The end of a small hiatus

I took two weeks off some time ago to go home... it was wonderful for the body, mind and soul... but it interrupted all rhythms.... twice.... once on the way out... and then when I had just started to settle in.... trying to regain my original rhythms on return..... 'jet lag' does not quite describe what happens.... for it is more than just the body that is out of kilter..... so it is no surprise then that my blogging juices ran dry... or perhaps it was just procrastination.... maybe writer's blog..... but the mind was buzzing.... in these times how else could it be?... and then I had left a topic that I was writing on incomplete..... so this is an attempt to get back into that rhythm....  

Interesting thing happened the other day and it had to do with blogging.... was researching the topic of blogging..... in the course I kept coming across references to a book ....The Corporate Blogging Book  by Debbie Weil .  I almost considered buying it.... contrary to my normal tendencies....I defer acting for some reason..... that evening I saunter into my favorite used books store.... my last destination is the clearance section... it is amazing how some of the best books end up there..... and what do I find.... 'The Book!"..... it is as if the book was sending me messages not to buy online....Sometimes when you are looking for things.... it is like opening up your mind.... and you start seeing things or noticing them..... has that happened to you... somewhat like when your mind is hooked on buying that PT cruiser and you start seeing it everywhere....  

well... if nothing else it gave me a story that I thought would be interesting to tell... .and got me back to blogging....  

oh yes.... while I am on the research I found something else.... a recent post on the topic of blogging....Irving Wladawsky-Berger on blogging ...

The Architecture of online social systems – Populating the world

My last post related to the Architecture of Online Social Systems (OSS), was about Identity.

OK then! So we have taken the first step in the creation of an OSS. But one person does not make a world, so presumably there are others who will create an identity for themselves as well, and things will start to get interesting when there is at least a third person. Just like the three-body problem in Physics, now we might perhaps start to see some of the messiness that makes social worlds interesting.  

The point of today's post though is somewhat different. What would a world be without objects. In the real world we know what objects mean, and we know how to name them. "Man gave names to all the animals...." said Bob Dylan. Somewhat like that, we name things, and these names have meanings, which tell us something more about them. In the world of OSS though, objects take on a very specific meaning. Not only might they be representations of objects from the real world, but there are now a whole lot of Information and Knowledge objects, things and people who are associated with information or knowledge, and that includes other people. Now, we have dealt with the issue of identifying people.  

Just as in the case of people, therefore, objects, pieces of content, documents, blogs, comments on blogs, a web-site perhaps will need a way to be identified. For us to transact with these objects, we will need to know more about them, we will need a description of what they are, one provided by the creator, and others that get appended over time by people who use these objects. Imagine stones gathering moss over time, in the rivers of information and knowledge, in a nice way.  

Objects not only need an identity, but now that we have brought them in this world, we now need to keep track of them throughout their life cycle. We need to therefore associate with them, their time of creation, who their creator is, and track them till they are no longer active participants in the online world.  

All this information about the object, of course is important for the object to be available to others in this OSS world. There is one more aspect which we need to consider. We need to be able to locate the object somehow, be able to find it and know what class of objects it belongs to, if at all. In the OSS world, links and associations matter a lot. Objects are associated with their creators, and then they are linked to other objects and people in the OSS through various kinds of relationships. Creating a networked world of objects, which are linked in multiple different ways, is what makes the OSS worlds so promising.

 
For example, a blog object, has a creator, it has readers, it has people who comment on it, it is related to other similar blogs, people give it tags that make sense to them and so on. All these add-ons of descriptions and associations make the objects more valuable and interesting over time. Documents, photographs, web-sites, people, music, on-line discussions, blog posts, comments, communities - these are the objects that populate the OSS world. Naming them, describing them, linking them to each other, this is the second major architectural aspect of Online Social Systems.

The Architecture of online social systems - Identity

As an architect, I am constantly on the look out for general principles and frameworks, which can become guides for my work. I am often restless till I have discovered such underlying themes which I can work with. The process of refining these frameworks is rather long, since I have to test them several times before I am convinced of their general applicability and merit.  

Ever since I worked on a large project with an education agency last year, to build an integrated knowledge and collaboration system, I have been thinking about the architecture of online social systems. Elsewhere on my blogs, I have written about how I see online social systems as concerned with 'moving sociality online". It is that idea that has guided me in the process of discovering and developing this framework.  

I will outline this framework and develop it further in separate posts over the next several weeks. It would be wonderful to think of this as a living document, so that I could refine these ideas over time with our conversation, so that we could make this robust.
In this post I will discuss the first and perhaps most crucial element - 'Identity'.  

Identity:
In order to operate in this online social world, one of the most important elements is the need for a participant/citizen to have an identity. At its most basic level it involves, defining a persona for this virtual world - a name, contact information and so on.  

In the real world people get to know us in several ways. We perform multiple roles in our professional and private lives. Within these domains, there are several facets to our personalities. People who are involved with us in any of these professional and personal relationships, are exposed to these facets, through the various encounters that they have. We also provide them with several other clues to who we are - some explicit and others perhaps not so. There are aspects of our character which are revealed over time, and perhaps they become parts of stories people tell of us and of the things we do. While the depth to which people get to know us varies, however, there is a certain amount of knowledge they must have for them to engage with us, depending on the nature of the interaction.  

We need to think about creating such personas in the online world as well. These personas need to provide enough information so that the people we wish to transact with and relate to can obtain a rich and nuanced picture of who we are and whether they can expect a meaningful interaction. If they have come to us through indirect paths, they might want to know about our credibility and they need to be able to obtain such information too. In fact we need to go beyond what we do in the real world, in terms of providing information about ourselves, since in the online world, what people can see about us is only a partial representation. After all, my picture would not tell you about my predilection for drawing on whiteboards.

 
Now, this online identity only needs to be adequate to serve your purpose in a given environment. In a games environment or in Second Life, this persona might have no relation to your real life self at all, or rather little. However, in the case of a professional environment, building credibility and trust are contingent on providing accurate and pertinent information. Till people develop trust in you, they might look for other indicators.  

My real life persona is complex and multi-faceted, (which is indeed true for all of us). What you know of me depends on the context in which we have met and related. I expect the same to be the case in the online world. More than what we say about ourselves, what we do, in the forms of our various interactions in this virtual environment and what others have to say about us, all contribute to the believability and richness of one's incarnation in this other world - one's avatar!
We can thus identify the elements we need to provide for in the construction of online identities - from basic personal information, usually obtained from formal organizational systems, to richer and nuanced descriptions we ourselves provide , to indirectly derived profiles enriched with information mined from various sources which show our relationships to the rest of the online and real world, our networks, our credibility and our value to the community.

 
In my next post, I will write about the need for dealing with people and objects in the virtual world - content of various kinds, artifacts, and even people-based objects, and what we need to do to create a place and identity for them in this online world.

On Discovering vs... Imposing Order on Social Groups

There is a post on a discussion list I am a member of today. To paraphrase it - there is a client, a small bank which seems to have grown so far with an entrepreneurial decentralized structure, but is perhaps now facing issues with further growth and cost efficiencies. The fundamental question seems to be - how do we now put some structure into this organization and redesign it to reduce costs and obtain greater efficiencies.

I think this is a very fascinating challenge. I know how we might traditionally approach such a challenge, an approach which is valid in its own right. But there is a maverick in me, which would like to understand how a contrarian might approach this challenge.

Entrepreneurial cultures, have deliberately loose structures, since there is much ambiguity that an organization has to deal with in its initial stages. There are too many different problems to solve in its own local context, and the best approach is often something that emerges out of trial and error. People take on rather than being assigned responsibilities. There are stories of what worked and what did not that guide them. These become a part of the organizational culture, its definition of success and failure, its heroes, its definitions of traps and things to watch out for.

If things go well, the organization grows, and comes to a point, when some of this 'seat-of-the-pants' logic does not seem to work. The organization develops an appetite for growth and  loses its appetite for experimentation, and risk. It desires predictability. The new people joining the group, cannot make sense of how the organization deals with its challenges. They are difficult to absorb into its ways. The time it takes for organic growth, seems too long.

"...the lesson from biological evolution is quite clear and direct. The time required for the evolution of a complex form from simple elements depends critically on the numbers and distribution of potential intermediate stable forms". (Herbert Simon - the Science of the artificial - Pg 190)

Perhaps the organization has not put in place the intermediate stable forms that it needs for the next stage of growth to happen quickly enough.

One of the reasons for the organization's current dissatisfaction with its attempt to grow, might just be failed attempts at imposing order. There perhaps are now two camps of people - those who yearn for the good old days, even if it meant burning the midnight oil, and those who could care less for the old stories. Hopefully, it is in an early stage of its development, where the imbalance between the two camps is not profound. It could also be, that the new power structure belongs to the new school, in which case, the organization has to rapidly learn some new stories from the outside world.

The question then is - to what extent is it necessary to impose order and in what form? Will a sudden imposition of order create more pathologies? Will it lose its capacity for innovation in exchange for what it gains in efficiency? Is it possible that there is order today, but just not apparent. It is this second possibility that I would like to explore.

Order exists even in the entrepreneurial organization, it is just in a different form, latent and not explicit. Social Network analysis can discover this order. I think, if one were to analyze their stories, we would discover what they already know - the archetypes of success, who their heroes are and why, what they believe are the attributes of excellence, what is the nature of their market and so on. They perhaps also know why someone is more of a hero than another. I think the trick to helping this organization lies in discovering these structures first.

The plan for growth then needs to develop group and individual identities, and formal roles around these intermediate building blocks. It needs to reveal their own practices - both the good and the bad ones, and keep the knowledge environment intact. If it needs to share services, they need to be non-critical to the functioning of these groups, so that they can become utilities.

I know, we perhaps will not be able to do something like this, but it is so tempting to think, that one might come across and opportunity to try something different. The maverick in me drools at that thought.

The six blind men of Hindostan - The original folksonomists

A couple of days ago there was a blog post, which expressed dissatisfaction with the tag of "Nuremberg" associated with photographs on flickr, which I had commented on. For some other reason, I was also thinking of elephants. And then the two came together to trigger this post.

Everyone I presume knows the story of the six blind men of Hindostan, and how they tried to describe an elephant. Everyone in the story 'tagged' the elephant according to their own partial knowledge. The tags they used included, tree, rope, pillar, wall, and so on. I am not sure what the tags were, but you get the point.

On a facetious note, it occurred to me, that these six blind men, could not have foreseen (pun intended), that their invention would be revolutionary at some future point of time. Frustrated as they must have been with the effort of mentally trying to assemble these 'tags' into a coherent whole that made sense, I doubt if they gave much thought to their contribution to posterity.

On a more serious note, imagine someone who saw those tags in a tag-cloud, (what kind of tag-clouds would they have had those days!) all associated with this nameless object, which was clearly known to be an animal. Do you think, they would have been able to put those tags together and conjured the synthesized image of an elephant? Imagine scouring through that cloud, thinking that buried somewhere under that 'wordle' mess, was an elephant.

I have my own thoughts on the purpose and utility of folksonomies. Like in most other cases, I believe in understanding the boundaries of their utility, rather than give in to an 'irrational exuberance'.

Working on a large project with an Education agency some time ago, I was part of a vigorous debate on the merits of taxonomies vs.. folksonomies. The client interestingly wanted fairly sophisticated versions of both. Rather coincidentally, I later found another educational institution in Australia, which too had used similar mixed concepts. I was convinced then, that the client's arguments had merit.

In fact, I am now of the opinion, that particularly in organizational contexts, where structure is an essential aspect of its way of being, information architectures must provide for a mix of taxonomies and folksonomies. The folksonomies can put the flesh on the skeletal structure of the taxonomy, but the two must coexist, or the elephant will never come together. Maybe in that spirit, we need a new name for the combination of taxonomies and folksonomies - 'jumbonomies'.

Wonder what your experience has been in reconstructing elephants, or sheep for that matter.

On Channeling the Surplus!

Ever since the days of the Internet boom, when the 'e' prefix became ubiquitous, people have been talking about latent surpluses and the coming liquidity which would release new value. A lot of that promise has indeed come true, as value chains within and between organizations, became transparent and inter-connected. The world continued to become 'flat' in the intervening years, and just when it seemed like we had reached a point where practicing this elimination of waste and release of value was a given, something that everybody understood as good practice, we discovered a new latent surplus - in people.

Clay Shirky, called this surplus a "Cognitive Surplus" in one of this speeches. I am not sure if it is only 'cognitive', since the phenomenon we are seeing develop at such an accelerated pace, seems to release a lot of latent potential and energies other than just cognitive. I do understand his intent though, to capture an idea which expresses the ability of people to participate actively, using their cognitive powers and forms a critical part of the emergence of new social and economic possibilities.

There are several examples in the literature of how this phenomenon has manifested. We have examples such as the Wikipedia, collective software development and Linux, The Gutenberg Project, and forms of social involvement and participation which have been enabled by the new social technologies. Clearly, new avenues and opportunities for participation and creating value are opening up every day. A tremendous amount of a formerly latent surplus is being channeled to creative and productive expression, when open, free-form interaction is enabled outside the enterprise.

So, when we deploy these technologies within the enterprise, how do we deal with the release of latent surpluses. After all, we are supposed to have no latent surpluses inside organizations - it would imply an ineffective use of resources and a need for optimization and reallocation.

Social technologies at a very basic level contribute to improved productivity. Individuals can find resources easily, people can work with each other more effectively, and reach out to other people in an ad-hoc manner when necessary and it all leads to a better utilization of our human resources.

But, does the concept of releasing latent surpluses apply within an organization? And, if there is such a surplus, and we release it, how do we consciously and deliberately, harness this new energy, in a form that parallels what we see outside the organization. Or, are there just different forms for ad-hoc collaboration and peer-production within the enterprise than there are outside?

Here is what I believe. The fact that there is a latent surplus within all organizations is indeed true. Improvements in productivity, create an opportunity for tapping this new surplus. Innovation is one of the biggest opportunities, as we create these new and expanded spaces. However, this surplus begs to be free of the older forms of creating value within narrowly defined spaces. It's promise lies in the ability of people to make ad-hoc connections outside conventional boundaries.

So, as we help with improving productivity and creating collaborative environments, we might need to also guide people to consider new forms of governance in order to fully reap the unused potential that will inevitably be released, forms of governance which are in alignment with the porous boundaries these technologies create, both within and outside their organizations.

If however, those expanding spaces are constrained or not opened enough, my guess is that the potential will go latent again.

Keystones in the Hive

(The mind is always making connections between disparate things... by the time I have arrived at a certain idea... I forget its trajectory... these days I have to take time off every now and then to find out which memes my mind has become receptive too... .the subconscious has suddenly gained prominence as I am inundated with ideas from all over my expanded world... Perhaps we all need to be our own analysts..)

That was just the prelude!

I have been thinking about how Social Technologies impact our social lives, a phenomenon I like to use the world "Sociality" for. I am not sure of the appropriateness of its usage, but it captures for me the essence of the multitudinous facets of the phenomenon we are all trying to make sense of.

Sometime back I wrote about 'Communities of Passion'. Then, as I was reading something about the use of Social Technologies for addressing customer complaints or improving customer service, it occurred to me, there might be a whole bunch more of "Communities of Pain" then there are those of 'Passion'. Well perhaps they are in the same number, that is not in itself important. However, it leads the systems thinker in me on the quest for an underlying theme, something more universal than the two archetypes of Passion and Pain.

They are both emotions, and therefore maybe we are talking about 'Communities of Emotion' in general. But yet again, that leaves out a lot of other things that the mind is individually and collectively involved in.

It then occurred to me, in these expanded social spaces, we are actually dealing with Ecosystems of minds, with all their thoughts and emotions and aspects I might not know. And, in those ecosystems are all these attractors, of Passion and Pain, and milder things like interests and so on. Passion and Pain are just the two types of plateaus on this landscape. There are thousands more which we could occupy.

That leads to the thought of 'keystones', and how influencing the ecosystem, is essentially about either being a keystone yourself, or influencing a well formed keystone in some way.

So there you are - "Keystones in the Collective Hive".

The systems thinker breathes a sigh of relief. For the moment, here then is one of the levers for the Social Universe that Archimedes would have looked for.

Socializing Business

I have been reading "Groundswell" (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff). It is not my favorite kind of book - it makes a couple of key points, and most of what they say seems kind of obvious, or rather, it would to most consultants. The book mostly focuses on showing businesses, how they could use Social Technologies and join the whole movement, rather than getting sidelined. Most of the examples have to do with interfacing with customers, reaching out to groups which already exist or creating some proactively.

There are some things in the book, that will probably come up in conversations related to this topic. One is what they call the Social Technographics Profile. The profiling framework classifies web users into the following categories:

• Creators
• Critics
• Collectors
• Joiners
• Spectators
• Inactives

I do not personally like the linearity implied in the ladder metaphor. This, however, is a useful way to think of any population of users, and makes us aware that in any particular user group, we are likely to see different behaviors. Further, the patterns of distribution among these categories is not necessarily universal. So, it helps to know what the population you are interested in looks like.

As one reads through the various examples in the book, about using the web as a marketing tool, listening for feedback, spotting possible issues early, engaging people in conversations, building relationships and so on, it occurs to me that one's starting point is always the business context.

If one were to take the marketing process and look at it from two perspectives - opportunities for re-engineering the process in the context of the new technologies, and socializing the process, we can start developing a framework for how to apply these technologies to business.

Elsewhere in the blogging world, there are conversations related to HR for example. I would look at HR in the same way - how is the process designed today, which element of the process is amenable to a social approach, and then figure out the technologies which are best suited to transform (incrementally or radically based on the enterprise's appetite).

Since we used the ‘'T'’ word, obviously there are changes in the way the process is governed, managed and so on, there would be changes in the organizational design that supports the process, and as I had mentioned in an earlier blog, it would require a move to an Open Social System. If the organization is not completely comfortable with an 'open' approach, it would have to appropriately scale back its expectations of what one could get from socialization of the process.

I think, this leads to the main point I wanted to make. There are certain aspects of a business which are more amenable to 'socialization' than others. Broad-based approaches, lead to situations, where the expectations are set high and could lead to disappointments with the technology. We know this anecdotally of course - we now need to develop our own framework or Point of View to identify an approach to socializing an enterprise.

Openly Social

Most of us who have been involved with implementing social technologies for clients have encountered concerns regarding the nature of conversations that may come about and what policies or guidelines they should use. Most concerns are universal in some sense. They mostly relate to improper conduct, using foul or offensive language, not being respectful, fomenting and causing trouble etc. Then there are concerns related to conversations that are critical of the organization itself, its policies, strategies, leadership etc.

One of the things that seems to be missing in all the conversations about Social Technologies is the notion of Open Social Systems (OSS). It is only when these technologies are applied to the service of these OSS, that they deliver the outcomes which we find so exciting. It is through the unfettered ability of individual agents communicating, sharing, cooperating and coordinating with one another that we obtain collective intelligence and wisdom, and spontaneous collective action for example. The 'open' aspect, which means without central control is critical to this phenomenon.

Organizations implementing Social Technologies, must as much buy into the reality of open participation as they do in the vision and promise of the technologies. For several, this is a radically different way of being, and to that extent, it goes beyond simple implementation and adoption of technology issues. Or rather, the adoption involves transformational change of some not insignificant order. The notion of Governance for example needs revisiting. The ideal ultimate state for OSS is perhaps self-governance. Getting there involves a journey involving guidance and interventions, the central organization gradually relinquishing control when self-governance becomes self-sustaining.

When on the other hand, there is no real commitment to such Open practices, we should be prepared for a less than optimal result.

Communities of Passion

All of last week, I was deeply engrossed in reading "Here comes everybody" by Clay Shirky. I have had the book for a while now, and it just had not made it to the top of the heap, with all the others that seemed to want my attention. Like in most cases, it was a series of minor coincidences, which led me to finally picking it up and I was happy I did. A friend of mine had heard Shirky speak on NPR recently, and mentioned it to me. A couple of days later someone posted a talk of his on a blog somewhere. I got to listen to that talk and was very impressed. One of the things that caught my attention then was the notion of "Cognitive Surplus"

In the context of the media industry, where he comes from, he talks about the impact that productivity improvements had on available time. The TV and entertainment industry consumed that surplus. His argument is that, people spent their spare time watching TV because there were no better alternatives to use that surplus.

One can argue with the details of that line of thinking, however, it brings to attention an interesting concept. All kinds of change, in our case, those driven by technology, create surpluses (assuming they improve some aspect of things). The questions we should then perhaps ponder about are, can we anticipate that surplus, and proactively put forth ways of redirecting that surplus in creative ways. In his talk Shirky argues, that the new web environment does precisely that, which is why we are experiencing the exponential growth in that space. Computed across the entire population of internet users, it is indeed a humongous resource.

I would strongly recommend the book for those interested in also developing a deeper understanding of the social web phenomenon. He provides several interesting frameworks for the creation of successful communities, for example. I like the one which talks about the three essential elements for success - Promise, Tools and Bargain.

Being technologists, it is easy for us to focus primarily on the 'tools' aspect of this equation. However, like Shirky correctly argues, all three are critical for success. That would be no different from including Business and People in addition to technology in a holistic transformation effort.

Thinking about "promise" led me to the realization that the correct formulation of the 'promise', releases a tremendous amount of spontaneous latent energy. It serves as the 'attractor' around which the community coalesces. The energy that sustains it, is something akin to passion. In that sense, the most successful communities, are not just communities of interest, but truly, "Communities of Passion". Innovation is often transformational, since it brings forth new paradigms, new ways of thinking and being, and passion is essential for making it over all the barriers to change.

So, there you go, to the language of communities, we have another term now, something to distinguish the energy that seeds, forms and sustains effective collective action.

A twittering fiasco - The FedEx story

http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=189#more-189

I found this interesting story about how a Senior Ad Exec's twitter comment became a major embarrassment. Lesson: Watch what you say in public forums. You never know where the message could end up.

Change is imminent - Gerd Leonhard

 
Here is a youtube video talk by Gerd Leonhard on the Future (somewhat also the Future of Media). The themes are kind of familiar. Clay Shirky who also comes from the media world talks about the same kinds of changes.

I will write more later, but for now here is the talk itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUrj7CJ0CUs

Discussions around Obama 2.0

The inauguration of President Obama has let loose a tremendous amount of energy not only throughout the country but also throughout the world. I was listening to a wonderful program on the BBC today where they were talking to people from all around the world, asking them their expectations of the new President and America in general. One of the interesting features of the program was its ability to set up conversations between people from different parts of the world, with differing perspectives on a particular issue.
Well, it is therefore not at all surprising that people in IBM have been having several conversations at different levels about the implications of the change in administration as well. I was not here at the time of the last change in administration, so I cannot comment on whether this kind of discussion happened then or not. What would be interesting to know is if this is happening now, and if this has something to do with our changing attitude towards on-line sociality, our comfort with social tools and generally the greater amount of participative activities we seem to be involved in. I had an opportunity to participate in and listen in on three different conversations.
One, in the Horizonwatch community, was an analysis of the economy (Dr. Martin Fleming), and an attempt to understand the implications of the various trends over the last couple of months and where that might take us. The prognosis seems not too cheery, at least for the next 18 months or so. However, there were some interesting opportunities for IBM arising out of the new directions that President Obama intends to take. From my perspective, given that the intention is to take the country and the world in a new direction, implies that these will not just be business-as-usual but quite transformational. There will therefore be correspondingly large shifts in all aspects of our economic and social life, as we set up the infrastructure for new industries and reorient our whole system to align with the new directions.
The second conversation was around the theme of Smarter Planet. Granted that we have been working on this for a while now. However, in the context of the change in administration it takes on a fresh meaning. A lot of what the campaign lays out has to do with the opportunities that come about when we confront some of the major challenges we are facing around the world, climate, energy, traffic congestion and so on. What was interesting in that conversation (presented by Craig Sowell)was the recognition, that these problems were in some sense complex, and intractable. We would have to deal with them in a systemic manner, using multi-faceted and holistic approaches. The question that naturally arises is, whether we are ready to address issues systemically, both as IBM and our customers. Even though these issues are problems that exist, the solutions to such problems could also take us in radically different directions and in that sense transformational.
Finally, we are in the midst of a conversation within the HCM practice. To be held over 10 weeks the 10X10 innovation challenge, started with exploring the very same issue of implications of the administration change.
Once again it is clear, that we are facing significant changes in our business environment from all sides, and some of these changes might even bring discontinuities. Whether or not we are able to solve address these challenges successfully and in an enduring manner, are going to depend a lot on how we make sense of what they are, and where the levers of change really lie. We can then direct the resources to these opportunities coherently.
We have to together imagine the future that is possible. These conversations are a wonderful beginning to that possibility.

On Transforming Systems – a Smarter World

Having explained X~N.g in an earlier post, you might want to know... what was it about the discussion about “Smarter Planet” and IBM, that got me over the ~ (here it means hump!)

So here is a quote from that text....
IBM's recent campaign goes well beyond mere image — and beyond green — to envision a "smarter" world in which problems as wide-ranging as health care costs, energy and resource shortages, government inefficiency, threatened waterways, climate change, and traffic congestion can be addressed by a blend of systems thinking, technological innovation, and computing power. It's an intriguing campaign aimed at helping redefine IBM from its roots as a computer maker to its more recent incarnation as a self-described "global services company."
Notice the "Systems thinking"... now that I thought was interesting.... but then there was more...

"Globalization has many benefits, but also some tradeoffs because many of the systems that the world operates in today  — and by systems, we mean systems in every sense of the word, from systems in companies, to manmade systems and natural systems — needed to become smarter, to handle and take advantage of the greater connectedness in the world.
and finally....
I asked Kennedy and Lechner how the ads work — that is, how they are supposed to create new business opportunities for IBM. Kennedy explained:
"There are two ways. First of all, in practical terms, over time we will talk about how 'smarter' is a way to think about transformation, and a way that industries can be transformed, and the way that companies in those industries can be transformed. So there are opportunities for banks to become smarter, retail firms to become smarter, healthcare to become smarter, government to become smarter. What you've seen initially are about larger issues because they resonate well. They are ones that the general population are familiar with.
"The reason why this is so timely, we believe, from a business standpoint, is we're in a time of great change in the world and we're in a time in our history where change is being discussed everywhere from the kitchen table all the way to the boardroom table. As a result, the leaders of many of our clients and leaders around the world are focused on transformation and see this as an opportunity to drive a great amount of transformation, and therefore it's a great opportunity to address ways that they can make their companies become more competitive as we come through this time of great change. That's the way we see the commercial opportunity."

See the repeated references to transformation.... now that did it for me... an acknowledgement that what technology actually does.... is transform... it is just one of the levers that is at our disposal... an important one for that matter... though if one were to look at the way we deal with it.... we almost think of it as the only one....
That is why I found the acknowledgement of the systems perspective interesting... .so we were also saying that these were 'Systems' that were dealing with... .and we know that changing them means dealing with them from multiple perspectives... and that they would be complex... and therefore our intervention may not necessarily have linear effect....
Wow... am I reading too much... or are we really Smart

An ode to a Guru

About two months before I joined IBM in August 2006, I had the opportunity to attend a Cognitive Edge Accreditation program, conducted by David Snowden of Cognitive Edge, in Vancouver. Patti Anklam, an ex-colleague from Digital and Compaq, who has subsequently written a book on SNA, put me in touch with David, which led to my knowing about the program he was offering, and so on...

http://www.cognitive-edge.com/

It was one of the most intellectually stimulating and life-changing events I had experienced in a long while. Those of you who know me, know also of my unabashed admiration and passion for Dave’s work. (He does not know this, which is good! – He might not agree with what I have come to understand.)

Now, some of you know David, from his having been an IBMer, Director of the now-defunct Institute of Knowledge Management. Those who do, also know, that while he can be described as interesting, stimulating, often provocative and a maverick, he can also be rather abstruse and difficult to understand. One would think though, that he would be kinder to people attending his class, who were hoping to be practitioners of his methods, laying out his ideas in ways that one could take back with some deeper understanding. That did not happen for me at least. I however made a resolution, that I would deconstruct him completely within a year - actually I took it on as a challenge. I was not going to let him get away with this.

In one of the most dedicated efforts of my intellectual life, that is exactly what I did (I in fact put a Master’s degree in Studies of the Future, which I was working on, on the back burner, which now I am mentally available to complete). I dug deeper into everything that Dave threw out there, sometimes barely in the passing – a mention here, a thrown-away statement there. It turned out to be a labyrinth of sorts – one thing would lead to another, and then yet another. If it had not been so deliciously fascinating, I might have abandoned the idea - but in some ways, the challenge of breaking through his inscrutability combined with the intrigue of the worlds that were opening up, kept me going.

Finally, after several months, or just about within the year I had given myself, I was able to start pulling the threads together. A coherence emerged out of all that babble. I had discovered new ways of looking at the world and thinking about it.

Dave talks about needing new ways to tackle intractable problems, and why we are not able to solve them. His contention, quite rightly being that we are not able to solve these because we use inappropriate methods, because our understanding of these situations is flawed. He superficially seems to focus on cognition, though buried in his methods are ways of dealing with situations related to sense-making, decision-making, cultural change and innovation, just to list a few, and the one I think is most important to me which he does not mention - systems thinking. ( I think he does not like that term due to his differences with Senge - ask him!)

I now stand on my own feet - more or less. I have through this journey discovered, that a lot of what Dave teaches is already out there in different forms. His genius I think is in pulling it all together ‘coherently’! I am very happy that I had this opportunity, and am personally deeply indebted ( I did pay to attend his course) to Dave for lending me his shoulders even briefly to stand on. The world looks very different now than it did two years ago.

Moving Sociality on-line

I love the way the concept of Social Software and its understanding is evolving.

I think we need to understand this phenomenon, starting with the notion of 'Sociality' or what does it mean to be social. We as human beings are essentially social beings. Our sociality is the most evolved among all living beings - so we communicate, cooperate, collaborate, coordinate and so on. (I run out of terms beginning with 'c' here!). The point is that we have been like this for a very long time - way before there was the internet for sure.

What I believe the internet is now doing is moving more and more of our social life on-line. There are three fundamental implications here, which I will discuss here briefly.

The first is about the straightforward migration of things we do off-line to the on-line world. We make friends, we share objects, particularly social objects, we stay in touch, we communicate and so on.

Sociality on-line however does not have a one-to-one correspondence with what we know off-line. That is where the transformational impact of technology comes in. It expands our reach across space and time, it remembers our footprints in the digital world, it lets us interact and converse with the various objects (including people!), and so on. In its wake it brings issues of security, privacy, transparency etc. Not that these issues do not exist off-line, but they take on a much larger significance. So that I believe is the second aspect of this phenomenon.

The third aspect is that the on-line world is clumsy in some ways. It lacks several features that we are used to. We do not as of yet, see all aspects of the people we interact with. We are privy to some aspects in greater detail, but we miss out on their emotions and body language. The traditional markers which we use to identify spaces and people are no longer the same in the digital world. We need to now device ways of finding and navigating through this world. It all begins with having an identity. Every social object in this world needs one, and it grows more sophisticated with time. We develop more sophisticated profiles, add descriptions, tags and so on. We need ways to organize this stuff, so there are taxonomies and folksonomies, we use indicators for preferences and so on. So this notion of creating ways to interact with the sociality online is the third key aspects.

Now there is indeed a fourth one, but it does not have so much to do with sociality, as it has to do with the properties of the online technical environment. That is its ability to discover patterns in our interactions, and aggregate and correlate in way we could not do before. This property greatly enhances our experience of the online world, and quite enhances sociality too.

When we look at this phenomenon in this way, everything falls neatly into place for me. Actually it serves as an Architecture of online sociality, which I have used to think about solutions as well.

Perpetual Transformation

I am wondering if given the constant change we face these days, whether we should consider ourselves to be perpetually in the midst of a transformation.

Not too long ago we were moving our organizations to the Services paradigm (SOA for example). I do not believe we have all either embraced it completely or completed the transformation associated with that. Now we are in the midst of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, or the transformation associated with Social Technologies, for example. I believe it is a radically different enough way of doing things, that moving to this new paradigm constitutes a transformational effort.

By ‘transformation’ I mean holistic change. where it is not just an issue of the adoption of a new technology, but revisiting all aspects of processes, systems, organizational design and so forth, looking for opportunities to conceive them anew. The other connotation of the word is that orchestrating such change usually is a complex effort.

This question came to my mind from an observation related to Social Technology services that we offer. Is it enough to help our clients with adoption, or should we, depending on their maturity of course, be preparing them for a transformational effort? I believe, that only when one goes beyond simple adoption can an organization obtain the true benefits of any new paradigm.

And, then the issue of perpetual transformation. If new paradigms that have the potential to radically reinvent the way we do things, keep emerging even before we have completely realized the promise of earlier ones, should we just create ‘Offices of Transformation’ that keep us perpetually in that mode of being?

I think that way, we might have better results with delivering on their promise and potential.

Social Networks and Happiness

Social Networks are ubiquitous.... and pervasive.... we all know that.... Somehow though, we are now discovering the role they play in more and more aspects of our lives.... here is  an excerpt from a WebMD article on Happiness...

"How important are social networks to your happiness? Perhaps even more important than you realized. A recent 20-year study of more than 4,000 people showed that happiness is influenced not just by your immediate friends and family. The happiness of a friend of a friend of a friend -- someone you’ve never even met -- can also influence your happiness. It turns out that happiness can spread through social networks, like a virus."

http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/why-youre-not-happy?page=3

Kidding apart... I have a theory about why they have suddenly become so important... I think it has to do with our image of organizations.... (I am borrowing the phrase from a book titled similarly)... all these years we were happy describing our organizations as hierarchies.... they seemed to work quite well for the work we were doing... I mean all enterprises.... public and private sector....

but the times have really changed....what they say about the environment.... volatility, and complexity, speed of change etc.... all those terms we have heard so often now, that they have become cliches.... those terms have become real now.... and all of us are feeling their effects....

The structures of old ....the hierarchies with centralized control paradigms....are no longer able to respond to that reality.... it is as if their ability to generate value is exhausted.... As the world becomes more complex, we need correspondingly complex structures to respond appropriately.... at all levels.... we need more complex cognitive structures for sure.... structures such as hierarchies become unwieldy with increasing complexity.... that leaves us no choice but to recognize structures that are more appropriate.... that is where networks come in....

I do not believe in all or nothing ways of thinking.... hierarchies are appropriate for some domains.... and will be around.... there are certain domains within any enterprise which will benefit from structured way of working... however there are certain aspects of an enterprise.... (This needs a more detailed discussion)....which have no choice but to move to more organic... non-hierarchical approaches...

Of course social networks have always been around.... now we know that we must acknowledge and nurture them as well.... for Cognition (Sense making, knowing, intelligence), Innovation, Cooperation, Learning... almost all aspects where sociality dominates....particularly when it comes to those challenges that we face which cannot be put in neat boxes.... or responded to with conventional command and control structures.... we must then defer to the network or even some more fluid structures which will evade neat analysis...

this is a fascinating topic for sure... there is more unsaid...

but closing out here with where we started this post..... social networks and happiness! ... perhaps what that means is that our efforts to deal with our world are too much for any one person.... only with the help of our social network can we deal with it effectively enough to be stress free....and happy.....hmmm....

The logic of X~N.g

I have been reading this book by Axel Bruns - "Blogs, Wikis, Second Life and Beyond" (http://snurb.info/) . I will probably review the book at some point of time, since I think it is exceptional. Unlike some of the popular books on these topics, here is a book that provides a deeper conceptual framework. Even though the frameworks I came up with are probably not in the book, they were clearly prompted or provoked by it. Several other recent books have provided what now is starting to form in terms of a more complete understanding of what is going on. A book called "The difference" by Scott Page is among them as is Infotopia.

One outcome of this understanding - a new cryptic thing I included in my signature block today. X~n.g. Replace X by Web and n by 2 and you will perhaps start seeing what I mean. What is intriguing is the '~' sign. Why would you say Web~2.0, when the world says Web2.0. Let me suggest you try something else. Replace X with "Enterprise", or "Supply Chain", or "fashion" and you might see what I am trying to capture here.

The n.g might become something else tomorrow - 3.1, 4.0.... Perhaps the 'g' should be replaced by '0', but that doesn't really add significantly to the meaning of what I am trying to convey. Whatever be the stage of evolution of the technology (it could infact be any other driver), what we are interested in is the intersection of that development with something else, the "X".

The "~" communicates something more too. I believe it incorporates in its waviness a certain ambiguity, an openness in terms of the potential of the intersection. The intersection of a particular stage of evolution of a technology, a certain paradigm, is different for different X'es. The X'es we are interested in are typically complex systems themselves. Which is one of the reasons that the intersections are interesting. I will touch upon this aspect some other time, but I think that itself, the notion of understanding systems, and their dynamics, and particularly their dynamics in the context of the intersection is what we really need to grasp, in order to make complete sense of any new phenomenon.

One last point - going back to the "~" - in its indeterminacy the symbol is in my mind loaded. It incorporates in the interesection dynamic, our frameworks, heuristics, beliefs and preferences. This Point of View (POV), has its own role to play in the shape this intersection will take.

Much has been written about the Web 2.0 phenomenon. A lot of the literature communicates awe and revels in overwhelming the reader with the cornucopia of forms and terms. Social bookmarks, tagging, folksonomies, collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, hive mind and so on. You are then left to make sense of it all. There definitely are some who go beyond this populist approach and provide insight. I think Axel Bruns is one of them.

Human Sociality has certain fundamental attributes. Several of those traits remain foundational, even as new forms emerge as we move sociality to new virtual spaces. An understanding of Sociality therefore is a must, before we start understanding the intersection.