Today we think it would be laughable in most enterprises to have a VP for electricity: but we do all have CIOs or VPs or Directors of information technology, don't we? We saw IT as transformational, and too important not to be a focus of our enterprises.

But now that we all have networked computers and Windows NT servers (or, in some cases, even better technology), can IT still be said to be transformational?

Well... I guess the answer comes down to how well you use it. Some companies - FedEx comes to mind - really revolutionized their industry by using IT, and became leaders. Elsewhere, IT has just been what you replaced the typewriters with. So it's not just having IT when others didn't that confers an advantage, IMHO, which means I may be agreeing with Bill Gates, as quoted here. If others are using IT poorly, which I think is the norm, those who use it well can still benefit. Nicholas Carr (see below) has a point, though... IT is becoming a commodity in some sense... IBM and others are even talking about selling it that way...
Comments 8:43:30 PM    

What works (so far): VueScan, Canon N656U scanner, Nikon Coolscan III SCSI film scanner, xawtv w/cheap generic TV tuner card. What doesn't work (so far) SANE, gtkam, SIIG USB CF card reader. We'll keep working on it... and if you think I'm nuts going through the pain with a house full of Macs, then, yeah, right, you prolly have a point...
Comments 1:44:58 PM    

It's not an easy topic: prediction is always difficult ("especially about the future" said Niels Bohr). But I am of the belief that we are heading into totally uncharted waters, and the symptoms of this sea-change are beginning to appear in almost every endeavor I can think of.

Take yesterday's massive demonstrations in Paris: they have been a number of truly huge demos in the past couple of years. Unlike the demos of my 1960's youth, these demos were put together in a very different fashion from the ones that I once walked, banner in hand.

Today's demos are organized by very small groups, with a fraction of the infrastructure and chain of command that were common in my day peace-marching days. We don't see the faces of charismatic leaders or hear the names of cryptically acronymic organizations: instead we see hundreds of thousands of people appear, sometimes in dozens of cities at once.

Howard Rheingold has written a book about the phenomenon, Smart Mobs, in which he shows how groups as diverse as peacemarchers and Chechnyan rebels use modern networking tools to acheive often surprising results.

It's interesting that I don't recall predictions about the rise of such phenomenon, and only now do we see perceptive chroniclers describing what's already happening in our midst. This behavior has just appeared: and I think that it's significant.

Smart mobs are an emergent phenomenon, the kinds of things that occur in complex systems that are governed by surprisingly few, and simple rules. When humans look at ant communities, we often marvel at the degree of organization, and assume that there is some central plan, and command-and-control system to make it all work. The reality is different, say researchers: each ant has a relatively simple set of behaviors that produce, as if by magic, the wondrous, if occasionally annoying, industry that we observe. There is no master plan, per se, and the queen's only job is to procreate, not lead (sorry Antz fans).

Emergence has been chronicled in systems as diverse as cities and the growth of embyos. Like other concepts that have emerged from the study of complex and chaotic systems, it is non-intuitive. And this is problematic, in my opinion.

Intuition is one of the most powerful tools available to humankind: I regard it as a way to solve problems by taking advantage of a million-year-old pattern recognition machine that has kept life on this planet against unbelievable odds. But I also think that intuition breaks whenever there is a big enough discontinuity.

Another time this happened was when Sir Isaac Newton, the archetypal lone genius, completely changed the world with his descriptions of what is now known as classical physics. Newton paved the way for modern scientific method, and rapid advances in technology have quickly followed ever since. Many in the 18th century, Voltaire was one, were dumbstruck by the changes: some then-prevalent human institutions (e.g. the Catholic Church) took hundreds of years to assimilate the knowledge.

And the church's slow response was probably one of the things that has lead to its long decline in influence. So how are today's human institutions going to survive?

I think they will survive by coming to grips quickly with the new 'physics' of the networked marketplace, And I don't think that they will need to get it perfectly right, but they will need to 'get it'. And I think you'll see that the ones that do will prosper. If 100,000 people can self-assemble around a political issue, are there ways to help 10,000 people, even, self-assemble as customers?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. The methods are not obvious, and are still being learned: they almost certainly represent a turning of classical marketing thinking on its head. Enough for now... will be coming back to thius topic, and offering some news about same in a day or three...
Comments 11:20:39 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures