Digital Industrial Park

Hal Varian asked a very good question. “What’s scarce in today’s economy?”

The answer is attention. Psychologist Herb Simon declared in 1971, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. We could argue that this is exponentially more crucial today as media fragments into a thousand devices and the concept of dayparts becomes a distant memory. In the last post I was talking about how important it is to provide the necessary coordination, collaboration, and comprehension as we leverage the entire global ecosystem, humming along in glorious harmony as a symphony of efficiency.

In the old corporate organizational model, everyone fed information up the food chain to the top, to the one who was the decision maker. It doesn’t work that way anymore because information is available across the entire organization. In fact, we are awash in data. What is lacking is the necessary coordination, collaboration and context that makes the data actionable. But even if we had that, there is still a missing component: something that takes into account our capacity to pay attention at the time we require the information.

The matter of attention was reintroduced in 2001 when the Attention Economy rolled out. This is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

Attention is an issue for advertising agencies and it is an issue for business information systems. The ability to take data and process it, understand it, visualize it, and extract value from it is going to be an incredibly important skillset in the coming years. In fact, if I was going to be choosing a career for myself, it would be…drumroll…Data Visualization. (Here are some great examples from the good people at Smashing).

Think about it, the people who are able to help make sense out of this roiling sea of data are going to be rock stars. I’ve got your attention now, don’t I?

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Musings, Uncategorized, design, metrics, project management

There was a time in recent history when companies, specifically those in the service industry, started touting the fact that they were “global”, “worldwide” or part of a “global network”. The pitch to clients was that they could leverage the entire global ecosystem that hummed along in glorious harmony as a symphony of efficiency. It sounded good but in truth, these companies were frequently at war with themselves, sometimes even unable to play well with departments in the same building let alone strangers in other offices on the other side of the world.

Some companies were more fiercely competitive with groups within their own company than they were with competitors in the marketplace. Some of them still are. If you know any big, happy, dysfunctional families, it will look familiar.

So what about this global work? Can it work? It needs to work because what was once a convenient talking point is now critical to survival.

The potential benefits of global work are obvious. It promises unprecedented flexibility and access to almost unlimited markets and resources. These advantages compel the leaders and managers of organizations to think globally because they know they are unlikely to survive if they do not. But reaping the benefits depends on doing global work well, and that is way easier said than done. Global work is new and different – it calls for new frames, a new vocabulary, and different design principles. No one (myself included) yet fully grasps what strategies, structures, practices, processes, and technology it requires.

Back in 1995, when the internet started gaining traction, the utopian idea of the global economy as the free flow of knowledge, resources, and goods came front and center. But it ignored the realities of power, politics, language, culture, regulation, and environmental issues that influence every aspect of business. “Global networks” yielded some benefits but in some cases they became studies in tribal warfare.

Here’s a salient fact that somehow got lost for awhile: The most valuable knowledge cannot be readily documented or easily shifted from its original context to a new one.

And, at the risk of being a Master of the Obvious: Even the most sophisticated communications technology does not automagically create the necessary coordination, collaboration, and comprehension.

In the next post we’ll take a look at what to do about all this.

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design, innovation, project management communications, global, technology, work

What constitutes work these days? It’s a subject I’ve been pondering recently because 1) I have the time to do so and 2) the answer will determine where the money is spent in the coming years. I went back to my notebook and sure enough, I found some notes on the subject.

Offshoring and automation have really changed what work looks like over the last decade. At a high level, work can be divided into two groups; transformational activities and transactional activities. Transformational activities are things like production and manufacturing and transactional activities are clerical work and simple, rule-based activities. Offshoring and automation pumped a whole lot of efficiency into those two areas, so what’s left? What do we do all day?

One could argue that work in the US, Europe, and Japan could be reduced to a simple equation:
Work = Interactions

What are these interactions? The are negotiations, conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad-hoc collaboration. This is where value is created when we say “work” and, more importantly, it’s where the opportunity lives.

The focus in the coming year shouldn’t be about efficiencies, it should be about focusing on interactions that create value by ensuring the right information at the right time with the right context.

This means that we need to create managerial innovations – smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value though interactions. If done well, this will create a competitive advantage that will be difficult for competitors to replicate…but it’s not easy work.

One of the first issues that companies will run into is that the return on investment of automating transactioanl activities is a whole lot easier to quantify than investments in making interactions more effective.

That is going to be a very interesting conversation between the CMO and the CFO.

Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging (but critical) for management this year because this is the time when competitive advantage will be gained…or lost.

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Uncategorized

About a year ago, Doug Weaver from the Upstream Group and I were talking about what a “post-broadcast” world looks like. Both Doug and I like to make up names for things and, if I remember correctly, Doug came up with the phrase post-broadcast to describe the networked world after the decline of broadcast media. His point was that advertising  had become synonymous with broadcasting, one-to-many, intrusive communications and that the time for that had passed.

I agreed then and we see the supporting evidence of that now.

Doug had started his career in media sales and I in advertising creative so the risk of pronouncing things to be “post-broadcast” were colored by the possibility that we were two middle-aged guys declaring the world had changed when, in fact, it was us who had changed. Perhaps both are true but I believe he was on to something.

There is a fair amount of evidence that has appeared just in the last year alone to support the concept of a post-broadcast world.

The Mumbai attacks were covered faster and more thoroughly on Twitter than they were on CNN.

Facebook has become the world’s addressbook. On the campus of Virginia Tech in November I overheard a student ask another student if he wanted another guys phone number and the reply was “Nah, he’s on Facebook.”. That’s a networked world for you!

This brings us to the most curious thing to come out of CES2009 this year: the announcement of Yahoo! Connected TV Widgets.

I used to work with Andrew Frank a few years back in New York and, like Doug Weaver, I found him to be a consistent font of insight and clarity. Andrew says that Yahoo! “took a pole position in the Internet-TV convergence race by partnering with Intel and securing deals with Samsung, Sony, LG and, Vizio to include the Yahoo! TV Widget engine in TV sets scheduled to hit the market this spring”.

This hastens the post-broadcast world in very real and meaningful ways. Andrew goes on to say, “Yahoo! also augmented its “open strategy” by revealing an open TV widget developers’ kit (WDK) and ecosystem that will allow any developers to create TV widgets, have them reviewed by Yahoo!, and (if appropriate) get them listed in Yahoo!’s (or anyone else’s) on-screen (PC & TV) directory. ITV is here at last.”

Andrew’s excellent post, The New Face of Convergence at CES can be found here.

The takeaway here is that the next big Internet-driven disruption in media is that bastion of broadcast: television.

It’s a post-broadcast world. Welcome.

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The simple truths are the best.

Over the past few months I have been wrestling with business plans, branding elements, infrastructure issues and a laundry list of things that go into creating something new. Blank canvas theory, as illustrated in David Bayles’ Art & Fear, does a good job of describing what to expect. Hello Exhilaration. Hello Terror.

During the holiday week, I have been enjoying reading (and re-reading) Matthew Fredericks’, “101 Things I learned in Architecture School”and #81 is one of my favorites because it is so true.

# 81 Properly gaining control of the design process tends to feel like one is losing control of the design process.

The design process if often structured and methodical, but it is not a mechanical process. Mechnical processes have predetermined outcomes, but the creative process strives to produce something that has not existed before. Being genuinely creative means that you don’t know where you are going, even though you are responsible for shepharding the process. This requires something different from conentional, authoritarian conrtol; a loose velvet tether is more likely to help.
Engage the design process with patience. Don’t imitate popular portrayals of the creative process depending ona singular, pell-mell rush of inspiration…Accept uncertainty. Recognize as normal the feeling of lostness that attends to much of the process. Don’t seek to relieve your anxiety by marrying yourself prematurely to a design solution; design divorces are never pretty.

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design creative, design, process

It’s New Year’s Day, a day about which U2 sang that, “nothing happens”. But it does. It’s just never the thing that we expect, is it?

This is the time of year for predictions and this is what I was pondering on my walk this brilliantly sunny New Year’s Day of 2009. Americans love predictions. We have made them for as long as I have been alive. We have fretted about them, marveled at them, and just generally made them with alarming frequency.

Predictions have generally been divided into two discreet camps; the first is the Doom Camp, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984, where the world is dark and oppressive and just generally doomed. The second is the Perpetual Progress camp like Shangri-La, John Maynard Keyne’s Leisure Society, anything with jetpacks, and pretty much everything at the 1964 World’s Fair.
Both predictions of the future are persuasively argued…and both never come true. Right? The astounding thing, the truly astounding thing, is that what actually happens is always exponentially bigger than any of the predictions!

Both the Doom camp and the Progress camp of predictions are underpinned by an ordered world. But we don’t live in an ordered world, do we? At least not ordered by our definition of ordered.
Think about it, we don’t really ever see the defining moments until they have already happened. Marconi sending the first radio transmission, little Japan attacking great, big America, Hitler, Hiroshima, the 1969 Mets, heart transplants, Watergate, the Internet, 9/11, O.J. Simpson (both times), global financial collapse; inevitably, what actually happens is infinitely more compelling than the predictions. Curiously, the seemingly surrealistic world that is, is infinitely more interesting than the prognostications.

The hallmark of American predictions (the ones that aren’t about doom) are the ones of progress. These are the every-greater, ever-better prognostications that have defined American predictions since the 1950’s. But did you know that this connotation of the word progress is a relatively new connotation?

That’s right, only around the late 1800’s, the early 1900’s did Americans start to think in terms of the word progress meaning continuous improvement. Before that time we tended to think in terms of “change”.
Interesting, isn’t it? It is worth noting that President –Elect Obama’s presidential campaign slogan was “Real change”. That Americans seized upon the notion of change is notable. For the previous fifty years we have been obsessed with the impossible notion of ever-upwards progress.

Real change isn’t just a campaign promise, it’s an inevitability. My hope for 2009 is that it signals a return to wisdom and understanding that might have gotten away from us in the name of progress.

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Musings American, change, Musings, progress

Talk about perfect timing. New York-based SecondMarket has created a virtual marketplace for illiquid assets. Things like, say, those trillions of dollars worth of real estate loans that everyone on the planet is wondering what to do with.

http://www.secondmarket.com/

In the U.S., either the banks are going to have to figure out what to do with their debt or the government is going to set up a Resolution Trust Corporation-style sort of solution. Either way, SecondMarket looks like a very, very good idea.

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innovation banking, digital, innovation, virtual marketplace

If you aren’t familiar with boxee, their goal is nothing less than putting cable out of business. No small task. Boxee is a media center interface for aggregating both locally stored and streaming movies, TV shows, music, photos and more. Whitney Hess will be leading the redesign of the user experience and it is a fascinating project because boxee is a critical time in their development. They’ve got loyal early adopters but it needs some work before it gets rolled out to the masses (and if they want o beat cable at it’s own game it has to work really, really well. Computer users have much higher standards than TV viewers. It’s weird but true. Two boxes, two different sets of expectations.)

Here’s how Whitney Hess describes the project in front of her, “So I have quite a challenge ahead of me — how do I preserve the existing elements of delight while making the app more scalable, more social, more effective and easier to use by a larger audience?

I’m starting off by doing usability testing with current alpha users, using boxee both on laptops and TV set-ups, and will additionally conduct interviews with prospective boxee users to learn their media consumption behaviors, attitudes, motivations and frustrations. Together these findings will be brought to light in a small set of user personas and scenarios, from which the necessary features for the ideal experience will emerge. Working closely with the boxee team, I’ll develop a set of wireframes to communicate how the features should be woven together in the most useful, usable, pleasurable way, screen by screen. From there the visual designer and developers will bring the product to life, infusing all of the sleekness and fluidity you’ve come to love so much. And all together we’ll test it, and validate it with users, and tweak it and test it again. On and on and on until we’re ready to launch beta.”

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Uncategorized boxee, usability

If you’re an advertiser/marketer and you’ve got questions about the opportunities ahead of us in digital, you’ll want to spend 31:24 listening to what Jeffrey Cole has to say. Television moves out of the home and becomes pervasive and mobile will be at the center of everything digital…but that synopsis doesn’t begin to do it justice.

On the past:
“In 1946 4.3 billion movie tickets were sold. By last year the population doubled so we would have needed to sell 9 billion tickets. Instead we sold. 1.4 billion. The movies are a shell of what they used to be but the theatrical film business is a thriving, high-profile business and it is not a coincidence that it reached its peak in 1946 on the eve of the introduction of television.”

Even more interesting than the history lesson is his view of the digital future and the ensuing discussion.

Hint: John Wanamaker’s conundrum will be answered, “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half.”

VIDEO HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJHZEAjO4h4

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Uncategorized digital, future, jeffrey cole, media, mobile, television

The “Internet of Things” to refers to the general idea of things, especially everyday objects, that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and/or controllable via the Internet. This ties into the business planning that was mentioned in the previous post on “Tools“. These innovations are exactly the kind of things we will be vetting out as we plan out our new business:

“Ideally, the following use cases could be common in ten to fifteen years. To complete shopping in bricks-and-mortar retail stores, customers could simply walk through doorways to check out, debit accounts, and receive e-receipts that they can inspect via the displays on their cell phones. A soldier could rapidly learn how to perform a maintenance procedure by scanning an item of equipment using a handheld device and reading the device’s display. Handheld devices could become not only information sources but universal remote controls for the environment—user interfaces for engaging lights and appliances, locating misplaced and loosely-organized objects, diagnosing problems with systems, and controlling tele-operated objects from greater or lesser distances.”

The Internet of Things (PDF) appears to have ben coined by a member of the RFIDS development community around 2000. I would suggest downloading the PDF, printing it out, and thinking about some of the ideas put forth in the paper. As always, think big, because NOW is when the game will change.

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Uncategorized addressable, Business Model Innovation, Innovation Process, internet of things, locatable, recognizable, rfid