mind this - by Lars Plougmann

How to impede progress, a simple three step guide

The world is moving ahead with breathtaking speed. Evolution. Innovation. Projects. Ideas. The difference between progress and status quo could very well be you.

Use this simple three step guide to halt progress in its tracks whenever it surfaces:

1. First time you hear about a new initiative, ignore it.
2. The second time you hear about it, ignore it but start thinking of reasons that it should be stopped. 
3. Third time, fight it with well-prepared arguments; prove that it does not make sense or it is impossible (hint: it only has to be impossible in your organisation, not everywhere).

These steps are especially powerful if you have skills that would help the initiative along; the arguments you have prepared may even serve to boost your reputation in the field. Or if you are a manager. 

The process has proven successful in stopping 98.6% of innovation. I have heard suggestions on how to increase the success rate but I am ignoring them.

Tags: innovation guide irony

Big companies use the cloud to innovate

Photo sharing service SmugMug received much attention when they published their business case for using Amazon's S3 storage service. The 2002 startup describes how the service saves them between half a million to a million USD per year.

At Headshift, we have made use of the S3 service too, most recently on a project where video is a part of the user experience.

But it is not just startups that benefit from Amazon's cloud computing services. Techcrunch asks who the biggest users of Amazon Web Services are and quotes an Amazon source who reveals that big companies make up a large proportion of the 60,000 customers.

In my view, the reason for large companies to use cloud computing is not just the potential cost advantage, it is the ability to do new and exciting stuff - such as introducing social software. Like many other FTSE100 companies, one of our client's IT operations are optimised for steady state stability. Provisioning a server for a project takes several months and costs tens of thousands of dollars. They now have a two day process to approve and set up a virtual server using a combination of Amazon's EC2 and S3 services, with user identity provision tied to existing systems.

Look to the cloud to help innovation along.

Geeks with business acumen

Just like low wage countries are moving up the value chain in the global outsourcing game, geeks are moving up the levels of business models. I am half way through Carson's workshop The Future of Web Apps in London where both the scheduled sessions and hallway conversations with members of the conference audience are inspiring.

Last year, there was a fair bit of focus on the decreasing cost of launching a consumer web application (£30k was one of the figures mentioned). Today, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels boasted that computing power and storage were not free, but almost. He was speaking about the S3 (storage) and EC2 (processing) services and I didn't know whether to dismiss the 'almost free' claim as a marketing trick until later when a Belgian entrepreneur explained to me that a photo printing service he helped build on the web spent an average of €1 on storage per month.

With the basic plumbing reduced to a commodity, energy and cash are freed up to focus on ideas and innovation. And these days that often means how to cater for the community of people using a company's services. Last.fm, flickr and Digg were hailed as examples of applications with strong communities but all businesses have communities and the more engaged they are in the product or service the stronger the business potential. Even with a million or more customers, we heard examples of how the community was engaged to define the direction of an application, how to make a community police its own members and actions and how to capture behaviour and attention data to improve the quality of the experience for the individual as well as a tool in the fight against spam (social spam as it is known now).

I spoke to a developer who recently joined a generation-old business. It was soon clear to the management that he had arrived with a bunch of new ideas so he was asked to present to the board. The theme of his presentation was 'how to engage with our community of customers'. Today's geeks care about the social model, the customer experience and word-of-mouth marketing. These are at the base of many startups and the principles are permeating to existing businesses.

Or as we heard from venture capitalist fund Index, if there is no buzz about your product or service, consider changing your product instead of increasing your marketing spend.

As usual, I am taking notes from the sessions in mind map format (using MindManager) and publishing them under a creative commons (attribution) license.

Tags: FOWALondon07 FOWA future of web apps web apps web services innovation mind map community Tara Hunt Kevin Rose Bradley Horowitz Index Ventures

Diversity, future, Korea

One of the key points James Surowiecki makes in The Wisdom of Crowds is about the value of diversity in groups. A related statement is William Gibson's:

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."

A friend of mine attended an MBA class about innovation last week; her experience brought about my associations to Surowiecki and Gibson. When the class was brainstorming payment and banking, the attention quickly centered on mobile phones. Ideas flowed on how a proximity interface could enable quick payments in shops and on transport, how money transfers could be as easy as sending text messages and how the phone could be used as a means of identity. Towards the end, a girl who had been quiet until then plucked up the courage to tell the class that all of what they had come up with was already part of life in Korea.

Hopefully, globalisation and flatness of the world will distribute some of that future to Europe and North America. When it happens, the finance sector is up for a rethink and massive change.

Tags: Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki William Gibson mobile phones finance banking MBA brainstorm diversity future

Cool Danish friends: Connecta

Although it was a highly international event, last year’s Reboot conference in Copenhagen offered an opportunity to meet people in the social software and consulting industries in Denmark. (I grew up in Copenhagen and speak the language.) Returning with a bunch of new feeds from Denmark in my newsreader it wasn’t long before I started noticing the many references to Connecta (about Connecta - in English, their blog - in Danish).

Connecta boasts an impressive list of clients: Danish multinationals (such as Maersk, Lego, Chr Hansen) as well as organisations highly regarded within the Danish borders but not that well known internationally (e.g. Monday Morning and the navy’s corps of combat divers). The team has also helped set up a number of CEO blogs and provided coaching; one example is the weblog (in Danish) published by Lars Kolind, author of business books and former boss of Oticon, a hearing aids designer.

A recent project by Connecta is Kollektiv Intelligens (in Danish), a project to write a book about collective intelligence. The aim is to engage thousands of people in the authoring process and create a community with shared interests. A wiki has been set up to manage the writing process but the use of collaborative technologies does not stop there: The site also includes a blog, a discussion forum, a prediction market and a place to announce events related to the project. The component parts are all open source software, integrated with single sign-on and a consistent interface – a showcase of web 2.0 technologies. Perhaps it will be possible to “crowdsource” translations of the final product into other languages.

After collaborating with Connecta online and meeting the founders Hans Henrik H. Heming and Jacob Bøtter, I am proud to announce that the clients I work with through Zonoma will have access to Connecta’s expertise – in Danish or English.

Tags: Connecta Denmark reboot web 2.0 wiki collective intelligence kollektivintelligens.dk Zonoma

The 10-to-1 rule of email project management: Follow up

In August of this year, I published some thoughts on how effective email is when it is used as the only or main communication tool for a project. The post became part of a discussion on multiple blogs so I shall try to pull the arguments together and provide my inchoate conclusion.

The piece was referenced by Konrad Marx, Stowe Boyd, Seth Gottlieb and Kurt Voelker. Stu Downes and Pranshu Jain left comments pointing out that collaboration solutions are still in an experimental phase compared to email. Paul Wilkinson points to an article he wrote in February 2006, questioning email capabilities of collaboration tools. Rodolpho Arruda adds that project manager certification focuses on controlling a project, not on collaborating within a project. Jim McGee points us to the danger in assuming that sent messages will be effectively received: "That is not a symmetry that can be safely assumed." Om Malik says that email is our "communication dashboard."

Anne Zelenka responds with a robust defense of email, saying that "email is good enough for most workers’ collaboration needs." She provides a convincing argument that email works better than many collaboration tools because is offers interoperability, personalised organisation, easy access control, and a single point of information access. I agree with many of Anne's points but I also accept Luis Suarez's view that email "is the worst thing that could have happened to Knowledge Management and remote collaboration [...]." John Tropea goes further by comparing closed systems with transparent ones and sharing a case study on email collaboration.

JP Rangaswami delights us with a taxonomy of enterprise email stereotypes, from the "iceberg lettuce" type to the "oops-I-did-it-again'ers" (the ones who habitually hit reply-all to wide distribution emails). He also agrees with Anne that email is a good enough collaboration tool, but for individuals not for teams in an enterprise.

Ed Yourdon published some of his thoughts about email at about the same time that I penned my 10-to-1 rule. In his superb post, he examines five hypotheses about email; one of them is whether email is broken or whether it is not being used the right way: "We never learned how to use the capabilities of email, and our behavior is akin to driving a car on the freeway at 60 mph in first gear."

Rod Boothby provides an illustration of "The Enterprise 2.0 Communication Continuum" and goes further to state three reasons for adopting collaboration tools that offer more than email:

• They create positive externalities because of transparency, context and the persistence of the content
• They increase the pace of internal innovation by providing what innovation creators need
• They provide a platform that can improve ad-hoc workflows

What are the conclusions? Discussions like this make me believe that we will find solutions in the fusion of paradigms and technologies that we presently see as conflicting.

Email is about messages and messages have proven useful for thousands of years. (Part of the reason that RSS is successful is that a feed can be presented as messages). Email software takes the strong conventions pertaining to messages and integrates them with the centuries old inbox paradigm - which itself was a way to transition from an industrial society to the information processing organisation by mimicking a conveyor belt. Altogether a very powerful concept which is the reason that email is how work gets done in today's businesses.

It is only for a decade or so that we have achieved the ability to work together in the new ways that we have started to call collaboration. Our challenge is to explore what we can do with collaboration while weaving into it the message style of communication. Messages and inboxes (a.k.a. email) are an undeniable part of the future, but as concepts they will be fused with transparent, discoverable, content-persistent, workflow-enhancing, buddy-list-integrated, taggable and action-supporting collaboration tools.

Tags: collaboration email email inbox project management collaborative workspaces

The age of quality

20,000 songs on your iPod. Fifty inch flatscreens. Ten billion web pages indexed by search engines. Ten megapixel pocket cameras. Impressive technical developments have given us impressive metrics.

As we watch our big screens and enjoy playlists that loop every 50 days, I suspect our infatuation with quantity will wane. The next wave will be about quality. The challenge for the market place is that quality is largely non-quantifiable, highly individual and subjective - and often not directly communicable. In such a world, businesses are facing an uphill battle for the hearts and minds of consumers while open initiatives have a head start.

A small aspect of quality may be quantifiable. The bit rate of mp3 music files is one example. But in the new age of quality, expect to see a surging interest in lossless audio formats, supported by the decreasing cost of storage and faster internet connections. The same two factors will also drive us towards lossless compression for photos.

Inherent quality is only weakly linked to quality in a manufacturing sense and the ambition of achieving less than 3.4 defects for every million opportunities. It is strongly linked to innovation and knowing what your customers want. It is linked to social networks because the people we trust are the first ones we turn to for recommendations when we have understood the quantifiable aspects of something. It is linked to collaboration tools because the right working environment makes us more effective.

Even then, we may collide with the non-communicable aspects of quality. Robert M. Pirsig taught us that while quality cannot be defined, we know it when we see it. Open standards, open products and open systems that can be modified and improved upon by users and consumers (i.e., ourselves) will win favour in our quest for quality and pursuit of happiness. Transforming our environment and experiences to what we want without impeding the rights of others means a preference for stuff where those rights are compatible with our creativity.

A search on Google for quality produces more than a billion results. The quantity aspect is certainly impressive. If I was looking for the Australian government's reef water quality protection plan I would find it on page 99.

Tags: quality open standards social networks Google search mp3 lossless audio

You cannot control your readers' content consumption behaviour

The first automobiles looked like horse carts. The qwerty keyboard layout (or azerty in France etc.) is derived from mechanical constraints of the first typewriters. Sometimes innovation happens gradually and we stick to the conventions.

At other times, innovation leaps ahead by an order of magnitude. You should generally not expect to see disruptive innovation originate with the established players in a field. Ross Mayfield points out that organisations should design themselves in ways that remove incentives to "perpetuate the status quo" (and I learnt a new word: heterarchy). Peter Merholz points us to a great example of adopting new technology while resisting innovation: Publishers who want to replicate the sensation of paging through a newspaper on a tablet PC. As Peter puts it, cell phones don't have rotary dials.

A business news organisation I have been speaking to in London is convinced that growth is to be sought in the area of chunking up, repurposing and syndicating their content. Their main concern is how to adapt their systems to allow their content to be disseminated through a variety of channels and how to make it scale to service large numbers of syndicatees. It is a good service to provide a limited number of pre-defined formats in which your content can be consumed. But as readers become more savvy they want the ability to decide how to have content delivered and presented. The innovation in this area is coming from three year old FeedBurner (another example of a grassroots technology making it into the enterprise).

The future of publishing is to be sought in the crossroads of open standards, tags and metadata and in-line markup, appropriate content licenses, scalable infrastructures provided by third parties and perhaps the development of a next-generation digital rights management that strikes a usable compromise between authors, publishers and readers (DRM 2.0?).

All organisations are publishers to an extent. Many individuals too. As the landscape is being flattened with respect to the technological barriers of making your content useful, a single important determinant remains: Quality. Now turn the page.