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Collaboration
Transations and Interactions
I have been having an interesting dialogue with an ex colleague York whose own blog is well worth a read. The particular dialogue has been around what is essentially the changing, and expanded environment in which we are all increasingly working. It’s a World in which Web Services and traditional IT both exist, and therefore we need to start to be careful to discriminate about terms to ensure that we really understand what we mean.
The challenge that this produces is that if both exist in parallel then we need to get a whole load more carefully about terminology. What exactly do you mean by a process as an example? Is this part of an application, an orchestration of ‘services’ or even something achieved through REST? Some 18 months ago I wrote a white paper about using Web 2.0 and SOA in which I attempted to make some clarifications.
A month so back I asked for thoughts on how to define Middleware in the new World and sure enough after some great posts I think we got a really good and recognizable definition. Well I would like to try this again with the following; (I do believe that ‘crowd sourcing’ works, particularly when looking for an ‘open’ definition).
My Laptop, Your Laptop
It’s something I particularly like to do when speaking at Open Source conferences, where the sentiments every now and then just tend a bit too much towards the politically correct. Open Source is Free, Green, Saving the World and – most importantly – helps us to battle the dominance of the You-Know-Who guys. Yeah. Right. In these cases, it always seems appropriate to dedicate a few minutes to the important work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the beginning of the presentation.
Just a bit of warm bonding with an audience. There’s nothing like it.
But admitted, during the recent Go Open conference in Oslo, I saw an excellent example of what the Open Source is donating to the real world. I have written about it before, but the XO ‘100$ laptop’ of the One Laptop Per Child foundation still manages to inspire more and more people. After Håkon Wium Lie, the brain behind the Opera browser and a true IT Rockstar in Norway, had showed a XO during his speech, the podium was swarmed by people that just wanted to touch and feel that small, very green-painted wonder machine.
Although the XO is not an open source community initiative (others are responsible for that), it does run completely on free software, which obviously helps to keep the production price low. The OLPC initiative is extremely relevant, as it aims to educate the children in our world, and I encourage all of you to donate to it and tell it to others.
Blogging is maturing and that means changing
I am normally rather cautious about Nicolas Carr blogs as he does seem to like to go for the controversial, and sure enough some six months back he posted one about Blogging in which he questioned its value. A sort of ‘Does Blogging Matter’ to paraphrase his original controversial publication ‘Does IT Matter’. Strangely enough his premise was that maybe successful Blogs are too popular, and take too much effort to maintain.
The principle part of his argument was related to a comment by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor with one of the world’s most widely read economist’s blogs, that he was disabling the comments section as it was taking too much of his time to respond to all the posts. Actually if see the original view it was that ‘poor quality’ and ‘inappropriate’ posts were becoming a big issue. I can relate to that as we are continually receiving posts asking for jobs, but I was interested because I have been seeing another reaction to commenting on Blogs. In my case I see more comments by direct personal emails then I see as publicly posted comments, and at the same time the number of readers continues to rise suggesting (I hope!) that the content is at least reasonably interesting.
The Semantic Web may be becoming more likely with RDF
In recent posts I have touched on the challenges of too much content, too little context, together with the further challenge of the sheer number and types of devices that will create and use data http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2008/03/communications_convergence_or.php. I was even pretty provocative about whether master data has become an IT department distraction that is slowing down business requirements for ‘better’ and ‘faster’ decision making by using content in a more personal manner http://www.capgemini.com/ctoblog/2008/03/master_data_has_it_become_a_ba.php. So I think it’s about time I got a little more positive about at least one potential solution.
Sector as a Service with Utilities versus Online Products
I have been struck recently by how many times I have been in conversations about what I think I can best describe as the ‘removal of value’ from products, or at least the failure to create a sustainable business proposition. Most alarmingly most of these stories are connected with new markets and the delivery of products as ‘services’, the very change that the new technologies are being adopted for by the business world. The one that sparked off this Blog piece was an interesting story in the Ecconomist.com about Online Social Networks, with the sub title ‘Social Networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business’.
The point was that every new ‘service’ even if it pulls in millions of people does not necessarily have a business model, and that advertising cannot be the revenue generator for everything. The comparison point was with mail services, once seen as a key new market with Microsoft buying Hotmail, and various other big names making their own acquisitions, but today nobody has a business model generating revenue from what is still a free service, albeit now enormously upgraded in terms of amounts of storage, etc, to levels that would not have seen feasible five years ago. Why persist with providing it at all? Answer, because it is cheap to operate and keeps the millions of users within the brand and websites of the operators. So to be successful it’s the old rule, something to grab attention, a supermarket might call it a loss leader, and something else to create revenue and profits.
Debunking the Myths of Long Tail and so much more!
The whole wisdom of the crowd’s concept I buy into, but with one very important proviso; I personally believe you can only trust the result when it has been tested and refined by debate. Not quite sure who said this profound point but the best one liner on this says; ‘When everything else has been eliminated what remains must be the truth’.
And in this remark lies the basic reasoning for collaboration, or should I say new world community style interactivity that Web 2.0 permits rather than traditional forms of structured collaboration tools that are often found inside enterprises. If the right people can get together, and have the right discussion, around the available information, - please notice I did not say facts – then hopefully the best version of ‘the truth’ will emerge.
Actually it probably isn’t going to be about facts, because the challenge today is the web doesn’t actually help us separate fact from opinion. We have more, much more, to take onboard when considering any topic, reacting to an event, etc., but at the same time we have less certainty about the ‘quality’ of the information we have access to. To put it another way; if you want to check the quality of information available to you through the web try googling yourself. Do you reckon the information that you find is a true reflection of yourself? Probably the best you would own up to is that it represents a snap shot of yourself provided through what you decided to make public through your participation in different activities, but not what your deep seated personal convictions might be.
The one liner on googling yourself to determine the accuracy of the web comes from a website where there is a whole section devoted to ‘debunking popular statements’. On a page described as a linkfest of debunking you can find a whole series of links covering a lot of popular topics starting with the Long Tail. Now holding the views I do about lively debate and wider interaction to add value and ultimately help define the best version of the ‘truth’ you can imagine I thought that I was onto something good here.
Maybe I am, but a wider look around convincing me that the work to find the good stuff amongst some pretty wild stuff isn’t worth the effect of adding this to my regular reading. And there is my point. I am as guilty as anyone else in choosing what I read, and in newspaper circles they know this. They are well aware that we choose the paper that reflects our views, and will report in a way that we feel aligned to, unfortunately that also means we self-censure the actual inputs to our internal debate to create an opinion on the ‘truth’ as we see it.
It does make me wonder if in selecting sources and blogs I am really doing such a good job as I pride myself on, or if I need to accept being challenged, and made uncomfortable, a little more so I can at least grasp the other views that are in existence.
DAVOS and the power of collaborative innovation
I was surprised, gladdened, and then worried to find that the theme for the most powerful people in the world when they gather in the resort of DAVOS this year is ‘the power of collaborative innovation’. Looking at this issue from a technology standpoint, it’s great to see that world leaders have noticed the revolution in capability with the way people at large have grasped the use of web 2.0 technology, but are these great people too far away from being ‘hands on’ in using these technologies themselves to see some of the very real issues that are emerging? Do they use social networking sites, read, comment, and write blogs? I doubt it, so their observations must come from the direction of ‘controlled’ use in business, or government with clear definable benefit cases, whereas I feel that many of the issues that are emerging are actually social, and flow from factors they are barely able to grasp.
The two most influential books on the topic that it seems everyone knows, and I would expect to see the authors present are; The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, and ‘Wikinomics’ by Don Tapscott. Both assume the changes that mass collaboration and global communications will be a force for good, because it will be capable of being channeled towards appropriate goals. Presumably that’s the point of the discussions by the ‘leaders’ of our society, how to channel these new capabilities for the good of the countries, enterprises, etc that they represent. I hope they figure out some good positive moves, I can only be encouraged by what is already happening as people with imagination and a responsible attitude to society innovate. Some great and good changes are already underway.
There is the other side of the coin, those who don’t see society as something that they have any responsibly, and those who are already encouraged to use smart phone cameras to video themselves indulging in anti social acts for posting on web sites. Okay that’s recognizable and action is, or will be taken, to curb these activities. Slightly different, but also recognizable to control is that the Chinese already have a serious problem with addicted gamers who play themselves to death, or at least to the distraction of their social roles. This is also recognizable and action to curb that availability of sites after a gamer has spent three hours online is underway.
My worry is the ‘grey’ area that the availability of this huge amount of information is having on the population at large. I believe many of the Politician’s attending are self-confessed technophobes, difficult for them to perhaps comprehend how much any interested person can know find out about their behavior. Is this the basis for the apparent dissatisfaction with Politicians in so many countries? I think so. Worse I don’t think these guys understand that this may mean they need to change more than the way they behave; may be it’s less about democracy as we have defined it in terms of voting every few years to elect some people who will deal with issues that are invisible to the population at large, and more about continuous collaboration. That truly would be the power of collaborative innovation using the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ as defined by James Surowiecki to deal with the increasingly complicated issues which require complex solutions. Is it possible to do this today? The answer is almost certainly yes to the basic technical question, but it poses some very significant questions.
It’s not a question of if the people are educated enough for democracy, this question has already been answered with voting rights under the current model, but the real question is the quality of information made available and by whom. The Al Gore film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ dealing with global warming has been widely shown, and the UK Government decided to make it compulsory viewing for school children in school. A significant number of parents objected to this on the grounds that in their opinion the film has inaccuracies so they objected to these being presented as apparent educational ‘facts’ to their children. A court case followed and found that there were nine ‘facts’ that expert opinion could not sustain therefore the case was proven that presenting these as ‘facts’ was wrong.
This straight forward finding should have been an end to the matter, but the National Geographic magazine decided to ask an expert of their own and published an opinion by Eric Steig, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle that these ‘facts’ were true.
The reality is of course that all of these were in fact personal ‘opinions’ based on how individuals interpretation the underlying statistical ‘data’ to reach conclusions.
To me the real question underpinning DAVOS, and indeed society collectively and individually today, is about the accuracy of the information that is flooding into society and the capability of citizens to understand how to treat the ‘facts’ that they are presented with in forming their own opinions. Enterprises perhaps understand this better than Government and are increasingly learning that they have to update their own practices in face of these changes. Too many Governments have yet to grasp how to focus their current information and processes towards their citizens through the Web, let alone deal with this new generation of information hungry, highly demanding, citizens who will use the absence of ‘formal’ information to collect their own answers. The risk is that these may well be wrong, and their prevailing assumption that if it is found on the Web, or at least in places like Wikipedia, it must be true is highly dangerous.
Collaboration is a powerful capability that is supposed to have been one of the traits that separate the human race from other animals and has allowed the development of society as we know it today, and the attendees cannot help to be in favor of it. From the top down they can indeed set goals and encourage positive results, but from the bottom up these new collaborations may be built on straw if there is no answer to the question of collaboration using what information and from where. Am I advocating a global stamp for authorizing data? No not really, but a wider use of the current digital rights capabilities would go a long way to making sure that these powerful new collaborations both used and created authenticated information.
Maybe Global Warming would be a good starting place to unleash collaboration to solve the many problems, but the lesson of multiple opinions and versions of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ shows what is required in addition to the sense of purpose that DAVOS may well produce.
Don't Merge, Collaborate?
I was just talking to Financial Times journalist Ross Tieman - who is writing an article on partnerships and collaboration between IT companies – and we came back to the old conclusion that there are many examples in biology of successful splitting strategies (cell multiplication to begin with, mammals giving birth, reproduction strategies of plants and many other organisms, rabbit and ant colonies that expand through new subsidiaries, etc.) but only very few of merging strategies.
Think about it. What are successful mergers in nature? A small fish being swallowed by a shark? Hardly a friendly acquisition strategy. Bacteria or viruses invading a body? Destruction intended only. Ivy covering a tree? May lead to suffocation.
Mergers still happen all the time though in IT. Just recently, Oracle acquired Hyperion and did a first attempt to merge with BEA, SAP acquired Business Objects and this week IBM finally took over Cognos (we didn’t need Nostradamus to predict that last one, admitted).
Mergers obviously can provide missing capabilities and markets to the acquiring party and can offer protection and continuity to the other. And obviously, there are the economies of scale, although in surprisingly many cases the acquired parties stay autonomous for a prolonged time.