Everything Is Miscellaneous - book

Well, I'm not sure it had what I was looking for (secret of eternal youth, tip for the 3.30 at Ascot, designs for a real autoplane) but it sure was enjoyable getting what it did have.

In a sentence; modern technology means it's ok for everything to be messy - you can tag it and get it back later somehow.

(Thank goodness, because I really am terribly disorganised.)

Part of the book that struck me in particular was the atoms vs bits debate. Perhaps that's because it's relevant to me right now. It's not news that bits are weightless, have no dimensions and are infinite whereas atoms are constrained by the physical world - they need to be moved, stored, used, stored somewhere else and so on. Certainly it's been explored in a lot of the other Web 2.0 literature. Yet, really this is the fundamental difference between the pre-digital and post-digital age; atoms are atoms, but everything else can benefit from the weightless, infinite, immediate properties of digital. Weinberger states it elegantly, along with the ramifications for how we organise and use information in the future.

Where he doesn't choose to go is to look at those processes in the digital world which simply mirror physical processes. The assumptions behind them are invalid - the organisational walls that are breached will one day come down altogether and with them, a lot of our clunky existing systems and processes.

The 'include then postpone' concept is equally interesting - and equally extensible. It struck me almost as a digital motto and certainly my mind went to Google, Twitter, Facebook et al in that they first included everyone and everything they could, postponing monetisation and data use until much later. Weinberger chooses (rightly) to focus on data; it's natural to want to order things, but we must include messy data first and postpone the introduction of order until later.

There are clear themes in common with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do and other recent books; give control back to the people, promote creation by the masses, provide platforms for people to organise themselves elegantly.

Perhaps the only area that needs exploring more is the detail of the interface between physical and digital. The analogue to digital path is well understood I'd argue; capture through, say, a camera or microphone, add metadata, upload, share. However, the path back from digital to physical perhaps needs the most work; Weinberger references RFIDs and I started to think in terms of QRs, augmented reality and so on, but without too much success.

So I thought it was a good read. It's already part of the modern tech lexicon and rightly so. Another one of those books you'd like to distill and install directly into the memory banks of all your colleagues. It would be messy, but in a good way.

Insights into corporate innovation

Last week I was over in Leeds at a Corporate IT Forum day dedicated to Innovation. The presentations were from those who were shortlisted for awards last year at the Real IT Awards - we were lucky enough to win.

It's great when you turn up at these events to find a bunch of like minded individuals and if willingness to innovate was a realistic economic indicator, the national debt would be history by this time next year (well, ok, the year after).

After presentations from ourselves (SABIC Petrochemicals), Virgin Atlantic and Co-operative Financial Services, we had a number of open discussion sessions. Some common themes came out.

1. Creating time to develop an innovation is more important than funding

2. Invest small, fail fast

3. Innovations have to prove themselves quickly in delivery

Now, to my mind that reads like a list a start-up would make, rather than your average corporate. Perhaps the difference is relative scale.

For example, the corporate guys have a multi-billion pound turnover of which a relatively insignificant amount is dedicated to innovation. Start-ups have a relatively tiny turnover but most of it is dedicated to trying new things.

Corporate innovation teams are very small and very light. They typically use agile approaches to achieve something quickly and are very good at taking square pegs (both systems and people) and making them work in round holes. Start-up teams have less room for manouevre both in terms of systems and people; every blind alley or failed development is so much more expensive to them.

But it's clear that the corporate guys are learning lots from the typical agile startup. They're creating the time and space and trying to fill it with the right people. The number of attendees that referred to 'disrupting' tech was very notable.

Here were the key points from my presentation (prz available if req'd):

1. Focus on what you do; no point innovating in widget design if you're not a widget company
2. Approach innovation consistently
3. Key point: Take the straightest line to business value
1. Processes
1. How do you initiate change?
2. What happens to it then?
3. Ensure strategic alignment - or otherwise validate - and good oversight
4. Stretch evaluation into the business
5. Try lots fast
2. Culture is the result of a feedback loop
1. Let's not reorganise!
2. Don't try to mandate creativity
3. Give your people space and time and guide them in filling it
4. Improve capability and focus it on your business
3. Enable the business to add value - to itself
1. Provide open platforms, not closed tools
2. Encourage users in extending platforms inexpensively to get continual return for minimal investment
3. Do what you do best...and link to the rest
4. Focused trojan mice
5. Use platforms that encourage co-development and formation of communities

I think most people could take these key messages and build something around them for their organisation.

Cheers
Tim

Engage or die; why Amazon needs Facebook

Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com makes some good points (and stretches others) as to the future of cloud computing here, where he refers to Facebook replacing Amazon. Surely most Facebook users look at the tool as a simply as a free social networking site, many times removed from the clear online retail experience at Amazon. Rather than second guessing Marc's thoughts, it seems obvious to me why Amazon should be concerned.

Amazon's added value is it's user reviews section; if there are two identical products - identical picture, price, description - but with differing reviews, you'd be mad or deliberately contrarian to buy the unfavoured product. In fact, a terribly unscientific survey of one revealed that customers would rather pay more for the guarantee of a good product as opposed to facing the hassle of returning a bad product (or even worse, nor returning it).

The only problem with the Amazon reviews section is that a customer is taking a risk by trusting the reviews section at all; it could be skewed deliberately by paid product evangelists, by a particularly bad run off the production line, or by reviewers that aren't the true target market. Because the internet gives a veneer of anonymity (albeit ever thinning) you might never know the product you're about to buy is a total lemon.

Facebook is powerful precisely because we trust those who we befriend, to a degree that depends on our own attitude to trust; we choose who we want in our private community, while our privacy and profile settings tell the rest of the world how much we want to be part of each of their private communities. Therefore a recommendation from a friend (say, from @mcflinbob on a movie, or @euan on a book) counts much more than a faceless Amazon reviewer.

Amazon have tried to add virtual faces to reviewers through their 'real names' qualification; if it's a real name then they're more trustworthy right? Well, not quite; it's still just a name on a page.

Facebook is yet to engage it's user base in retail activity on a mass scale but the sheer numbers involved have the potential to turn webonomics on its head. Google has already proved the power of the virtuous circle with something as simple as search hits, relevancy and advertising; replace with sales, trusted reviewers and profiling and you're into telephone numbers. Should that user base then be mobilised by something - anything, good or bad - and it's a potential stampede toward or away from any product at any time.

So Facebook's community focus makes it powerful and Amazon's next move is a test of it's ability to remain agile in a socially networking world. The platform approach - the approach it should take in my opinion - is to build on it's existing credibility and invite integration with Facebook, Bebo, Digg, Twitter and so on; embed itself into Web 2.0.

After all, in a world dominated by social media, viability and engagement are synonymous.