Keen on the Royal Wedding – The Royal Channel on Youtube
by Rob Paterson
If this is not the TV revolution – I don’t know. The Royal family are their own TV Station – Here is the link to the Royal Channel.
Archive for April, 2011
Healthcare – the new frontier for Social Media
by Rob Paterson
Once upon a time there were department stores that sold everything. They hardly exist anymore. Why? because we get a better deal from specialty stores. Once upon a time there were record albums where many songs were in one package. We don’t buy albums anymore. If we buy any music we buy songs.
We used to rely on advertising. Increasingly we use our trusted personal networks to help us navigate the market.
It used to take millions to make complex things but more and more we are seeing new tools that can do big things for very little cost.
The world of Macy’s and Mad Men is over. But not in health care
Today we have a department store model for healthcare. Today we use all the old models of business in healthcare.
So what might a truly modern view of health care look like?
This is where Clayton Christensen’s new vision for Healthcare makes so much sense to me.
Here in one page is the guts of CC’s case. All of these models are combined today in the healthcare model and are rooted in the most expensive part of the system – the doctor’s office and the hospital. It’s all Macy’s in the 1950’s. It’s big and aggregated into one high overhead system that has massive organizational friction and so low quality.
Clayton Christensen is advocating that we break this up as happened to the department stores. Then each part of the mix woudl get the best deal!
Imagine each part of this mix being pulled out as CC suggests:
- Fee for Service – Here you pay a lot to get the best shot at finding out what the problem is when what is wrong is not clear. ”House” on steroids. The McKinsey model.
- Fee for Outcome - Specialized units that focus on doing one proceedure well – we see this already with hernia operations – you are much better going to a specialist clinic – lower overhead – better operational process – better outcomes.
- Membership as the Model – A social network aggregated around similar issues. Such as Type 2 Diabetes etc. Here prevention and living with a diease or the life changes needed to cure us will take place. None of these tasks can be done by a doctor as we currently organize health. Nor should they. They can best be done by us the pubic. For here the issue is how we live and of course getting off our addictions.
How to do this?
CC offers the playbook here too. It is very unlikley that the system will reform itself to do this. Systems don’t do that. The system will have to be disrupted from below.
Diagnosis – Most GP’s refer complex cases of all kinds up the line as it is. They are in reality traffic directors. They can treat only very minor problems. Most of the time they simply write a prescription. They are so time pressed that they cannot help with prevention. They are not paid for that anyway. The real issue for most of their patients is that they have a chronic disease such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes. All of these diseases are based on lifestyle. Not the Dr’s forte. Drugs are the proxy for health.
CC is suggesting that we see high end diagnosis as a field in itself. This does not have to be based in one hospital.
Just as a hospital or a Dr’s office has low skills and high overheads – Specialty Clinics have high skills and low overheads.
In Canada we have a start here in specialty clinics such as the Shouldice Clinic – If you have a hernia you would be silly to go anywhere else. This is what CC means as fee for outcome and this type of clinic can generate such process expertise as to all but guarantee a good result. The Shouldice is the specialty retailer that replaced the department store.
Changing all this above is hard work as it involves changes to the system as it is.
What interests me the most is the largest group at the bottom where groups of people with say Type 2 Diabetes can get together an help each other.
The new frontier for health that can grow up in spite of the system is “Community Health”. Where you and I take charge of our health and use simple and powerful tools and each other to stay healthy, get healthy and help each other at rock bottoms costs.
- In using diagnostic and measurement tools – as with all other tools more and more diagnotic tools that used to ve expensive and hard to use are available at prices and levels of complexity that you and I can use.
- In learning more about their condition – as with the publication of the bible in the 16th century, information that was restrricted ony to Dr’s is widely available to all of us now. Many know more about their condition that theur GP who has to be so broad.
- In learning about diet – we are learning that diet is at the heart of most of the diseases of medern life. Dr’s know nothing abut this. Changing our diet is often beyond our power alone. We need the help of our peers.
- In helping each other makes the hard lifestyle changes they need to take back control. No expert can help here – only peers.
Here the skilled part is in Facilitation. This is where 85% of the system will reside.
Here is I think where the power of social media combined with what we are learning about the true causes of most modern disease offers us so much.
We could all get more healthy at a fraction of the cost of the current system – cost to us as individuals and as societies.
This is the revolution that is ahead.
Are You Engaged in Your Job?
by Bill Ives
I saw an interesting blog post title on Twitter, Going through the motions: Only a 1/3 of workers are engaged in their jobs. Looking within the post, it reported that a recent study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. It notes that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson backs up this assumption. They found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.
The post went on to describe how US employees feel under appreciated which might contribute to their lack of engagement. The first Globoforce Workforce Mood Tracker report found that 55 percent felt they were not rewarded according to job performance, indicating a critical disconnect between recognition and performance. Even more concerning was the finding that 66 percent of those same respondents stated their company doesn’t have a recognition program that provides awards based on performance or behaviors tied to its core values. What is the matter with their senior management?
To no surprise the vast majority (85 percent) of U.S. workers surveyed like to have their efforts at work recognized. I wonder about the other 15% and would not like them on my team at work.
I have seen many dysfunctional HR policies in my tenure as an employee with various firms. This lack of awards based on performance falls into that category. However, even with such rewards you have to be careful how they are implemented. When performance rewards are handed out by forcing the ranking of employees, this likely only generates competition between employees and a lot of further dysfunctional behavior. I have seen this in action in more than one firm.
I think social media, is used right, offers an opportunity to increase employee engagement. I have seen a number of instances of this in action. It can certainly address recognition but also offer involvement in more decision processes through such a initiatives as internal crowd sourcing. Social media might be one way to counter this negative trend.
Now I have multiple jobs at the same time and I am lucky to feel engaged with each one. I wonder if there is a connection? This would an interesting study.
Measuring Influence and so Attention – New York Times
by Rob Paterson
description
Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web.
This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared.
Cascade was developed by R&D using open source tools including Processing and MongoDB.
videos
Better measurement is coming – I really liked this video that shows how the NYT is looking at how their content is shared.
It offers of course an “organic” perspective – reinforcing for me that new reality that is based on the model of nature rather than on the mechanics of a machine.
Already it is showing the importance of influence nodes – we see this is the spread of disease as well – the Typhoid Mary issue. Understanding this then enables us to understand where the systemic leverage comes from.
This I think takes us back to the math of Magic Numbers – a very few people count a lot. Their influence and how they get this is then central – that brings us back to the work of Klout.
We are getting there.
Is There an Ethical Quandary to Corporate Social Networking and Crowdsourcing?
by Joe McKendrick
Is corporate social media ethical? Is there a “Tom Sawyer syndrome” at work in which people are suckered into doing work thinking that it’s something to be enjoyed?
Those are the provocative questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the recent South by Southwest Interactive confab. His argument: a key value proposition of social networking is crowdsourcing, in which an actively engaged community contributes new ideas for innovation, or even does some piecework, for little or no compensation. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zittrain argues that these may be morally questionable ventures.
On these pages at FastForward, we have explored some of the opportunities social networking provides for businesses to improve customer interactions, including reliance on influencers to solve customer problems, as well as crowdsourcing. In the former case, a company essentially can be spared hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer service costs as proponents on the network take care of sticky problems with products or services.
As one observer recently summed up the economics of crowdsourcing:
“Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”
Still, Zittrain argued that many social networked arrangements amount to digital sweatshops and opportunities to exploit distressed labor. As he was paraphrased as saying at SWSX:
“Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money. In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay at all, instead offering recognition within the volunteer community or points in the guise of a game. Mr. Zittrain called it ‘a wonderful Tom Sawyer syndrome.’”
However, many crowdsourcing arrangements do have compensation at the end, since many are positioned as competitions. Corporations such as GE and federal agencies including NASA position their crowdsourcing efforts as such, with a cash prize at the end as incentive for the selected innovation. As such, these activities may be as morally questionable as an essay contest.
A counterpoint raised at SWSX was that unlike digital sweatshops, efforts by participants are entirely voluntary, and end-users can log off at any time. In many cases, the work provides benefit to society.
Along these lines, consider the work of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), which has marshalled more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland. The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. The project is catching all the text that optical character recognition technology misses, and therefore requires manual patching. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.
Also, while the idea of crowdsourcing labor sounds scary, it also is a huge opportunity for many workers as well. Drake Bennett, writing in the Boston Globe, observed that crowdsouring has opened up greater opportunities for workers and companies across parts of the globe. For example, txteagle, which distributes work to mobile cell-phone users across the globe to handle image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle is now one of Kenya’s largest employers, employing a 10,000-strong workforce is a network of freelancers.
