Technology

information & communication technology

Heads you win, tails you lose

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The Long Tail is one of the most commonly quoted models for business on the Internet:

The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a ‘normal’ or Gaussian distribution. This has gained popularity in recent times as a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The concept was popularised by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

More money is made by creators at the head than at the tail, according to Kevin Kelly, via Chris Anderson:

In pocket #1 of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator of a work. In pocket #2 of the curve, he also talks in terms of the creator. But then when he gets to the long tail, he switches away from a creator, to talk in terms of an aggregator of other creators’ work. Why is that? What happens to the creator? The creator is dropped when we get to the long tail “pocket of profit” because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It’s profitable only for the audience and aggregators.

According to Seth Godin, pocket #2 has some real potential:

The reason you can make money in the niche pocket is that it costs far less to compete here. First, because there’s less competition and the competition is less fierce, and second because it’s cheaper and easier to reach your target market because they’re choosing to pay attention.

After seven years as an independent working online and participating in online content creation, I am starting to wonder how much room there really is in pocket #2 and if it’s just a (very) short extension of pocket #1. Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, says:

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.  The freelance studio musician, the stringer selling reports to newspapers from warzones are both crucial contributors to culture. Each pays dues and devotes years to honing a craft. They used to live off the trickle down effects of the old system, and like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

If you’re not one of the recognized leaders in your field, can you make a living online or are you just part of the long tail, valuable only to aggregators and their advertising revenues? As a content creator are you providing the fodder that lets Google, Facebook and YouTube earn huge market valuations? Will there be a middle class in the networked economy, or only heads & tails?

Plus ça change

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Tony Bates made these recommendations to the University of New Brunswick, “to foster further development of knowledge-based industries in the province”:

1. Greater incorporation of ICT and other 21st century skills (e.g. independent learning, problem solving) in a wider range of programs and subject disciplines.

2. A gradual move from almost entirely face-to-face courses in first year programs to hybrid or fully distance programs in the fourth year undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as develop more online non-credit certificate or diploma programs focused on the lifelong learning market.

3. Start gradually to redesign courses in this way on a program by program basis. Make sure the new programs are properly resourced (time for development + learning technology support).

4. Stop treating distance education courses as extra load, but integrate them into regular credit programming as part of a normal teaching load for instructors, perhaps supplemented with revenues from full cost recovery courses aimed at lifelong learners.

5. Look to partnership and consortia to leverage the development of online programs on an international basis.

6. Provide systematic and comprehensive training in pedagogy and educational technology for instructors scheduled to work on online programs.

7. Provide instructional and web designers to work in teams with instructors for the redesign of courses.

After reading this and seeing what advice they got from the west coast, I just had to dust off a (not successful) online learning strategy proposal that Rob Paterson and I submitted to UNB in 2008. Here are some highlights:

We see the objective of building a community of learners as the critical aspect of any future endeavour in online learning.
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In two years time, 2010, the web will be the principal place where most business, entertainment, and socializing will take place – learning will follow shortly – so by 2012 you will be a player or dead.
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The university can still grant a degree and the degree has a certain amount of societal value. The university can also offer a social space, but most kids don’t need 4 years of this.
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UNB wants to be a leader in online learning but there must be several reasons why the university is not a leader already. There is no competition in New Brunswick and little competition in the Atlantic provinces. One of the reasons for declining enrolment is demographics, as cited in the UNB Online Partnership document, and another is the lack of students outside the traditional age range. This age range is what business ventures call “low hanging fruit” and the model worked well when a university education was accessible, affordable and provided a decent return on investment. Given the rising cost of a university education and the declining perception of a bachelor’s degree, the traditional university business model has peaked.

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I respect Tony very much, but I do not believe that an incremental approach will work. However, it’s probably what the client wants to hear.

Automated and Outsourced

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As a result of economic changes, some workers are getting left behind, reports the New York Times:

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t believe that it’s any longer a question of whether standardized work will be outsourced or automated, but when. How much time do we have to prepare people for the new revolution? Any scenario that I consider – peak oil, global warming; globalization; Asian dominance – still requires that the developed world’s workforce deals with more complexity and even chaos. We need to skill-up for emergent and novel practices and that means a completely different mindset toward work.

But our schooling and training systems are backward-looking systems, based on what has worked in the past, and don’t help to develop the new skills necessary for the networked workplace.

We cannot leave these people behind. As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations must give  serious thought to what work needs to get done and how we can prepare people for it. As Gary Hamel described at the Spigit Customer Summit, traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder). The networked, creative economy requires independent and interdependent workers (more like theatre productions) with the following traits that cannot be commoditized:

  • Initiative
  • Creativity
  • Passion

This brings into question the rationale for practices such as:

  • Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone.
  • Predominantly full-time, salaried employment (few options for part-time work at the control of the worker).
  • Standard HR policies.
  • Banning access to online social networks at work.

 

Identifying a collaboration platform

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This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post that the LMS is no longer the centre of the universe and Jane Hart’s post today on A Transition Path to the Future. According to Jane, Step One in this transition is:

There are, of course, a number of steps on the transition path to a post-LMS future, and one of the first inevitably involves taking a good hard look at how your LMS is performing.  It may be that you want to retain it in some cut-down form, or it may be that it is providing no real value at all, and it is a barrier to “learning” .  I’m not suggesting that in every case, you should junk your LMS completely – in fact that would probably involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater! – but you certainly need to take an honest look at whether it is delivering what you need in the workplace today.

Step Two, or a concurrent step, would be to look at how to enhance collaboration.

First of all, collaborative work tools must be simple to be effective. The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?

The options then become:

  • Open the LMS so it can be used in the daily workflow
  • Connect the LMS to a collaborative work platform
  • Migrate learning to a collaboration platform and minimize use of the LMS

Given the nature of many LMS, the last option is the most likely. Once again, it’s about getting work done. If learning is embedded in the work tools, then there is little need to go to a separate place (LMS) to “do some learning”. Here are some examples:

  • Use blogs to replace group e-mails so that information can be updated on a given subject/topic. This makes the work transparent and encourages learning.
  • Use wikis for all documentation. This reinforces the notion of work in perpetual Beta and encourages business improvement.
  • Adopt presence tools (IM, micro-blogging) so you know who is doing what in the organization. Tools like Twitter/Yammer/Laconica also become excellent places to jot down notes in public, which encourages serendipitous learning.

The key challenge is merging work and learning, especially in the minds of workers. I’ve noted before that the main objective of the modern training department should be to enable knowledge to flow in the organization. The primary function of learning professionals within such a collaborative work model is to connect and communicate, based on three core processes:

  1. Facilitate collaborative work and learning amongst workers, especially as peers.
  2. Sense patterns and help develop emergent work and learning practices.
  3. Work with management to fund and develop better tools and processes for workers.

If your LMS is not helping you with these processes then it’s time to find a better platform.  I recently described one such platform – Elgg: it’s a community effort:

Another platform that I have used since its early days is Elgg, an open source social networking platform that attracted me because of its unique underlying model. We started using Elgg for an online medical community of practice in 2004 after going through dozens of platforms. The key differentiator of Elgg is that the individual [worker] is the centre of all the action. A course is just a node that an individual connects to [does not disrupt work flow]. You don’t “enter” a course, you just connect to it, as you would to a colleague or friend. This is real user control. We liked Elgg so much that we paid to develop a calendar function and then gave the code to the community.

In 2005 I described Elgg as a Content/Community/Collaboration Management System that allows you to develop, invent and construct knowledge [knowledge management & social learning]. That sure beats any LMS, in my opinion. Elgg is used for commercial applications like Emerald Publishing as well as the foundation for the Eduspaces community.

The Elgg platform has matured in the past six years and has a strong community and a solid product (v. 1.7). My colleague Jane Hart provides Elgg services for education & business. Soon, Elgg.com will launch with services for those who want a hosted community platform. One major advantage of Elgg will be the ability to take your data and have it hosted elsewhere. Avoiding vendor lock-in is a wise business decision. The Elgg community blog has more information.

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* Here is Jane Hart’s follow-up post on Elgg as a collaboration platform.

LMS is no longer the centre of the universe

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OK, so here’s the deal – if learning is work and work is learning, why is organizational learning controlled by a learning management systems (LMS) that isn’t connected to the work being done in the enterprise? Learning is no longer what you do before you go to work, never having to learn anything else in order to do your job. In the 21st century networked economy, learning and working are becoming one.

As Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers, we need to keep learning in order to get our jobs done – “What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

In a networked economy, social learning is how we get things done. Training, based on solid documentation of processes and procedures, works well at lower levels of complexity and we can develop best practices. As complexity increases, we need more tacit knowledge, which cannot be documented. Conversation is a prime medium for the sharing of tacit knowledge and is the foundation for collaborative work. We need to communicate in order to collaborate. This is why organizations need to manage what matters – collaboration.

The LMS framework is being challenged for its supremacy over organizational learning much as heliocentricity showed European civilization that we were not the centre of the galaxy. Jane Hart says that, “what is needed is an organisational system that SUPPORTS and ENABLES this informal approach to learning.” That system is one where the LMS is nothing more than a node in the network, which means that the LMS has to play nice with others (which most do not). The centre of the universe has shifted for training & development professionals and they can ignore this shift, as the Catholic church did, or they can become part of the Learning Reformation.

Complexity links

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I use Delicious to keep track of web resources and recently passed on, via Twitter, my social bookmarks tagged with complexity. Here are some of those bookmarks.

James Surowiecki’s three conditions on the use of the Wisdom of Crowds [something often overlooked], via Dave Snowden:

  1. independence of opinion between the individuals
  2. relevant diversity among the individuals
  3. decentralization of the decision-making process

A short explanation of the Cynefin framework (and video by Shawn Callahan), by Ton Zijlstra:

Over the years I’ve seen the number of issues companies and professionals are dealing with shift more and more to the complex realm. Because our internet and mobile communications connected world as a whole has shifted towards this complex domain more by increasing the connections between us and as a result the speed of change, the dynamics around us and the amount of information. A quantitative shift with massive qualitative impact. Complexity is where predictability is absent, and only in hindsight cause and effect are clear. It’s the messy bits, as Shawn says, where human interaction, culture, innovation, trust are at play. And it’s those same messy bits where increasingly organizations are able to distinguish themselves from others, or not.

On transforming to the enterprise of the future, by Art Murray at KM World:

Move from a posture of sense-and-respond to one of “co-creating.”

Stephan Haeckel’s Adaptive Enterprise brought us from make-and-sell to sense-and-respond. In today’s environment, even sense-and-respond may not be enough. Enabled by massive social networks with memberships numbering in the hundreds of millions, the cycle of listening to customers and filling their wants and needs is both rapid and continuous. You need to get into your customer’s mind, and let your customer into yours. The same goes for your suppliers, even your competitors.

Action: Trash the stupid customer surveys, along with the sales presentations. Have an ongoing conversation instead. Ask thought-provoking, open-ended questions and listen intently (the right way to do knowledge capture). Focus on needs and desired results, and find the most efficient and effective way to achieve them.

Added bonus: Do the same internally, from staff meetings to budget planning to performance reviews. Get knowledge flowing in all directions.

Rob Paterson, “ … we refuse to see the complex and work as if complexity was complicated or simple.”

It’s a simple message, really. But if you don’t get it, you’re headed for chaos.

Simple = easily knowable.

Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.

Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.

Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.

Simple Rules, by Michael Dubakov [check out the simulations]:

Many complex systems are based on simple rules. A set of several simple rules leads to complex, intelligent behavior. While a set of complex rules often leads to a dumb and primitive behavior. There are many examples.

The Cynefin framework and (the complexity of ) classroom instruction, by Andrew Cerniglia:

Classroom instruction is complex but do we treat it as such? Is “sensing” a priority of teacher education? How would an instructor who waits for “patterns to emerge” be viewed by their supervisor? As laid back? Aloof? And does outcome-based education (unintentionally) result in educators treating complex situations as complicated, or worse yet, simple in nature?

Our aggressively intelligent citizenry

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In 2004 I commented on an article by Peter Levesque calling for new leadership for the information revolution. He said that communities have not been as successful as corporations in producing certain kinds of societal benefits as a result of the internet’s enabling connectivity. “I suggest that the leaders will be found among the aggressively intelligent citizenry, liberated from many tasks and obligations by technology freely shared; using data, information and knowledge acquired from open source databases, produced from the multiples of billions of dollars of public money invested through research councils, universities, social agencies, and public institutions.”

It seems that some of that is happening now, as reported by Stephen Downes:

Congratulations to the Canadian government (yes, you Mr. Harper) for allowing openparliament.ca. And even more to the point, congratulations to Michael Mulley for making it happen. And from David Eaves, “‘Parliament IT staff agreed to start sharing the Hansard, MP’s bios, committee calendars and a range of other information via XML by the end of the year.’

This is great news. Having this data in XML, an open interchange format, means it’ll be far easier for this and other sites to use Parliamentary data, and will really lower the barrier to creating new and innovative ways of sharing information on our democratic system.” It goes without saying what a valuable resource this would be for schools, especially with the XML data feeds.

However, my conclusion from 2004 pretty well remains the same – our management and corporate models need to change even more to allow our “aggressively intelligent citizenry” to lead in business. They need to be free to express their opinions, without fear of losing their livelihood. They need to be able to share data (including information & ideas, which are now represented as data) and build upon them, without fear of being sued.

We are an information society, moving into a knowledge society, while a few corporations own our data and can make profits off it for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a creative knowledge society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas slows down our collective ability to learn.

Open government data is one step forward, but we also need open business data, especially ideas. From Intellectual Property, Information and the Common Good (1999):

The fundamental problem with intellectual property as an ethical category is that it is purely individualistic. It focuses on the creator/developer of the intellectual work and what he or she is entitled to. There is truth in this, but not the whole truth. It ignores the social role of the creator and of the work itself, thus overlooking their ethically significant relationships with the rest of society. The balance is lost.

Social media, social learning, social business – these all influence the social role of the creator and the work, and cannot be clearly delineated in our hyper-connected society. In a networked world, we need to divorce data from physical property. If not, we will have the worst of both worlds: corporations freely aggregating our crowd-sourced data and then selling it back to us. It’s happening already with Google, YouTube, Facebook and all the other social media sites that use our data, legally own it and profit from it.

Parliament is slowly opening up and communities are waking up, but our wealth-generation models are lagging behind, in spite of the few good examples from WorldBlu. What good is an aggressively intelligent citizenry without access to its own ideas?

Make imperfect copies

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Copying is an underrated business skill says Drake Bennett in Boston Globe’s The Imitation Economy. However, you have to be careful what you copy and from whom:

For example, while it’s tempting to copy direct competitors, especially when they’re doing well, it’s often more helpful to look for models in far-flung fields: It’s ground less likely to have been mined by competitors, but where unfamiliar ideas have already been tested. Shenkar points to how the toy firm Ohio Art has borrowed from the automotive industry and how the medical supply firm Cardinal Health copied the methods of food distributors, but there are plenty of examples beyond the business world: Today weapons designers imitate video game designers, traffic engineers borrow from particle physics, mechanical engineers copy the intricacies of plant structure, architects mimic airplane design, and psychologists use techniques perfected by magicians to design research studies.

In looking at organizational structures for complex environments we could learn something from how nature deals with complexity through copying. Natural selection is basically making multiple copies, with slight variations, of which only the best-suited survive; and then repeating this process over long periods of time. Perhaps organizations need to incorporate the creation of adaptations (slightly imperfect copies) into their business processes. A culture of encouraging the identification of and experimentation with emergent processes would be part of this.

Look at these recent web projects: Twitter is not that different from Jaiku, though only the former is hugely successful. However, Jaiku is now open source and may grow into something else, under Google’s umbrella. Meanwhile, Yammer started making some headway in business micro-blogging, but it’s a proprietary platform that could go the way of Ning and suddenly change its pricing model. Laconi.ca perhaps sees this weakness as an opportunity and has launched open source Status.net as an alternative for organizational micro-blogging. All of these are variations on a basic theme: short, mostly public text messages, with links & attribution.

When I work with clients I often bring the perspective of other fields to the organization. Like the copying cited above, you can learn from different disciplines but you have to understand the underlying patterns and structures and see how they can be used in your own context. The lesson from The Medici Effect is that old associative patterns must first be broken down and then new combinations can be found. Author Frans Johansson suggests [I suggest]:

diversifying occupations [abolish standard job competencies]

work with diverse groups of people [make everything transparent to as many people as possible]

Go intersection hunting [encourage reading outside one’s field and regularly “straying off the path”]

These are simple changes, made at the lowest levels of the organization, that when applied consistently and over time, can have major influences on the business. In dealing with complexity, we don’t need to add more complication to our business models, we need to make small, but fundamental changes to how work is done.

The business of information

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The internet era has allowed almost anybody to self-publish and we’re doing it in droves, on blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. This has shifted our relationship with information because we can find most information we need for free.

I wrote earlier this year about the changing information business.

I would surmise that ten years ago it was easier to sell a research report than it is now. There was less information available online for free. However, I think there is still a growing market for mass customization. That means a customized research report for me that’s different than one for somebody else. That’s pretty well what I sell: customized strategy & analysis for the specific context of each client. The challenge for Janet (and all of us in the custom information business) is figuring out the 90% that we should give away for free and the 10% that has market value and that we can charge for. The problem is that this sweet spot keeps changing so we need to keep tweaking and reinventing our business models.

With ease of publishing comes increased competition and most content publishers today are looking for new and better business models. Ross Dawson sees an exclusive class of online content creators developing, but at a cost. Dawson sees increasing demands to publish more frequently:

I don’t know how professional bloggers who are parents of young children manage. You’d be torn in both directions. It’s hard to keep the blog posts flowing every day, all the time, while you have other demands.

However it will be an imperative for almost all of us to create content in some form, just to have any visibility at all in an overloaded world.

So those who choose to belong to the exclusive class of content creators are automatically drawn into this spiral of intensity, whether they like it or not.

This seems kind of scary, especially when my own publishing is not for money. I wonder if I’ll feel this increasing pressure in the future.

Blogging is part of my learning (PKM) process and has a side benefit of connecting with potential partners and clients. I don’t spend any money on traditional marketing. Everything on the blog is free because I get intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary rewards for doing it.

Of course, one concern is that people will take my ideas and sell them as their own. This is a risk of being on the internet and I don’t see this changing. It can be frustrating to see work that was developed over years of practice and reflection get repackaged and sold as a poor imitation. An alternative is not to share, but that would be self-defeating.

I don’t think that charging for general information is a viable online business model. When I look at how to price information, a rule of thumb I’ve adopted is that anything that requires context can be fee-based, while context-free information, like blog posts, can be given away. That rule may change some day but constantly tweaking our business models is just part of life in perpetual beta.

Beta, data and more

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Here’s what I learned on Twitter this past week:

@literacyadviser “The only truly effective web filter is an educated mind.” via @ jonhusband

@dweinberger “The only way I know to solve big problems anymore is to do it in public.”

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“Training for future use of a skill is pretty much pointless.” by @JaneBozarth

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Why you need to understand political policy by @cognitivepolicy via@drmcewan

In other words, we are more like defense lawyers than philosophers.  We are compelled by our judgments to feel a moral view is appropriate and correct, then defend it if pressed to do so.  We don’t start with a set of assumptions and reason our way to conclusions.  And this process occurs largely outside conscious awareness so it takes practice to recognize when it is happening.

This relates to a common psychological phenomenon called “confirmation bias” which refers to the tendency to be overly critical of information that challenges what one believes to be true (or the tendency to uncritically accept information that supports one’s belief).  We see this all the time in politics.  People are predisposed to consider their values, views and positions as inherently good and right.  At the same time, we tend to be suspicious of anyone who holds a view different from our own.

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Industrial vs Networked approaches to work: Fire the indispensable? OR nurture a linchpin culture? via @minutrition

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@courosa “Ning Exposed – Tech Company Scams its Clients” [2008]

Is Ning a scam?
There’s a theory that Ning’s actions are part of a carefully planned scam to make the company the next MySpace or Facebook. Instead of spending millions of dollars advertising and gathering enough members to compete with MySpace or Facebook, why not create a social network platform and rely on the ambition of thousands of other network creators to up build membership. When the time is right, simply take all of those members and combine them into one super-site, Ning.com

[Read the comments on the above link to get a better idea of the issues]

This reminds me how important it is to own your data, and the following show two open source options to Ning’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform:

@elggdotcom “there is a hosted version of Elgg coming in May”

@romiranck “A hosted version of Drupal, Drupalgardens, is in beta now. Testing it out.”

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You may have noticed that I’ve changed the tagline of this website to life in perpetual Beta. I find it an accurate description of my life and work. It’s been a subject of conversation here since 2006.