spot the Waldo" reengineering stuff ?), and then pour electronic concrete (SAP system) over it.

Now we are moving into collaboration applications layered over a dense-and-deep IT infrastructure (let's leave ERP systems out of this aspect for now), applications that consist of stitching together various web tools and web services (as a generality) that lay on top of the denser, more "permanent" databases and engines. These applications ands services are becoming both more open and more integrated all the time, to the point where through "open" APIs people can plug the tools they like using into larger applications and systems. As the concept of "cloud computing" evolves, so too will the mix-and-match personalisation.

The former (and current) pricing models assumed amortization of investment over time in something more-or-less permanent (at least, assumed to be for the purposes of ROI hurdles).

With large-scale (and over time growing) participation and interactivity, the notion of value obtained and created changes, as you have pointed out.

I'll re-read and think, and come back when I feel I can talk cogently about ROII.

So maybe this isn't the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn't keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to "jump start" the economy won't work, and maybe that's as it should be, and maybe that's a good thing?

Yes.

I think this is now, finally, the beginning of The Fourth Turning - America's (and the rest of the world's) Next Rendez-vous With Destiny ... good book, +/- ten years old now.

What's that old adage ... ?

We tend to over-estimate impacts in the short term because of all the "machinery" of the existing systems, and under-estimate the (cumulative) impacts in the longer term because our necessarily limited view on the scope and reach of the activities and systems.

I do agree it will not be day and night, in terms of difference, but I also believe that the accumulated changes will eventually create something clearly different than today's capitalism.

I've been thinking about this for a while too ... example: "Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?"

I mentioned it before, but there's ongoing serious research into the economics of happiness .. I think we will find it has a lot more to do with the "infrastructure" and dynamics of sociality in given cultural contexts (in other words, nurture) than it does with nature.

Social media does not imply socialism in any direct way

"How Cisco's CEO john Chambers Is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist"

Do the editors of Fast Company need you to call them on this issue as well ? ;-)

It's perhaps more about the use of "social computing" rather than "social media" (difference ?), but neither of this inside the fire wall will turn a company "socialist", I don't think.

Re: numbers 4, 8 and 10 .. I presume everyone remembers EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015 ?

Re: number 5 ... I have an idea I think is interesting .. maybe we should yak sometime ?

Agree with Gregory in that "flow" was clunkier before, and agree with Jay that "sweet spot" is somewhere in between, and will vary with individuals' purpose, cognitive abilities, thinking and learning "styles", communications skills, and so on.

I also think Arrington's point about meatier or more substantial blog posts (or at least more frequent) has some strength, as you point out. I am sure I'll be criticized for this, but I am not sure it is possible to stay "in flow" constantly and retain the ability to "go deep" on an issue or an idea, which is something that is necessary (or at least necessary to attempt) in this field. By "go deep" I mean "go deep", not blurt out an interesting or provocative insight or statement. I think there I 'm basically agreeing with Jay's last sentence.

The "intervention" by Jennifer Palmieri on Think Progress was quite extraordinary, as was the reaction. I actually read all 636 comments ... I don't believe I recall seeing even one that was mildly supportive (tho' if I remember correctly there were 2 or 3 that could have been interpreted so except that it was reasonably clear that they were sarcastic or a pseudimposter.

Well ? No better place that I can think of to prove out your thinking about flow than inventing innovative features that add value to a "market" leader, and turn everyone's favourite whipping boy re: business model into a multi-million $ juggernaut, all whilst continuing to redefine the basics of knowledge work. Given that Twitter has turned down a substantial offer, you should be able to convince Ev to incent you in such a manner that if you crack the revenue issue, you should make out just fine, thank you very much.

What are you waiting for ? ;-)