Archive for April, 2009
by Joe McKendrick
April 27, 2009 at 10:42 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, 3.0
Yale scientist David Gelernter has always been a step or two ahead of the industry, publishing the book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean in 1991, which predicted the rise of the World Wide Web among other things. In his 2000 work, The Second Coming: A Manifesto, he predicted the rise of cloud computing, as well as the rise of the Semantic Web and advanced search, which he called “lifestreaming:”
“A lifestream is a sequence of all kinds of documents — all the electronic documents, digital photos, applications, Web bookmarks, rolodex cards, email messages and every other digital information chunk in your life — arranged from oldest to youngest, constantly growing as new documents arrive, easy to browse and search, with a past, present and future, appearing on your screen as a receding parade of index cards. Documents have no names and there are no directories; you retrieve elements by content: “Fifth Avenue” yields a sub-stream of every document that mentions Fifth Avenue.”
Gerlernter’s career hasn’t always followed a smooth, predictable path, however. In 1993, he was a victim of a mail bomb delivered by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the “Unabomber,” who sought in a twisted, violent way to protest the rise of technology. The incident, which severely injured Gerlernter, brought him to the attention of the mainstream media.
In a new and powerful interview from Edge Foundation, Gerlernter was joined by John Markoff and Clay Shirky in an inspiring discussion of where we’ve been, and where we’re going with technology.
Gelernter said that early on, he had reservations about the idea of searchable information across interconnected computers:
“This is a very pretty idea. This is a beautiful elegant idea. It’s stupid because it’s impossible. It will never work. It is grossly inefficient. There is no way that you can take information, just float it out there, and expect people to search this whole vast collection, or somehow or other find what they want. And, you know, how are you going to find out what computer to put it on? How am I going to know what computer to look for it on?”
He says as he gained experienced and continued to research the problem, he determined that “In the final analysis, “the question is not, what can software engineers build? It’s the question, What do users need? If we identify our user need, the software technology will come along — in combination with hardware, obviously, and interconnect technology.”
These ideas were further expressed in Mirror Worlds. Gerlernter said he was inspired by the ponds within the villages he saw around Cape Cod, reflecting the surrounding churches and buildings:
“The idea began with the idea of delocalized information floating out there so that I could look into my computer and without knowing where to look, what file on which computer, I can sort of tune in the information I wanted the way I tuned in CNN on a TV. I don’t have to know where CNN is and I don’t have to know on what operating system my TV is running, or the software on my cable box — I just tune it in and I assume it’s there.
“So this is going to the cybersphere and the real world will be mirrored on the surface of software essentially. Instead of having to penetrate the real world, go places, deal with institutions in their real-world manifestations, which involves a lot of trouble and a lot of time and a lot of energy, in some cases necessary and desirable but not always, I’ll be able to tune in any part of reality I want.”
The original work of Mirror Worlds may be 18 years old, but, as Markoff put it, “the world is just now catching up with that…. It’s clear now with cloud computing that that’s the direction the world’s moving in. But only now.”
Gelernter says the only major fault with the book, looking back on it, was that it was “too conservative.”
Ultimately, people don’t care for fiddling with computers — they care about the content and information that computers bring to them, Gelernter also said. “Easily half the world doesn’t like playing with machines. It’s not something they enjoy doing. It’s not something they take to.” He added these perspectives:
“They don’t care about the gadgetry and they don’t care about the network. They care about the stuff. When I buy a TV, I care about the movies that I’m watching, not about the details of the scanning and the interleaves. But the computer industry itself, and partly as a reflection of the absolutely astonishing technological achievements of the IC- industry, has kept the focus on itself. And this is still a really controversial issue in computers. What are we looking for and should we have computers in mind, or should we have software in mind, or should we have actual users in mind? I think the average programmer still doesn’t understand that he is not a typical user. The average programmer still thinks that insofar as people don’t find his software easy to use, it’s because they are childish, or ignorant, or just obtuse.”
Thanks to JP Rangaswami (”Confused of Calcutta”) for surfacing this interview.
by Rob Paterson
April 26, 2009 at 3:10 pm · Filed under
Twitter, Wikipedia, Wisdom of Crowds
Wikipedia has a brilliant site here
For Twitter use #swineflu
Of course it goes without saying that the web community will offer the fastest and the most relevant coverage. Why we should care?
by Jim McGee
April 26, 2009 at 6:15 am · Filed under
KM
Suppose you buy the notion that management is fundamentally an oral culture and analytics a literate one (see Part 1). How does that influence how you manage analytics? How can you take full advantage of technology?
In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop. Literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.
Management understands something that those rooted in literate thinking may not. Knowing the right answer analytically has little or nothing to do with whether you can get the organization to accept that answer. What literate thinkers dismiss as "politics" is the essential work of translating and packaging an idea for acceptance and consumption in an oral culture.
The critical step in translating from a literate answer to an oral plan of action is finding a story to hang the answer on. The analysis only engages the mind; moving analysis to action must engage the whole person. Revealing this truth to the analytical minded can be discomforting. It’s equivalent to explaining to an accountant that the key to a Capital Expenditure proposal is theater, not economics. You might want to check out Steve Denning’s book, "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations," for some good insights into how to craft effective stories inside organizations.
In addition to helping the analytically biased see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular. You need to bring them to an understanding of why repetition and "staying on message" is key to shifting an oral culture’s course, not an evil invention of marketing.
Assume you teach the literate types in your analytic organization how to repackage their analyses for consumption. They’ve now learned how to pitch their ideas in ways that will stick in the organization. What might you learn from their literate approach to thought? Is there an opportunity if you can get more of your organization and more of your management operating with literate modes of thinking?
Being able to write things down done permits you to develop an argument that is more complex and sophisticated. On the plus side, this makes rocket science possible. On the negative side, you get lawyers.
On the other hand, if you are operating in an environment whose complexity demands a corresponding complexity in your organizational responses, then encouraging more literate thinking by more members of the organization is a good strategy.
What would such an organization look like compared to today’s dominant oral design? The mere presence of e-mail and an intranet is insufficient. E-mail tends to mirror oral modes of thought, particularly among more senior executives. Intranets tend to be over-controlled and, to the extent they contain examples of literate thinking, are rooted in an organizational culture that strives to confine the literate mind to the role of well-pigeonholed expert. The presence of particular tools, then, isn’t likely to be a good predictor, although their absence might be.
What of possible case examples? A few knowledge management success stories hold hints. Buckman Labs used discussion groups successfully to get greater leverage out of its staff’s knowledge and expertise. Whether this success built on literate modes of thought or simply on better distribution of oral stories is less clear. The successes of some widely distributed software development teams are worth looking at from this perspective.
Although it’s a bit too early to tell, the take up of blogs and wikis inside organizations may be a harbinger of management based on literate thinking skills. They offer an interesting bridge between the oral and the literate by providing a way to capture conversation in a way that makes it visible and, hence, analyzable. As a class of tools, they begin to move institutional memory out of the purely oral and into the realm of literate.
by Jim McGee
April 23, 2009 at 11:31 am · Filed under
KM
Have you ever wondered what’s behind the conflict between geeks and suits? Sure, they think differently, but what, exactly, does that mean? A Jesuit priest who passed away in 2003 at the age of 90 may hold one interesting clue.
Walter Ong published a slim volume in 1982 titled "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word" that explored what the differences between oral and literate cultures mean about how we think.
Remember Homer, the blind epic poet credited with "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"? If we remember anything, it’s something along the lines of someone who managed to memorize and then flawlessly recite book-length poems for his supper.
The real story, which Ong details, is more interesting and more relevant to our organizational world than you might suspect. Homer sits at the boundary between oral culture and the first literate cultures.
In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Ong’s work shows that oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop: literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.
While this may sound interesting for a college bull session, it’s particularly relevant to organizations. For all their dependence on the industrial revolution, organizations are human institutions first. Management is fundamentally an oral culture and is most comfortable with thought organized that way. Historically, leadership in organizations went to those most facile with the spoken word.
At the opposite extreme, information technology is a quintessentially literate activity with a literate mode of thought. In fact, IT cannot exist without the objective, rational, analytical thinking that literate culture enables.
How does the nature of this divide complicate conversations between IT and management? Can understanding the differing natures of oral and literate thought help us bridge that divide?
Technology professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of "dumbing it down for the suits." But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought. The easy part of that is about oratorical and rhetorical technique. The more important challenge is to deal with the deeper elements of oral culture; of being situational, engaged, and conservative. The right abstract answer can’t be understood until it is placed carefully within its context.
What management recognizes in its fundamentally oral mind is that organizations and their inhabitants spend most of their time in oral modes of thought. The oral mind is focused on tradition and stability because of how long it takes to embed a new idea. The techniques of change management that seem so obtuse to the literate, engineering mind are not irrational; they are oral. They are the necessary steps to embed new ideas and practices in oral minds.
Repeating a calculation or an analysis is nonsense in a literate culture. Management objections to an analytical proposal rarely turn on objections to the analysis. Walking through the analysis again at a deeper level of detail will not help. What needs to be done is to craft the oral culture story that will carry the analytical tale. It’s not about dumbing down an argument, it’s about repackaging it to match the fundamental thought processes of the target audience.
That might mean finding the telling anecdote or designating an appropriate hero or champion. Suppose, for example, that your analysis concludes it’s time to move toward document management to manage the files littering a shared drive somewhere or buried as attachments to three-year old e-mails. Analytical statistics on improved productivity won’t do it. A scenario of the "day in the life" of a field sales rep would be better. Best would be a story of the sales manager who can’t find the marked up copy of the last version of the contract.
These human stories are much more than the tricks of the trade of consultants and sales reps. They are recognition that what gets dressed up as the techniques of change management are really a bridge to the oral thinking needed to provoke action.
Seen in this light, what is typically labeled resistance to change is better understood as the necessary time and repetition to embed ideas in an oral environment.
by Bill Ives
April 20, 2009 at 2:46 pm · Filed under
FASTforward'09
I have written a bit on the uses of Twitter, including marketing. Here is a marketing example that uses Twitter and a variety of other social media to promote, Moogis, an Allman Brothers inspired music site where you can see concerts among other things. I watch too many YouTube videos so this drew my interest. The Moogis web site and the marketing campaign were both implemented by Wyndstorm. I covered Wyndstrom as a software platform on the AppGap, (see Wyndstorm Builds Web Communities In A Variety of Markets) but I want to go into more detail on the social media marketing aspects here.
I spoke with Marian Sabety, the President and CEO at Wyndstorm. Marian said that since social media is still new, many of their clients need help with social media marketing, as well as building social media web sites. So Wyndstorm now provides business strategy and marketing services to go along with their web site construction. With the Moogis project, they first helped Moogis define their business objectives and target market. The primary goal of the marketing campaign is to expand the number of paid subscribers to the site.
It was likely that many of the Allman Brothers fan base are not avid social media users. So they reached out through social media to the people who know have a strong reach to this audience such as Twitter followers of Rolling Stone magazine, bloggers and PR people in the music space, message boards in social networks that fit the demographics of an Allman Brothers fan, and the web communities of similar bands. They began Twitter conversations (through twitter/moogis) with 50 people in this space that also included NFL radio stations, TV syndicates and IPTV sites, as well as retail ticket sites. After this Twitter campaign and the other social media efforts, 58% incoming traffic to the Moogis site came from sites where they did not have ads and this is not typical.
They also set up profiles on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and Flickr, as well as 40 other content channel and social bookmarking sites. See for example (http://myspace.moogis.com and http://facebook.moogis.com). The Twitter and YouTube pages have a significantly lower bounce rate than industry averages (see below for more on YouTube). The bounce rate for the Moogis site itself, at 30% is also below the industry average of 45-55%. The MySpace visitors stay on the site almost 1 minute more than the Moogis site average which at 5 minutes, 31 seconds is already much longer than the industry average of 1:30-2:25. I think the power of videos and engaging content for their niche audience are drivers here. Also, over 25% of visitors return to the site between 6 and 19 times. The industry average is roughly 1/10th of this.
Wyndstorm also worked with the Allman Brothers band members in releasing some of their music videos for free on YouTube and similar venues, as part of their social video campaign. So now you can find a stable collection of Allman Brothers videos on YouTube. This is much appreciated. There are many interviews and great live videos including Highway 61 Revisited” Allman Brothers Band w/ Johnny Winter. Just search for Moogis within YouTube and you will find these videos along with Moogis promotions (see Allman Brothers Anthology on YouTube).
Once the Allman Brothers’ Beacon Concert series was underway in March, Wyndstorm drove interest to the site in these same venues with fresh material from the concerts. The online Marketing foundation that was built in advance enabled the excitement and buzz from the live concert to drive traffic spikes to the site, with conversion rates that ended up exceeding the business plan by over 25%. This demonstrated the power of laying a strong social media marketing foundation from which to grow.
The Moogis YouTube’s bounce rate is 9% which 40% lower than industry average bounce rates for YouTube. The general YouTube rate is already much lower than averages for other sites. I guess once you see a video you want to see more. I find to hard to just watch one YouTube video and this helps explain the general YouTube low bounce rate, but they have taken it a step farther with the Moogis content.
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