Wisdom 2.0

For a long time I held the view that the value from strategic thinking and foresight is in applying that knowledge to developing strategic action plans.  Like many others I guess I started to question my assumptions while reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.  From my point of view, Taleb’ s message basically was that people were fooling themselves by thinking that, in a constantly changing, unpredictable world, it is possible to really know what action to take that will be sustainable over time.

The challenge as I feel Taleb would define it is to constantly review and refine what to do in a world we don’t really understand as well as we think we do. The skill sets here are to be constantly alert to new, potentially disruptive developments, and to have the agility and resilience to take timely action. It’s like having a ‘ceaseless quest for learning’.

So it was with some pleasure that I found just that phrase – ceaseless quest for learning – in Umair Haque’s The Wisdom Manifesto. Haque used the phrase in the context of renewal: that the measure of a day spent wisely is a day where you learn five new things.  And Haque – as with Taleb – utterly debunks strategy as a worthwhile activity. For example Haque describes strategy to develop ‘best practice’ as limited in that it adds nothing new compared to the inherent value in wisdom from finding “…new ideas, concepts, and solutions” and “…acting on what people, communities and society lack”. The effort is not physical and intellectual energy but emotional and ethical too.

According to Taleb, being alert to constant flux and change necessarily involves regular interaction with people such as in cafes and attending social events – developing extended networks of relationships. It’s about being out there, tuned in and fully engaged. It’s not a new idea of course – the coffee houses in 18th century London and Vienna were hotbeds of innovation and creative thinking.

For organisations based on hierarchical layers and formulaic compliance protocols, that kind of wisdom lies beyond the pale. For those organisations really intent on finding new ideas and solutions, and where they are disposed to a ceaseless quest for learning (ie. they want to be wise organisations) then their people must be out there interacting with people – customers, clients, communities and citizens. This is where the internet and Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 interaction kicks in. Haque refers to Starbucks crowd-sourced learning from mystarbucksidea. Perhaps it can encapsulated in the term ‘Wisdom 2.0′.

While ‘strategy’ seems to be limited, I still feel that strategic thinking still holds – indeed I feel it is central to the ‘ceaseless quest for learning’. Strategic thinking involves suspending your assumptions, being capable of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. That’s why I’m so active in social networking and social media – so I can tap into the constant flow of information and interact with people I would not otherwise have the opportunity to do so. So ‘Wisdom 2.0′ has meaning to me.

Innovation in media

Business model innovation

Ever heard of Sonos? Based in the USA, Sonos & their partners provide the means to stream or download music from around the world, as well as hooking up to your own music stored on your computer. Using peer-to-peer mesh wireless networks, you can have music distributed to multiple rooms in your house. Currently available in North America and Europe, if you have Sonos you can access over 25,000 Internet radio stations, make up your own personalised radio station through an online service (eg. Last.fm) create your own playlists and access millions of songs online through online music service provider Rhapsody. Radio broadcasters with online channels can be accessed too – the platform provides another global channel for international players such as the BBC. Users can search by title, artist or genre. An obvious attraction is in not having to buy a CD again while having access to so much more choice.

Sonos seems to be a good example of a 21st century Internet business model. Sonos has an internationalised, horizontal business model providing technology coupled with content aggregation through partnerships and distributed over the top of broadband Internet infrastructure. Rhapsody too is a horizontal business player with web services open to third party developers. The consumer gets unbelievable choice. It’s legit. Professionals get paid – in fact given the potentially large customer base, profits from Sonos plays could be very lucrative. I understand that each time a subscriber listens to a song, the copyright holder gets US 1 cent. My understanding is that Sonos (and Rhapsody) revenue is from an ad-free subscription service. At about $12 US per month the cost seems reasonable.

Now, music online has been disruptive factor in the music industry for many years, but innovative plays keep coming. I feel that video and newspaper online business models could follow with Sonos-like business models too. As an avid consumer of news and information online, I would be happy to pay a subscription to an online aggregator so that I can access news and information from any device and from anywhere I am.

Innovative strategy

Mark Scott, Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), has a posting called Media after Empire on Unleashed. It’s a very good read. But what I am particularly excited about is news that the ABC is creating widgets so that people can take ABC content and share it through their own social networks. Nice. As I’ve said before, social networks are a hub for news, information and communication for many people and I see no reason why that can’t go further to provide tailored entertainment to suit the preferences of individuals and their network of friends online.

There’s a lot about the ABC’s strategic thinking and emerging transformational strategies in Mr Scott’s posting. The ABC is striving to remain of relevance. Apparently the ABC is contemplating what life would be like for them in a world where viewers have 5,000 TV channels to choose from. Although Mr Scott says he does not have a pathway through to “…a more vibrant future for old media organisations”…and he knows of no one that does…he quite rightly observed that “the paths to the future are made not found [and there are] no solutions to be found in legacy thinking”.

Mr Scott comes across as a quite cynical of the News Corp strategy to figure out ways to make hay through charging for content…while staying in control. The strategy has parallels with the fall of Rome… or at least that is Mark Scott’s view.

Here is what firstdogonmoon though of it -

The Genie is out of the bottle – and is driving convergence between computing, communications, media and devices

The subject line of this posting paraphrases the heading of a paper on telecommunications/communications recently published by Oppenheimer, US investment bank (HT: David Isenberg). To those who have not been tracking ICT and telecommunications trends for a while, David Isenberg coined the term “stupid network” in calling the transition from the ‘smart networks, dumb terminals’ Telecommunications Age, to ‘dumb networks, smart terminals’ of the Internet Age. Basically the message is that applications running over-the-top of underlying networks do not need “smarts” in the network provided by telcos. Just high bandwidth connectivity will do. This is the “dumb pipes” nightmare outcome that telecommunications vendors and network operators fear the most.

Indeed, a battle has been raging between telecommunications and computing industry interests for some years now. The telecommunications sector has a dream: “next generation networks”. Meanwhile, networked computing interest have lived their dream: the open Internet – or has Oppenheimer calls it, network-centric (NC) computing. NC is described as “….networking and sharing computer processing, storage and data, which can be accessed over the Internet using thin devices at the edge of the network” (page 25). Oppenheimer is calling the victory for NC computing. Oppenheimer summarise their analysis by saying “The migration to NC computing will…eventually lead to the break up of vertically integrated service providers along horizontal lines”. They support their case by pointing to the success of the iPhone, which in terms of its applications is separate to the cellular network.

Under a network-centric (NC) computing age, applications and smart devices have the advantage of global economies of scale. Applications and services innovation and deployment can happen much more quickly than services that are coupled to underlying network configurations. So these two forces at work – global economies of scale and rapid innovation development – are the most important dynamic that telecommunications service providers are likely to face over the next few years.

Oppenheimer point to a few examples of applications innovation in VoIP over mobile, such as Fring and Truphone. Fring makes it easy to connect to your favourite VoIP, social network or messaging application and WiFi hotspots. Truphone is a London-based but global provider of mobile VoIP – you can connect to Truphone’s social networking presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and flickr. Later this year Truphone is expected to launch a ‘Local Anywhere’ service where customers will be able to make and receive calls via a local number and at local rates wherever they are. Great for overseas travel! According to Oppenheimer, developments like that could potentially cannibalise telecommunications industry voice revenues (fixed and wireless) and text messaging revenues. Oppenheimer expect that the explosive growth in data traffic would provide some good news to network operators, but that in the longer-term carriers might be better off being transport wholesalers. Oppenheimer assume that carriers could anticipate a healthy share of applications and advertising revenues.

In other respects the NC value-chain is expected to evolve into a horizontally segmented structure with the three main layers being 1) service providers; 2) software companies; and 3) devices. Interestingly, Oppenheimer anticipate that software companies and telecommunications network providers will strive for an open mobile Internet to avoid being dominated by a monopoly operating platform.

Oppenheimer also expect carriers to continue with a strong presence in the enterprise market, providing integrated security, mission-critical execution, dedicated customer service and integration with other data systems.

Convergence – getting your business model right

Telecom TV has a good panel discussion of convergence and business model implications for telcos from over-the-top applications. The panelists are Alan Meehan, CEO of INQ, and Alan Nunn, Head of Services, Intelligence, Applications BT Innovate.

I guess there were four things that stood out to me, that:

• the walled-garden approach is not sustainable (not that I needed convincing of that)
• there is a clear drive to “make the Internet real” for mobile users
• we can expect continued innovation in communications from applications development
• innovation and growth is happening in the web and a lot of the focus is shifting to mobile connectivity.

From the INQ perspective, “making the Internet real” is in making it easy to use what their target market wants – Facebook, Instant Messaging and Skype. Now, what these applications have in common is that they are used to keep in contact with people. I suspect that Telstra’s “phone mum” advertising campaign actually resulted in a lot of those connections being over Skype or Facebook, not a phone call. In short, connectivity for many people these days does not involve making a traditional phone call.

Alan Nunn spoke about some going innovation, such as converting speech to text, arising from BT’s acquisition of Ribbit, an IP phone company.

There is also some interest insight about mobile network investment decisions such as stringing out HSDPA & deferring optic-LTE roll-outs, and the anticipated roll-out of femtocells. Nonetheless, the end-game is expected to be LTE, taking IP to the edge and cutting through the remnants of mobile operator walled-gardens.

It’s all another sign of the de-coupling of content from underlying infrastructure – a market-led separation in fact, driven by what the consumer is doing.

Openness, participation and scale: Web 2.0 rules of thumb

A large part of my horizon scanning research last year was on emerging communications and media business models. I needed to explain the main underlying trends likely to shape emerging value-chains and business models, so I came up with these three over-arching trends for ease of ‘conveying the message’ and to help retain the message:

Openness – socially, commercially and technically (standards and code) driving a culture of collaboration

Participation- the people formally known as the audience creating and co-creating, forming new connections and augmenting existing connections via social media and social networks online; and service providers facilitating interaction with their customer and the public

Scale - where location and size are no longer barriers to offering services or content online, challenging the scale advantages of mass media and telecommunications

Those three forces are driving growth and innovation in communications and media. My conclusion was that any communications & media business model that lacked those three drivers had a limited shelf-life.

Why am I posting this now? It was Vodafone’s move to “embrace open source with open arms”. I think this is biggie. Vodafone is a global mobile operator and from a sector that has strived to maintain control over what goes over their networks – such as Skype.  The EU is now on to that.

All well and good – my analysis is standing the test of time. But of course “it’s the economy stupid” applies as well. The global economic meltdown occurred afer I completed by research above and that factor has obviously caused Vodafone to re-think its strategy. No longer in a position to grow by acquisition, the company now accepts that “the only way to create a fertile environment for innovation is to have open platforms and leverage them”.

There is another twist as well. While reflecting on the Vodafone development, it occurred to me that the three over-arching drivers are applicable to individual netizens (consumers) and to instititutions generally as well as business.  To make the most out of the web, embrace the 3 x Web2.0 rule: openness, participation and scale. Of course there are major challenges to people and organisations taking up that challenge: the modus operandi for the 20th century has been one of control and acting independently.  Now we are in a century of co-dependence and collaboration – at least that is where innovation and growth is coming from. Perhaps a more apt phrase is “it’s the culture, stupid”.

Web enabled politics and stakeholder engagement

This posting is for those interested in new ways to engage with stakeholders and citizen-engagement in rules-making – in other words, those of you thinking about ways to improve stakeholder engagement in consultation processes and rules development. One of the contributing factors to a fall-off in political engagement over the last few decades is due to individual perceptions of a lack of influence or control. Much of what goes on in democratic processes between elections is led by sectoral interests who achieve power through organising institutionally (the organised few) in contrast to the influence of citizens (the dis-organised many). Well, although it is early days yet – the Obama administration for example is experimenting with different platforms – the web has the potential to change that.

Earlier today I listened to a Radio Berkman podcast on web-enabled political system. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, was interviewed on how the Obama Administration could build on what they have done to bring about a web-savvy democracy based on values of transparency and engagement. One of the advantages of the web is that participation can scale at no marginal cost. Achieving citizen engagement in rules-making sessions would overturn the institutionalised power of a few. Koo talked about the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules-making process and the power of lobbyists to influence how the law gets enforced, and the potential for citizen engagement to participate, in effect contributing the ‘wisdom-of the-crowd’ to EPA rules. I feel there is potential for similar citizen-engagement in Australian rules-making processes…or at least to draw in a wider contribution from those who would not otherwise have the time or the money to participate in institutionalised processes.
 
Last Monday I went to a presentation in Melbourne on engaging stakeholders using Web 2.0 hosted by Futureye and BangtheTable(who claim to be an independent space for discussing public policy). The presenter, Crispin Butteriss, made some useful points about online consultative processes including that they:

•  are accessed by people from work between the hours of 8.00 am – 6.00 pm
• unearth real issues, not necessarily those identified by politicians or bureaucrats
• can shatter myths about what people really think about particular issues or public services
• make it easier for small-sized community groups to participate as well as individuals
• can use a range of tools, although some are better for particular uses (wikis are good for communities of interest; web forums are better for exchanging views, blogs are a useful public relations tool and to record the history of decision-making, mapping tools are good to cluster regional interaction)

Crispin had some hints about managing risks from online participation, such as:

• promoting the site widely so that the process is not hijacked by special-interest groups
• moderate post-comment as people find pre-comment moderation annoying
• once you make the call to start the online conversation, stay with it

Trends and developments in communications and media technology, applications and use

Chris Chapman, chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) released the Trends in Communications & Media Technology, Applications and Use at the CommsDay Summit on 31 March 2009.  A copy of the report is available here. The report identified five key developments that are putting pressure on media and communications regulation.

‘Investment in broadband, digital and Internet-Protocol (IP)-based infrastructure, and the ongoing evolution in web standards are influencing technology developments in Australia,’ said Mr Chapman.

Internet Protocol (IP) is becoming increasingly integrated across a range of networks and services. The key developments evident from the embedding of IP platforms are:

• an increasing use of IP-based video across a range of networks and applications providing further impetus for professionally produced content on the internet;
• a continued evolution in cellular and other wireless networks and mobile operating systems, all capable of supporting packet-based transmissions and new software applications; and
• the use of web-based computing systems like cloud computing that enables use of centralised computing services, which will materially influence the way people work and the way companies operate.

The rapid expansion of social media meanwhile is fuelling developments in:

• social networking and the rise of new media influencers; and
• the personalisation of web experiences, including location-based services.

New emerging regulatory challenges identified in the report include:

• an increasing public interest in data portability between web service providers, and the management of online identity, data and reputation; and
• the impact of evolving cyber-crime economies which operate across the internet.

Some of the changes identified further embed established regulatory pressure points, particularly:

• the increasing demand for and use of radiofrequency spectrum to support IP-based services and the evolution of high speed data on mobile networks;
• managing privacy where there is an increase in location-aware services and the use of personal information for behavioural marketing; and
• changes in the way content is produced that allows distribution across multiple platforms.

‘While expectations in the short-term are likely to be qualified by the current economic downturn, the developments and trends outlined in the report indicate ongoing significant change in the sector over the next five to 10 years,’ Mr Chapman said.

Digital literacy proposals in the UK

According to a report in The Guardian the UK Government is considering introducing digital literacies to the primary school curriculum. Under the web-based learning proposals, children would learn familiarity with blogging, podcasting, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and communication. 

I think it is fascinating that Twitter gets such a high profile, but then I’m not surprised about it. Twitter is a form of online SMS but with a lot extra, and text messaging is hugely popular. The proposals also demonstrate a high level of confidence about the usefulness of content on Wikipedia, and the continuity of short messaging services online.

That being said, I would think the thrust of the proposals are more likely to on the use of the web for finding information and for communication, whatever the applications in use now might be.

Future Montage Vision

After have developed scenarios in collaboration with others, Microsoft put together an excelled video montage of our possible future lives, including at work and at home, in 2019. Drawing on long-term trends, customer challenges and emerging technologies, the montage gives examples of how current prototypes might evolve.

Check out the video here - it is less than 2 minutes! A lot easier to consume than a multi-page tech trends paper

How many emerging technologies can you pick? Here’s a few that I noted:

• augmented technology
• e-health technologies
• digital wallets
• display technologies including 3D, electronic newspapers, transparent digital walls and ultra-thin displays
• Identification management including biological 
• Location sensing and context aware technologies
• Real-time conversation translations
• Touch 
• Ubiquitous computing

I know that the montage is still a Microsoft view of the future so you take it for what it is. I’ve got to say though, based on my own horizon scanning experience the vision displayed in the montage is a reasonable one…although just how widely available is another question. Of the technologies listed above, only the transparent wall stood out as new development. I’ve been tracking developments in others for as long as seven years. 

Whatever else you may take away, can I suggest that the video is a great way to get a sense of the pace of change on the horizon.

Networked information society: what it means for your business

My blog posting activity has been on the light side recently. This posting marks the return of more regular postings.

Wealth of networks

If you have not yet read The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, can I recommend that you do. The main theme of the book – that the networked information society creates social value – is at once a great challenge for the 21 century, and is also one of the great opportunities.

It’s challenging to those that hold dearly on to the main elements of 20th century market economies: exclusivity, wealth measured in monetary terms, the organisational power of the firm, the nation state, consumerism and the media. The networked information society is challenging to accountants, economists and management consultancies, the rationale of all being bound by the main elements of market economies.

Information is not scarce. Knowledge is not bound by centralised control. Indeed, the value of knowledge and information grows with sharing. Networked social value is not exclusive property. Not only is it possible for people to be well-organised in networked relationships online, it is actually very easy – and adaptive and resilient too. The value of networks transcends organisational and jurisdictional boundaries. Can you put any of that on a balance sheet – or confine it to a national identity? Hell no!

The networked information society creates social value through connections between people. Social value is created through shared creativity, expression and reputation. In The Internet and the Project of Communications Law, Susan Crawford described it this way. “…the greatest possible diversity of new ideas that will support our country in the future will come from the online world, because of its special affordances of interactivity, interconnectivity, and unpredictable evolution” (page 6). Written in 2007, don’t those words seem that much more important in the global economic meltdown. Oh, and while referencing Susan Crawford, another take-away from her piece is: don’t treat the internet like a content-delivery supply chain. It’s greatest value is in human connections and relationships online.

Implications for the firm and other institutions: it’s about relationships, not things

Get networked! Participate and engage with your customers, stakeholders, citizens, people everywhere. Get to know them better. Anticipate their needs. If you have something of value to them, go directly to them. Avoid intermediaries.  Invite them to know you better. Collaborate with them. People are influenced by those they know about and trust. Share to grow. Use others data and platforms where you can.

Reach out and use the scale of the internet to go beyond your town, your region, your country.

Use mulitmedia. People are more passionate, more emotional with video interaction. There is far richer connectivity. Tell stories about you, your service or product.