1. Technology leads, humans follow. I’ve worked with a couple of visionaries who understood both the potential for new technologies AND the possible applications for them, but most of us simply react to new products and features as they appear. The process of digesting new technology is a time-consuming process of evaluation, budget approval, implementation, and training. The result is that technology diffusion in large organizations can take a long time. The effect is likely to be incremental because new features are measured against existing business process. In fact, an organization’s capabilities become disabilities in the face of disruptive growth opportunities (see “Information services for corporate growth,” a review of Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Solution). For that reason — and because intangibles like customization and training are hard to estimate — return on investment is often sub-optimal (and may even be negative).

2. Technology pursues monopoly. In our economic system, the way to cash in on new technology (or the data that it generates) is to maneuver into monopoly position. Think of railroads, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Benefits include economies of scale (Google), workflow integration (Microsoft), a large selection and low costs (Amazon). But when monopolies disappear (and they always do),disruption can be massive, especially for large organizations. Nobody likes to hear about the dangers and costs of obsolescence, conversion, and migration, but they are always lurking somewhere in the future (see “Review: Does IT matter?“).

3. Technology unwinds business models. Everybody knows this, but it can take a long time to happen, and most managers have a hard time coping with the implications for their industry and organization. I think the reason is that entrenched industries in our economy system are based on mastery of technologies, the production of physical artifacts, and the business ecologies that have evolved to monetize them. As soon as the Web browser appeared, it was obvious that the impact on the education and publishing industries would be profound. Yet, here we are nearly 20 years later still agonizing over an artifact called a “book” and its implications for bookstores, readers, libraries and three technology giants — Amazon, Apple, and Google (see “Publish or perish“).

When I did a SCIP workshop on the use of the Internet in competitive intelligence (CI) in the early 1990′s, Kodak had a highly regarded CI function. There was apparently no lack of information about the switch to digital cameras, even as early as 1979. But, while its Japanese competitor Fujifilm is thriving, Kodak filed for bankruptcy this month (see “The Last Kodak Moment?”).

4. Technology empowers end users. I’ll never forget the thrill of producing a nearly professional newsletter with the Apple Laserwriter, creating a taxonomy and A – Z Index with Filemaker, or checking email on my iPhone. Cloud-based services like Lulu.com and WordPress are even easier to use and require less up-front investment. End-user development can make organizations more agile by enabling employees to capitalize on opportunities without over-burdening the IT staff, but it has broader strategic implications (see “End-user developers: A critical corporate asset“). From a career perspective, it means distancing ourselves from roles based on things (i.e. computers, books, libraries) and focusing instead on developing our intellectual capital. From an organizational perspective, it means more emphasis on extranets (see “SharePoint use in extranets“). From society’s perspective, it means substituting mentoring for financial capital (see “The way companies are getting financed is completely changing“).

Related articles

• End-user development tools vs. black box software (montagueinstitute.wordpress.com)
• What Kodak teaches us about disruptive innovation (reportr.net)
• What Could Kill Apple, Google Or Microsoft? (forbes.com)

Shortly thereafter, I read a profile of Silicon Valley libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel and an article about a related group of people who design the most sophisticated technology on the planet but fear its dark potential.

These men live in a rarefied world where their intelligence opens doors and attracts large sums of money. I do not begrudge them either their smarts, opportunities, or wealth. After all, these are the kind of people who drive the innovation that allows people like me to have fun and make a living. But I wonder whether we are doing them (not to mention society) a disservice by failing to expose them early on to the kind of experience that the rest of us get in the school of hard knocks.

Some of these smart men are part of a subculture of thinkers, entrepreneurs, and nongovernmental organizations raising money to help defend the human race from its own creations. They include Saving Humanity from Homo Sapiens, the Lifeboat Foundation, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (of which Thiel is a backer). These may be worthy efforts, but how effective will they be? I’m skeptical, when I read that Thiel is known for his extreme views on taxes (there shouldn’t be any), women’s suffrage (it never should have happened), and his backing of an initiative to create a floating, visa-free “entrepreneurship and technology incubator” off the coast of San Francisco.

I believe in thinking outside of the box, but maybe smart young men would benefit from reading Leo Tolstoy as a counterbalance to Ayn Rand and competing to invent something cheap and useful for the bottom of the pyramid (the 99%).

The big exception to my Luddite tendencies is technology that allows me to be more creative. That explains why I spent almost $5,000 for the first Apple LaserWriter in 1986, started building Filemaker applications when the current version was 2 (it’s now 11), and am fascinated with new end-user development tools.

According some analysts, by 2014 end-user developers may constitute 25% of users in large organizations. Maybe when this happens, people like me will be able to tap a robust support system to help us identify and evaluate new tools and integrate new applications. For what these services might look like, see “End-user developers: A critical corporate asset.”

As much as I love the creativity, speed, and control of end-user development tools, I’m increasingly uneasy about “black box” automation. In “When algorithms control the world,” Jane Wakefield of the BBC describes a transatlantic cable between Canada and the UK built primarily to serve the needs of algorithmic traders, who will be able to send shares from London to New York and back in 60 milliseconds. She quotes Kevin Slavin, an algorithm expert, who says:

“We are running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications system that no humans will ever see.”

In “The Next Economic Revolution,” Alex Planes of The Motley Fool, questions the conventional wisdom that neither education nor entrepreneurship can solve the unemployment in a consumption-based economy. He says:

“Accepting a world in which human labor is largely supplanted by technological solutions requires us to radically re-imagine the foundations of our economy, which is a step most are not prepared to take.”

The geeky side of me can’t wait for next breakthrough in end-user development tools while the Luddite side is cautious about technology that promotes unsustainable growth or creates market instability.

Related articles

• The Personal Computer Is Dead (technologyreview.com)

Both Amazon and Google are creating ecosystems (not just new software features) that leverage the creative work of individuals to generate transaction or advertising revenue. In Amazon’s case, this means giving authors:

• direct access to data about book sales in individual markets;
• one-on-one communication between authors and readers that used to happen only on book tours;
• professional editorial and graphic design assistance.

The catch is that authors do not receive a cash advance, but their works are exposed in Amazon’s hugely popular electronic marketplace with nifty features like Search Inside This Book.

With YouTube’s new service, content creators can:

• search for legally re-usable videos from such organizations as C-CSPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, and others;
• mark their own videos with the Creative Commons CC-BY license so that others can use and remix their work.

Contrast those creator-friendly features with objectives from the Microsoft governance document (italics are mine):

• “… processes are understood and lines of communication follow predictable paths;
• business usage translates to business value via known pathways and is measurable;
• business users know how to use the available features as intended;
• usage growth is predictable and managed.”

From the IT point of view, predictability is good, maybe even necessary. But creative people are most valuable when they develop unconventional solutions, pursue out-of-network relationships, and use tools in new ways. True, creative effort in a business environment does need to be measured. The marketplace determines the metric for Amazon and Google, but for intranets, the yardstick is not so clear.

For “back room” corporate operations where efficiency and low cost are key objectives, meaningful metrics are fairly straightforward. For customer-facing functions, such as sales and product development, measurement of the sort described in the governance document is notorious for being inaccurate, irrelevant, or both.

Should large business and government organizations try to implement creator-friendly ecosystems like those offered by Amazon and Google? If so, how?

Image via Wikipedia

The IT world borrowed the taxonomy concept from biology to compensate for the fact that users didn’t know what to type in the search box. It was hard for them to figure out what a Web site was about and zero in on their area of interest. The taxonomy (a hierarchical list of topics) served as a Web site table of contents and, in some cases, the equivalent of a back-of-the-book topic index. Eventually, it was also used to make search engines “smarter” by letting users narrow search results by topic and display related information, such as a list of experts.

As we add bottom-up and inside-out relationships to the prevailing top-down model of content creation and search, taxonomies look less useful and harder to manage. What will replace them? A recent post on the Freebase forum by Paul Houle of Ontology² gives us a glimpse of what’s in store when we publish and subscribe to metadata in a semantic web format.

“One of my favorite oddities in Freebase is the case of ‘J. Edgar Hoover’, who, according to the auto-suggest,  has the primary type of “Film Actor.”  I guess that’s nominally true because he appears as himself in at least two films.

When I first saw his record,  he was typed as a “Politician” but there wasn’t any documentation of that — no fact about what office he’d held.  I felt uncomfortable with that typing because I thought a “Politician” was somebody who’d been elected or who ran for office, but looking at the docs I saw it could apply to an appointee as well.  I added a CVT to state that he was director of the FBI, but this still doesn’t communicate the importance of his position.

There are a number of ways to evaluate the “importance” of a topic by looking at relationships.  For instance,  if a topic has a lot of quads,  it means that somebody thought the topic was worth documenting.  You could also evaluate a movie by counting the rewards it has received or know that an actor is a :FamousActor if they’ve got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. All these scoring systems are imperfect, but faced with 22 million topics, you need to have some sense of priorities.

J. Edgar Hoover, one of the most powerful figures in U.S. politics in the 20th century, gets shortchanged by the simple scoring system because he’s not well documented. Call him a bureaucrat, call him a cop, call him a tyrant, Freebase doesn’t have a vocabulary to describe his career, so he gets consistently beat by the likes of :Elton_John unless you put some strong opinions in your T-box [schema].”

There are, of course, several good programs on the market that integrate metadata repositories with SharePoint, but my Filemaker database already does the thesaurus part (as well as many other things). I just needed the Filemaker/SharePoint connector.

Remember that you can import Excel-created csv files into SharePoint 2010, but SharePoint doesn’t have true thesaurus relationships. The advantage of using Filemaker is that you can create and customize databases with little or no help from a programmer. For more on this topic, see:

Integrating taxonomies with SharePoint BCS

How to create SharePoint taxonomies

Customizing & governing the SharePoint search system

“The not-native-to-either-party language is like a neutral territory, a halfway point where the joys and difficulties of communication are shared equally. I speak more slowly, knowing that my listeners may not ‘hear’ me like a native; they return the favor. We all leave out tricky turns of phrase.”

This kind of communication is essential in knowledge base publishing, even when all communication is in English. I think we tend to use the “phrase book” when communicating because it’s easier — you know, use terms like “Web 2.0″ or “taxonomy.” One problem is that the words can mean different things to different people. A bigger problem is that the term doesn’t convey the scope of the underlying ecosystem to the non-native speaker. The result is often poor decision-making and projects that fail to live up to their potential.

See also “Using plain language to build a brand“

Maybe I’m part of a trend.  In “Education needs a digital-age upgrade,” the author discusses the work of Cathy Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. In a new book, Now You See It, Davidson  says that she was appalled when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers. After studying the matter, she concluded, “Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.”

The same issue of the New York Times featured another article on the same theme. In When knowledge isn’t written, does it still count, the author discusses the idea that much has been lost to Wikipedia because of stickling rules of citation and verification. One example is dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India. Someone created a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children. According to current rules, the article would have been deleted from the English Wikipedia edition.

Does this mean we shouldn’t package knowledge in traditional vehicles like books and articles? Of course not. But those of us who learn, write, and teach for living need to experiment with new formats. Then the question becomes: when should we use one format instead of another, and what’s the most efficient data structure to store the raw material?

See also Packaging knowledge: the evolution of the book from the Montague Institute Review.

• bookmarking articles as I find them;
• selecting the ones I like for the current month’s issue;
• creating a record for each article in our knowledge base;
• exporting article metadata as RSS XML.

The main benefits of this approach are:

1) Metadata for ALL our content (regardless of source or format) is centralized in one data structure, which is under my control. There are no content migration issues. We also have a consistent tagging vocabulary and a very good search function.

2) Automatic feed generation. To produce the monthly RSS file, we simply run a database script that automatically creates the digest.xml file.

With the August issue of the Montague Institute Review, we will supplement RSS Digest entries at www.montaguelab.com/digest.xml with posts to this blog. Here’s why:

1) We can create more complete annotations that include graphics and links.

2) Our annotations can be augmented with reader comments.

3) We’ll be able to get better usage statistics.

The knowledge base will remain our primary content hub. It will contain records for locally stored, marked up copies of selected Digest articles, and it is the source of categories used on the blog.

Article in focus: “Interface lift” (Amy Wohl, IEEE Spectrum, November 2005).

More articles on this topic: See “usability and user behavior” in the Digest index or the Montague Institute Review index.

About the author. Amy Wohl is a consultant, newsletter publisher, and columnist for VARBusiness magazine. Prior to that, she was Executive Editor for Datapro Research Corporation, an IT research firm now owned by Gartner Group. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in economics. Her focus is primarily computer technology news.

About the publisher. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship publication of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), a professional association with more than 380,000 members.

Article summary. The next big thing in user interfaces is unlikely to be a single, all-purpose design, such as the current one that mimics folders and file cabinets. Instead, three new “metaphors” are emerging:

1) Web browsers (e.g. Firefox and Internet Explorer);

2) special purpose interfaces for browsing large document collections (e.g. Grokker and IBM’s WebFountain);

3) personal knowledge management programs (e.g. Evernote).

In designing new user interfaces for computers, you can either use radically new metaphors, software, or devices — and risk alienating experienced users — or you can make incremental improvements that exploit the familiarity and work habits of a large user base. It’s hard to do both.

What I liked. Interface metaphors are useful in expanding our view of how we interact with computers. For example, Wohl points out that FedEx drivers, retail clerks, and nurses have joined the ranks of “knowledge workers” alongside research scientists, business intelligence researchers, and marketing managers. Computer interfaces for these new knowledge roles may come not from the office but from the life sciences, the health care industry, or even the world of computer games.

Commentary. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when IT commentators miss the two most important information metaphors of the last 500 years — books and libraries. When libraries morph into portals, reference librarians cede their role to search engines, and books become electronic files, why bother with quaint artifacts like card catalogs, A – Z indexes, glossaries, and tables of contents? Two reasons: familiarity and utility.

The problem is that while old metaphors still have value, they need to be adapted to today’s publishing realities, where databases, Web sites, text, graphics, and interactivity merge. It’s a delusion to think that people who’ve grown up using card catalogs and A – Z indexes will be satisfied with search engine results — even with fancy starburst graphics or embedded taxonomies.

On the other hand, it’s crazy to ignore ways to extend the library and book metaphors with modern electronic tools, giving users the ability to:

• search the full text of a book;
• create and annotate a personal “card catalog” of sources (including books, Web pages, electronic documents, and people);
• connect source materials to contact information about the people who authored or recommended them;
• share and link personal libraries with colleagues through a system of categories and keywords.

For an example of a traditional back-of-the-book A – Z index updated for use with an electronic journal and Web site, see the Montague Institute index.

Is the the library/book publishing metaphor is too expensive for today’s infoglut, as many IT professionals seem to believe? After all, who has time to catalog and index millions of documents by hand? This view makes sense if you look at corporate intranets as giant information warehouses. More realistically, they are aggregations of personal and departmental libraries, coffee houses, war rooms, jam sessions, labs, and news rooms as well as factories and counting houses.

The concept of “expensive” is relative. A $1 million expense might look significant if potential savings per unit of output are relatively small, largely invisible, and hard to measure. On the other hand, the same figure might look paltry if the upside is large (e.g. a blockbuster new product or a multi-million dollar deal) and the outcome is highly visible. The “expense” might shrink even further if participants are willing to create, categorize, and tag documents on a volunteer basis (as they do in information sharing communities like Flickr and del.icio.us).

Metaphors based on things (e.g. books or inventory items), transactions (e.g. sales), or numbers (e.g. finance) tend to be backward-looking, passive, and focused on cost reduction. Metaphors based on relationships and collaboration (e.g. customer lifetime value, new product development, or new business models) tend to be forward-looking, proactive, and focused primarily on quality and results. Cost is a secondary consideration.

Metaphors are seductive but tricky. For example, Wohl uses a retail metaphor to describe how clerks become “knowledge workers” by entering inventory data into a store’s database as they stock the shelves. But this is only the back end of the retail metaphor. On the front end, where the customer meets the inventory, many metaphors are available — independent boutique, global discount chain, “embedded” store (e.g. college bookstore or hospital gift shop), electronic garage sale, or something not invented yet. In designing user interfaces, there’s too much focus on back end metaphors and not enough on the front end.

I like to play with new programs and devices as much as anyone, but what I find most interesting are products and services that make it easy for people to express their own metaphors using computer tools. This, I think, explains the popularity of services like Google maps (which allows you to add a geographic dimension to data such as crime reports and real estate listings) and Filemaker (which allows non-technical people to create database applications). These products turn the idea of “usability” on its head and change the focus from back end to front end. Traditionally, programmers write applications and test them on users. Another alternative is for users to create applications and tinker with them until they work hand-in-glove with the task at hand. User-developers would only need to consult a programmer when they get stuck or need to exchange data with another application.

Bottom line. Metaphors are great, and we should certainly open our minds to new models for human-computer interaction. But at the same time, we need to broaden our perspective by adapting metaphors from libraries, print publishing and other models, and reassess the way we calculate the cost of creating, organizing and presenting information.