Bruce MacVarish Notes

Datarati are skilled in Data Analytics + Design

2009-10-27T16:01:39-04:00

[ I believe ] that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it's all about harnessing supply and demand.

"What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.

Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google , Wired - May 2009

"Designers versed in data may uncover trends or insights that not only yield better products but new product or business ideas as well."

Luke Wroblewski, Sr. Director, Product Ideation & Design, Yahoo

Evolving toward a People-Centric, Real-Time Web

2009-10-20T11:42:30-04:00

There are plenty of reasons to consider the collaborative opinions of Chris Messina and Jyri Engstrom. Chris is a champion of the open web and leads/contributes to the DiSo Project, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, activitystrea.ms and Portable Contacts initiatives. Jyri is the founder of Jaiku, one of the first real-time microblogging social / mobile apps acquired by Google. Both Chris and Jyri have co-authored a post outlining their vision for the next phase of the web and describe it as a "people-centric, real-time web":

"It’s 2009, going on 2010. For the past three years, the web has been morphing into a real-time and people-centric place. We’ve seen this trend among individual users — through their actions and demands for better social experiences — but also increasingly among companies and developers. We want a web that’s more “like us” than the old model was. We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents."

Both Chris and Jyri recently presented at Mindtrek where they outlined their perspectives on the value of taking control over our personal identity, our activity streams and social objects as the people-centric, real-time web emerges.

Chris presented Identity is the Platform with a focus on data capital and social objects centered on our personal identity across the open web:

1. Data Capital - All the data we're creating as personal activity streams has value ... and we should control access / use

2. Social Objects - Activity streams related to our "social objects" are meaningful and valuable too

Jyri presented Snack Size Sociality outlining how the battle for the people-centric, real-time web will focus on 4 important areas:

1. People's identity
2. Activity Stream Routing
3. The Social Inbox
4. Real-time Search

I think it is valuable to consider both of Chris's and Jyri's Mindtrek presentations together as an indication of how they see the People Centric, Real-Time Web emerging. They've pointed to key enablers that include:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example.

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies a la the DiSo Project:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

While it is early days in this next phase of web innovation, we'll see progress and proof points continue to emerge in the consumer space. So let's say we see the emergence of a people centric real-time web as envisioned by Chris and Jyri.

What might that mean for the enterprise?

How and when will this set of building block technologies impact the enterprise space and create new value for business users?

Is it reasonable to think that the enterprise will embrace a people-centric, real-time web, when they've had a hard time embracing the social web?

PS: I'm a big fan of the opportunity and user value to be generated by "conversation threading" and have been pushing an enterprise Sensing, Threading, Sharing strategy for a while now...

Visualizing Meaning and Seeing Sentiment

2009-10-16T09:03:49-04:00

information aesthetics (where form follows data) continues to provide insight and leadership on information visualization. I like the current post highlighting Pecha Kucha's presentation at Ignite Salt Lake (see below) with Mattias Shapiro discussing how different data visualization techniques can be used to determine what particular datasets are telling us.

In the Conversation / Attention / Engagement Economy, conversation analytics will become increasingly important. Being able to quickly visualize meaning and see the sentiment of the conversations we engage will be extremely valuable to users and to brands.

The Future of Games @ Work

2009-10-15T10:39:16-04:00

"Applying Principles of Game Design to Engage Business Users"

A recent survey of over 70 Fortune 500 CIO's identified enabling "collaboration across remote locations" as one of their significant challenges over the next 3 years. Yet, we have seen a number of different applications and technologies developed to address the problem of collaboration across a distributed workforce. Audio Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Social Software, Mobility solutions and more have all emerged as communication and collaboration apps focused on helping users collaborate across remote locations.

In most cases, these collaborative technologies have been deployed for some time and are available for today's business users. But many of these tools are under utilized by enterprise users. While some business users will never be ready or willing to adopt next generation comm & collaboration applications, I believe that most are ready... they just need to be fully engaged.

Most communication and collaboration applications are on the path to improving the overall user experience, but to engage business users it will take more than just clean interaction design or appealing visual design. Yes, understanding the job, the needs or behaviors of a business user and integrating that into the interaction flow of a collaboration application is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

To engage business users in a compelling and continuously productive collaboration experience, enterprise apps need to tap the user's individual motivation, unleash the user's curiosity and align the user's incentives, unique skills and social networks. Are there proxies for this type of engagement? Yes; in multiplayer gaming applications. A powerful example of users who are engaged in self-motivated, aligned, collaborative efforts can be found in massive, multi-player on-line games.

Today’s massive multiplayer online (MMO) games provide powerful and engaging collaboration software that appeals to the user's motivation, curiosity and social awareness. To me, they hint at important design elements for future enterprise collaboration applications. Nick Yee at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Stanford's VHIL has focused his research on social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments. According to Yee, "..the purpose of of all video games is to train players to work harder while still enjoying it. The success of on-line games demonstrates how seductive and concealed the work treadmill can be." Imagine if you could get your work colleagues to collaborate at the same level of engagement and collaboration found in MMOs. It is coming.

Many business users in the enterprise today are playing MMO games and the numbers will increase. As a result, we should expect to see their impact on the communication & collaboration market. Just as we're seeing the social / Web 2.0 generation demand social collaboration software at work, the emerging MMO generation of business users will demand that their work experience mirror in some way the engagement and enjoyment of their gaming experience.

Games at Work are becoming serious business. A number of academic and industry researchers have been investigating how MMOs deliver both user engagement and collaborative productivity across remote or distributed locations.

By applying the insights of researchers like Jane McGonigal, Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, Nick Yee, Byron Reeves and IBM, we can draft a set of guiding principles worth considering as we envision future communication and collaboration applications in the enterprise. Let's take a quick look at the research of Jane, Byron and IBM to highlight the opportunity of engaging users through game design:

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being. Jane's research scope extends from analyzing and forecasting the "Engagement Economy" at the Institute for the Future, to helping create the genre of "Alternate Reality Games" (ARGs) that connect game worlds with the real world. Her work highlights that collaborative MMOs succeed because they offer clear boundaries, a shared problem and build a community of collaboration. Jane's vision of the "Engagement Economy" builds on her research of human engagement and behaviors of players in successful, extreme scale collaboration MMOs. Based on her research, MMO games succeed because they fully engage the user by providing:

(1) Satisfying Work to Do
(2) Experience at Being Good at Something
(3) Time spent with people they like
(4) The chance of being part of something Bigger

Byron Reeves is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industrial affiliate program, Media X. He is also on the Board of Directors for Seriosity - a company he co-founded with J. Leighton Reed. From the Seriosity web site:

Seriosity's mission is to change the way people work together in functions requiring a high level of collaboration, communication, and feedback in today's information-intensive business environments.

Our software products and services improve collaboration, innovation, and leadership by using game principles that create focus and motivation to align personal and corporate goals. Up to now, these design elements have been missing from traditional enterprise software applications.

We combine the best of these principles to create a synthetic economy, tailor-made for today’s information-intensive enterprise. Combined with our applications to support knowledge workers, the Seriosity solution facilitates a dynamic marketplace of ideas, attention, analysis, persuasion, and resource allocation.

IBM and Seriosity have done in depth research to understand how multiplayer online game environments in the virtual world apply to the business world to enhance productivity, innovation and leadership in a distributed world. Researchers studied people who headed up teams in online games and they also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM. Their most important finding is that getting the leadership environment right can be as important as choosing the right leader. They point out important aspects of game environments that companies might consider adopting as part of their communication and collaboration strategy.

So, what are the guiding principles of game design that we might apply to improve engagement and productivity of communication / collaboration apps for business users across the enterprise? The details can be found in the research linked here... and numerous other resources found in the fields of game theory, game design and game psychology... but here's the start of a draft list:

Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work - DRAFT

Make it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration.

I'll continue to refine and add to this draft list of guiding principles. With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

All Spokes, No Hub

2009-10-05T16:22:16-04:00

"Conceivably the next great media company will be all spokes and no hub. It will exist as a constellation of connected apps and widgets that live inside other sites and offer a full experience plus access to your social graph and robust community features." Steve Rubel

Adjacent Growth Strategies for Adobe

2009-09-23T09:19:03-04:00

Adobe continues to push into adjacent markets for growth. After the $1.8B acquisition of Omniture, Adobe announced it is working with Gigya - a social media authentication and distribution platform - to create a new service that helps advertisers and developers make web and mobile applications more social, collaborative and monetizable.

"During an IAB MIXX keynote, Adobe Systems Inc. announced the launch of a new service that lets advertisers and publishers promote, measure and monetize applications across social networks and mobile devices.

Called Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution, it consists of online, hosted services that let developers add capabilities to Web applications with a predictable deployment model. Targeting developers, advertisers and publishers, Adobe Flash Platform Services are designed to help clients make Web applications sharable, social, collaborative and monetizable."

Adobe is creating a centralized dashboard that helps developers and advertisers promote, track, optimize and monetize adoption of their web apps and promotional media across multiple social networks and mobile platforms.

Both the Omniture acquisition and this new Distribution platform highlight Adobe's push for growth by entering near adjacencies with new products for their existing customers.

Recognizing Winners vs. Losers

2009-09-18T13:47:55-04:00

" When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser."

Paul Graham on Post Medium Publishing

Humanizing the Enterprise: Unlocking Value of Real-time Conversations & Relationships

2009-09-17T16:43:16-04:00

Once a month, I look back a year to see what I posted 12 months earlier as a way to see how things have evolved and to gauge what was interesting to me at the time. The concept of creating new value for users by unlocking real-time conversations and providing insight into the reach and expertise of a user's true social graph based on interactions remains very relevant one year later.

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In 1999, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke released The Cluetrain Manifesto outlining a number of insights on the rise of the internet, its ability to empower individuals and the impact it would have on business. The subtitle to the book declared "the end of business as usual".

The introduction to the book includes a description of how "a powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies".

Ten years later, companies are trying to get smarter faster by embracing many of the opportunities and implications of networked markets, customers and employees as outlined in the Cluetrain. Following the lead and lessons of consumer centric Web 2.0 applications, the enterprise software industry is realizing there is significant opportunity for differentiation and new growth. Whether you call it the "Consumerization of IT", Web 2.0 in the Enterprise or Enterprise 2.0, it is clear that consumer innovations are inspiring enterprise innovations and transforming the workplace for all of us.

An Enterprise is the sum of its Transactions, Conversations and Relationships

The first of the 95 Cluetrain theses stated "Markets are Conversations".

If "Markets are Conversations", paraphrasing Doc, then "the Enterprise is the sum of its Transactions, Conversations and Relationships" supporting and interacting with markets. Transactional activity from processing new orders, to inventory requests to billing and field service reports represents structured processes and structured information generated at each step of the enterprise value chain. In addition, as these transactions are executed, there are numerous conversations that occur within the enterprise, across collaboration teams, within functions and externally with customers, suppliers and partners. These conversations come in the form of meetings, phone calls, conference calls, web conferences, emails, instant messages and increasingly wikis or blogs. These transactions and conversations are supported and complemented by the various levels of strong and loose relationships between colleagues, customers and communities across the business.

The Soul of Enterprise Software will be found in User Conversations and Relationships

In May 2006, Google's GM Enterprise, Dave Girouard referred to the current state of enterprise software as being "bereft of soul" saying:

"This is Darwinism. In the world of consumer technology you either meet the end user's needs or you're finished very quickly. Innovation is happening in the consumer world. Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. It is designed for business not for humans."

Thinking about the enterprise as the flow of all the transactions, conversations and relationships focused on the development, delivery and support of products and services to customers provides an interesting framework for how the enterprise software industry will evolve with the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 innovations.

For the last 15+ years, the enterprise software industry has focused on organizing and optimizing the value of transactions. The emergence of ERP, SCM and CRM software markets worth billions of dollars annually have, for the most part, focused on innovations that structure and track enterprise transactions across numerous business processes. Improvements in the scale and reliability of business process software, database infrastructure and transaction reporting and analytics have helped drive process efficiency gains across the enterprise.

In the next 15+ years, as Enterprise 2.0 emerges and matures, the enterprise software industry will be focused on organizing and optimizing the flow of conversations and relationships for enterprise users and customers. While continuing to optimize transactions will be important, innovation and new value for users will come from the "humanizing" impact found in sensing, threading and sharing user conversations and relationships with and across the enterprise. Today, much of the conversational and social content - and related metadata - generated by the volume of interactions with and across the enterprise has been locked away. The value untapped.

As Enterprise 2.0 innovations emerge, the soul of the enterprise will be found in enabling users to follow and filter the flow of their most important, most relevant conversations and relationships with colleagues, customers and communities.

Microsoft Windows Live Activity Streams

2009-09-16T10:47:56-04:00

Chris Messina points to Microsoft's support of the open standard Activity Streams as part of Windows Live:

"Seeing large players adopt the activity streams format is good for the open web ecosystem. It’s good for individual choice and for enabling market-based mechanisms that encourage competition and good behavior. It enables the decentralization of reading and publishing, and provides individuals with a record of both what their friends are doing as well as what they themselves have done. And these things are all good for the development of the people-centric social web."

Skype as a Service ... not a Client

2009-09-14T10:33:11-04:00

From Michael Arrington's conversation with Skype CEO Jonathan Christensen:

"Eventually, we suspect, Skype will release a SDK that allows developers to integrate deep into Skype and make calls over the Skype service without opening the Skype client. In other words, people may start to think of Skype (voice, video, chat) as a service rather than a client that must be installed and used to communicate. Today’s tools, which include a public API and the now defunct Extras program, require developers to open the Skype client to make a call."

Augmented Reality + Communications

2009-09-09T10:49:13-04:00

Nokia has created a short video clip providing a glimpse of what we could expect when augmented reality and communications ( what I've been calling augmented communications ) come together to create a new user experience.

Their vision combines AR glasses, 3D audio, haptic bracelet, sensors and mobile cloud services to create a seamless integration of "mixed reality" communications and media.

In the last 6 months we've seen the introduction of augmented reality browsers (see wikitude and layar) and a number of AR enabled applications (see yelp) emerge. While it is still early in the evolution of AR applications and network infrastructure, it is moving forward quickly. Portions of Nokia's vision are not that far away.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb offered 5 barriers to an AR web that is everywhere. His list provides great guidance for all AR applications. If I narrow the focus to outline 5 hurdles critical to broad adoption of Augmented Communication applications, we get:

Ensure Augmented Communications must be Secure and Spam-Free
Create Augmented Communications Apps that are Social and Real-time (not solitary and cached)
Deliver a compelling Augmented Communications User Experience (not just a cool UI)
Develop an Augmented Communications platform that interoperates with other AR apps
Enable developers to create new Augmented Communication apps from your Open platform

With these 5 guiding principles in mind, take a look at Nokia's video clip and think about the opportunity to create new value for users through Augmented Communications.

Expertise Analysis & Ranking with the SPEAR Algorithm

2009-09-02T11:23:23-04:00

Michael G. Noll a CS Ph.D. candidate at Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany and Ching-man Au Yeung a PhD candidate in CC at the University of Southampton, UK have developed the SPEAR algorithm.

The SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious.

From their post on the Delicious blog:

A major problem of the Internet today is that finding high quality information is not easy nor fast. The steady increase of spam and junk content on the Web further complicates this challenge. Another related issue is that finding knowledgeable and trustworthy users on social platforms like Delicious is much more difficult than it should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if Delicious recommended “good” users with similar interests?

To tackle this problem, we created the SPEAR algorithm that analyzes the timeline of the bookmarking and tagging activities of users. The focus of SPEAR is on the ability of users to find new, high quality information on the Internet. A great benefit of SPEAR is that it returns two very useful sets of results: first, a list of users ranked by their expertise; and second, a list of websites ranked by their quality.

Technically, SPEAR is based on the well-known information retrieval algorithm HITS, a technique presented in 1999 that is used by search engines to rank Web pages. We came up with SPEAR by modifying HITS so that it fits to the characteristics of open and shared systems like Delicious and extended it with a new component that integrates the timeline of user activities into its analysis. This resulted in further performance improvements of the algorithm.

The two main elements of the new SPEAR algorithm are:

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user’s expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.

2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers – they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents. In other words, “the early bird catches the worm”. SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

The combination of both these elements has the effect that SPEAR favors quality over quantity of user actions, and that the algorithm is quite resistant to today’s spamming attacks.

We believe SPEAR is very useful in the context of open systems, particularly, social networks. That said, we are already researching the next version of the algorithm – the popularity of online services like Delicious is rising, and so is the spam threat. Whether we want to improve the user experience on Delicious or win the arms race against spammers, there’s still a lot of work left to do!

The Exploding Internet

2009-08-26T14:58:21-04:00

New Scientist has a number of visualizations that illustrate the internet explosion since 2002. Here's an example of internet users by country in 2002 and then in 2008.

versus...

Look at the growth in China and India... and still at a relatively low penetration of each country's population. I think it would be interesting to see the same comparison based on mobile internet use.

Just imagine what this mapping looks like in 10 years with a 90%+ penetration of the US, 50%+ penetration of China/India and an explosion of new web, voice, social and mobile innovations over that time.

Guiding Principles of Apple Innovation

2009-08-13T07:17:00-04:00

If you had to summarize the guiding principles of Apple's Design and Innovation Strategy what would they be and how might you embrace them to drive new product designs and create new revenue streams from new markets?

With the help of Chris Morrison, Bruce Nussbaum, Owen Linzmayer, Umair Haque and Daniel Turner, I've summarized a draft list of 11 guiding principles that appear to be important to Apple's innovation strategy.

1. Don't follow your Customers; Lead them

Apple tends to place less emphasis on evidence than on intuition, under the theory that consumers can’t tell you they want a product or function if they can’t yet envision it. Instead, they need to be shown a superior alternative. Apple sees itself as being in business to create those revolutionary alternatives.

2. Temper Engineering with Art

Most companies that try to operate like Apple fail. Often that’s because of who they tap to spearhead the creative process. High-tech devices are built by engineers — and often designed by them, too. Unfortunately, engineers tend to design products that they would want to use, which explains why a typical device is jam-packed with a hopelessly confusing array of features.

3. Focus on the Few to sell to the Many

Instead of trying to satisfy every fringe taste or market niche — other companies that make laptops, for instance, often sell dozens of models at any given time — Apple focuses on just a few products in each category.

4. Be your own toughest Critic

Ultimately, Apple succeeds because it not only beats its competitors but also strives each year to beat itself. As management guru Peter Drucker noted long ago, “Your being the one who makes your products, process, or service obsolete is the only way to prevent your competitor from doing so.” In the process of trying to outdo itself, Apple often leaves its competition in the dust.

5. Clear your mind and "Think Different"

Design is a “fundamental soul,” Jobs says, "that expresses itself through an end result — the product."

What is Apple’s fundamental soul? The company’s motto, “Think Different,” provides a hint. Apple maintains an introspective, self-contained operating style that is capable of confounding competitors and shaking up entire industries.

Internally, Apple barely acknowledges competition. It’s the company’s ability to think differently about itself that keeps Apple at the head of the pack.

6. Build your Innovation infrastructure and Fortress

Apple has flattened sprawling organizational hierarchies. Companies with extended chains of authority tend to plod when it’s time to act. Most of the decisions at Apple come from Jobs and his immediate deputies. Rank-and-file employees are often given clear-cut directives and close supervision. Proven talent gets a freer hand, regardless of job title.

7. Cultivate your "Creatives" - the Innovation Elite

Apple reliably churns out the industrial equivalents of da Vinci paintings and Hokusai woodcuts. This has little to do with how the company treats employees in general. Rather, it stems from the meticulous care and feeding provided to a specific group: the Creatives. Apple’s segmented, stratified organizational structure — which coddles its most valuable, productive employees — is one of the company’s most formidable assets

8. Institutionalize your "Creatives"

Today, Steve Jobs seems to have learned how to focus his aggressive, take-no-prisoners personality shrewdly and to great effect. While he’s still an essential part of Apple’s success, the company has also institutionalized many of Jobs’ values to such an extent that Apple is now far less dependent on him.

9. Innovation is not Invention

Innovation is creating something new of value. In the business world, that means creating something new of value that generates revenue and profits. Disruptive innovations that change the game are often business model innovations that integrate five or six or eight different types of innovation.

Apple brought together a legal/business innovation (getting the heads of music studios to agree on 99 cent downloads), a software innovation (the iTunes store) and a great industrial design--the iPod. That's what makes for powerful disruptive innovation.

10. Organize Something

What happens when we think of using new approaches to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? You get the iPod, the iPhone, the iTablet(?). One of the deepest secrets hidden at the heart of 21st century economics: markets, networks, and communities can organize economic activities and drive disruptive innovations. As an extension of the principle "Innovation is not Invention", using markets, networks and communities to re-organize inefficient industry models while empowering end users has resulted in a number of Apple innovative business models and designs.

11. MRD + ERD + URD

At Apple there are three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user-experience requirements document.

Marketing is what people want; Engineering is what we can do; User Experience is how people like to do things.

These three documents are reviewed by a committee of executives, and if approved, the design group would get a budget, and a team leader would be assigned. At that point, the team works on expanding the three requirement documents, inserting plans on how they hope to meet the marketing, engineering, and user-experience needs--figures for the release date, ad cycle, pricing details, and the like.

Thoughts? What else would you add or what would you change?

Sources / Links:

Four Principles of Apple's Success (and Failure) - Chris Morrison

How to Innovate Like Apple - Chris Morrison

Is Apple Innovative or Just Adaptive? - Bruce Nussbaum

BusinessWeek Inside Innovation

Apple Confidential 2.0 - Owen Linzmayer

MRD + ERD + URD = Secret of Apple Design

The Secret of Apple Design - Daniel Turner

The Live Web of Interaction Signals for Business Users

2009-08-07T13:47:09-04:00

Over the next 3 years, the ability to interact, analyze and filter our stream of interaction activities based on a live or real-time model will redefine our personal, work and mobile experiences with the web.

Let's look at these two categories (i) the Live Web of real-time streams and (ii) Interaction Signals separately:

The Live Web of Real-time Streams for Business Users

The real-time theme continues to grow and it will increasingly define a new class of web. While it has taken some time to get established, it is not a new idea. With a hat tip to Stuart Henshall, I've found it very helpful to read the early insights and writings of David Gelernter .

Professor Gelernter is a Computer Science Professor at Yale and his research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. As early as the 80's, Professor Gelernter envisioned managing information based on a time paradigm and through a decentralized data storage system. He is credited with setting the foundation for today's time based activity stream and cloud computing models so prevalent in Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Google apps and a number of start ups.

In this 2001 interview, I like how Professor Gelernter describes the impact of moving from a space ( or file) based computing model to a time ( or activity stream) based model:

When I look at where software is heading and what it is really doing, ... what's happening and what will happen with the emergence of a new generation of information-management systems, and as we discard Windows and NT ... these systems that are 1960s, 1970s systems on which we rely today, we'll see a transition similar to what happened during the 19th century, when people's sense of space suddenly changed.

If you compare the world of 1800 to the world of 1900, people's sense of space was tremendously limited and local and restricted in 1800. If you look at a New England village of the time, you can see this dramatically, everything is on site, a small cluster of houses, in which everything that needs to be done is done, and fields beyond, and beyond the fields a forest.

People traveled to some extent, but they didn't travel often, most people rarely traveled at all. The picture of space outside people's own local space was exceptionally fuzzy. Today, our picture of time is equally fuzzy; we have an idea of our local time and what happened today and yesterday, and what's going to happen next week, what happened the last few weeks, but outside of this, our view of time is as restricted and local as people's view of space was around 1800. If you look at what happened in the 19th century as transportation became available, cheap and ubiquitous, all of a sudden people developed a sense of space beyond their own local spaces, and the world changed dramatically.

What's going to happen, what software will do over the next few years has already started to happen and will accelerate... our software will be time-based, rather than space-based.

We'll deal with streams of information rather than chaotic file systems that are based on 1940s idea of desks and file cabinets. The transition to a software world where we have a stream with a past, present and future is a transition to a world in which people have a much more acute sense of time outside their own local week, or month in which they now have a clear idea of what was different, why February of 1997 was different from February of 1994, which most people today don't have a clear picture of.

With the introduction of activity streams, a business user, a department, an enterprise will have a more acute sense of time and how things have changed over time. They will have a clearer idea of what is happening now... live... in real-time... with the people, topics and activities most important to them... and what is different between this week vs. last, this month vs. last, this year vs. last ... across people, projects, customers, product lines, businesses and markets. This is an incredibly powerful shift.

Interaction Signals for Business Users

The shift to the live web is underway in our personal (consumer) lives and will ... as with other consumer web innovations ... be adopted and integrated within our work (enterprise) lives. If we describe the enterprise live web as a flow or activity stream of information tied to our live transactions, conversations and relationships ... then a number of new, live, time-based signals or metrics will be needed to help us optimize how we allocate time and attention in our daily interactions.

I think there are 4 classes of signals or metrics that are emerging to help business users understand how their interactions - and by interactions, I mean their transactions, conversations and relationships inside and outside the enterprise - are changing over time and will improve their productivity by embracing the Live Web. They include:

Interaction Activity Signals track the number, rate of change and scale of interaction activities for a business user over time. Examples include:

number of posts, emails, meetings, conversations, orders, tweets, cold calls over time
count of views, votes, comment, responses, feedback, re-tweets over time
active, inactive subscribers / followers over time
total inbound/outbound connections, interactions, links over time
number of unique interactions over time

Interaction Role Signals track the involvement, collaboration, leadership and consistency of roles that business users play through interactions over time. Examples include:

pattern and pace of interactions over time
degree of replication and emulation during interactions over time
variability in emphasis, rhythm and timing of interactions over time
degree of openness to new ideas and influence over time
inbound-to-outbound interaction ratio over time
positive-to-negative interaction ratio over time

Interaction Influence Signals track the diversity, reach and influence of interaction activities for a business user over time. Examples include:

diversity of business user social graph in the enterprise over time
conversation to broadcast ratio over time
conversation reach across the enterprise over time
degree of reference / Link over time
diversity of reference / Link over time
influence of your followers over time
influence of your referencers over time
new conversation generation over time

Interaction Results Signals track individual business user, team or enterprise deliverables resulting from interaction activity over time. Examples include:

new transactions (orders, contracts, demos, investment, etc. ) over time
conversation-to-conversion ratio over time
relationship-to-conversion ratio over time
correlation ratios between interaction activity, role, influence and results metrics over time

As the Live Web of activity streams and interaction signals emerge in the enterprise, one could say we're about to step out of the quaint New England village of the 1800's as described by Professor Gelernter.

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the Live Web.