This is the question that is most interesting to me and I believe, very transformational in the long-term on how we relate to each other and how things get done.

I was happy to work on this question for a Finnish telecom operator, Elisa together with their VP of Corporate Customers, Pasi Mäenpää. As we know, the traditional operator business of selling subscriptions and connectivity is commoditizing and many plans are going flat rate. The value has moved upwards to the actual applications of communication technologies in the enterprise. Understanding corporate customers and their true business requirements and opportunities is increasingly important. This leads us to ask the question, how is the business environment and practices of organizations truly changing?

To grasp this question, together with my team we produced a video and a presentation on the future of organizations and management:

On Youtube: Cloud Company – Change Happens (2010)

The related slides “A New Era of Leadership – From Hierarchy to Network” are here.

Cloud is the metaphor for the internet and Cloud Computing is the metaphor for a technological paradigm shift in the way how we utilize software and information. Google and Amazon particularly have been busy building the cloud. Practically it is an idea based on Technological Determinism, that technology would drive the development of society’s culture and social behavior.

An opposite view would see culture as a dominating force in technological development. Neither is accurate, as technology and culture are rather intertwining. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said that “We shape our tools. And then our tools shape us.” What the cloud is shaping is our forms of organization, intertwingled by technology and culture. The internet will dramatically lower the transaction costs of doing business. As companies decentralize various layers including infrastructure, R&D, marketing and sales, they eventually empower a new form of organization to emerge: the Cloud Company.

Management = Communication x Coordination x Responsibility = Collaboration

Management traditionally can be defined as effective communication, efficient coordination and someone taking responsibility of the actions. Manager communicates to subordinates, coordinates resources, supervises operations and takes (and gives) responsibility. This is mirroring the typical hierarchical thinking of organizations.

What happens today in digitally distributed collaborative networks is that communication becomes the means between people, coordination is the distributed peer-production activities among the people and responsibility is something that people will have the ability to take because of transparency of activities and open information. Thus the idea is that in organizations today all effective communication, coordination and taking of responsibility needs to be digitally distributed in order to remain viable.

There are two ideas on how effective organizations work. One that is based on complete centralization and the other based on complete decentralization. Most organizations are more or less different variations of the two.

Centralizated Organizations

A completely centralized organization is centrally planned and hierarchical in nature. The idea is that efficiency requires conscious coordination of resources and division of labor. Communication relationships and channels are pre-defined and planned – who reports to whom, what paper goes from here to there. This is the world dominated by bureaucracies, hierarchies, command & control and people as cogs in the machine.

Lenin tried to run Soviet Union like a big factory, as a centrally planned economy (or command economy). It was the most Fordist and Taylorist system ever envisioned. Everything would be centrally coordinated. The problem of such big hierarchies is that internal coordination costs increase as the size of the organization increases.

Over time it gets increasingly hard to predict the future and efficiently adapt to changing conditions. If internal coordination costs are higher than the value created and generated, the whole system collapses to its own absurdity. This economic calculation problem led to major problems in Soviet Union. Economic planners were not able to detect consumer preferences, shortages, and surpluses with sufficient accuracy. Resources were wasted and misallocated, eventually leading to the collapse of the whole house of cards.

Just like Soviet Union, most companies today are miniature centrally planned economies facing the same problems of internal coordination problems as the size of the hierarchy increases.

Decentralized Organizations

The father of modern economics, Adam Smith wrote in 1776 a revolutionary book, The Wealth of Nations. During the time his work was concentrated on supporting the political agenda of Great Britain to dissipate mercantilism, the economic reality that dominated Western European economic policies at the time. Mercantilism was based on a protectionist ideology of controlling import and export of goods for the nation’s good.

Adam Smith’s idea was that free market economy based on self-regulation would be more effective from the resource allocation point of view. Rational self-interest of individuals and companies in the short term would lead to common good in the long term. Competition and supply & demand in the context of rational self-interest would create economic balance.

The question then becomes, when does economic activity take place on decentralized markets and when do centralized organizations form as a necessity?

Lowering Transaction Costs

In 1991 economist Ronald Coase received the Nobel’s price on his theory of transaction costs. For a reference, take a look at The Nature of The Firm (1937). . When transaction costs increase, centralized organizations form to take care of the necessary side activities to achieve the goal. As transaction costs drop, certain economic activities are increasingly done on the open markets.

As an example, in the newspaper industry a photographer needs to take the pictures, journalist needs to write the story, an editor lays out the text, the printing press produces the publication and then someone takes care of the logistics of delivery. In the context of these activities there are other costs such as legal, marketing and administrative costs. All of these activities include high transaction costs that make it impossible to deliver such a product reliably without centralized coordination and organization.

As we know, Internet has enabled new forms of organization such as the Wikipedia or Huffington Post to emerge in the publication industry. Internet has radically reduced transaction costs involved in producing resources like an encyclopedia or a newspaper. According to Harward Law School Professor Yochai Benkler, digitally distributed collaborative environments have enabled a new form of organization to emerge between the traditional nation state and the private company, based on the logic of commons-based peer-production. In the open markets, people and organizations improve the common resources, eventually gaining more than their individual contribution is worth.

As companies thrive for higher value creation and move up in the economic food chain, it is impossible to do so today without lowering the transaction costs involved in producing these goods and services. Therefore all effective organizations today will utilize digitally distributed collaboration and management environments and practices, because of lowered transaction costs.

The Emergence of the Cloud Company

The next stage in running successful organizations is to understand that effective organizations today are operating closer to the logic of the open free markets. This means that companies thriving for higher value will decentralize many core layers that were traditionally centralized, including infrastructure, information storage and processing, collaboration, services, sales and customer service.

This stage will be driven by cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital mass-customization (such as the iTunes App Store where each person actually creates the end product through individual customization), commons-based peer-production and other emerging decentralized models for carrying out work in the digital business ecosystem: therefore the name Cloud Company.

Here is how one company might look like, where certain organizational functions have been supported with internet-enabled decentralized models and technologies:

A Cloud Company (or real Enterprise 2.0) will be much more effective than its more or less centralized competitors, because it’s capable of distributing certain organizational activities on the market, operate in a much more customer-oriented and centered way, changes dynamically the costs of running the business, is capable of lowering transaction and internal coordination costs and utilizes latest social media and collaboration environments for digitally distributed communication, coordination and wide taking of responsibility.

My colleague Esko Kilpi writes:

Today, with social media, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the fundamental processes of communication and coordination are being transformed.  Familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the Internet, not the traditional organization, becomes the most efficient means to communicate, coordinate and exchange value.

That’s the future of organizations in the digital age.

Thanks to: Esko Kilpi, Pasi Mäenpää

Traditional Sales Funnel (ref: Forrester Research)

Someone walking with a mobile phone in a shopping mall is no longer in the shopping mall, but impulsively dodging things that come by as the mind is somewhere else than in the physical realm. Someone scanning Twitter on a mobile phone while in a restaurant is no longer in the restaurant either, but lured into an endless flow of retweets.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
– Social Scientist Herbert Simon (1971)

Due to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, information aggregators, news radars etc. our attention is now highly fragmented. Traditional mass media channels no longer have the same control as they used to have. Attention Economy is an economy where our attention has become scarce and fragmented, unfocused and disoriented, something Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention (CPA): we only pay partially attention to what goes on around ourselves as we scan different channels for new opportunities, barely paying attention to things around us.

It is no surprise that the AIDA model (Attention + Interest, Desire + Action) from the end of 19th century is no longer as relevant as it used to be. In 2007 Forrester Research suggested that engagement is the new metric. They said that the traditional sales funnel based on awareness is broken and no longer works in digital media. In place they suggested a labyrinth depicted below, showing contributors as one potential outcome:

The New Funnel According to Forrester Research

The complexity of this picture sure doesn’t look very welcoming to managers who want command and control, predictability and assurance for their marketing euros. What ever may be the case, the reality is that customers on the internet now have a wide variety of opportunities and low threshold to gain second hand opinion.

The labyrinth can be understood in many ways. Here is mine:

Non-linear Inverted Funnel (ref: Teemu Arina)

Shifting from company perspective to customer perspective, things get highly non-linear and could go towards any path, not just the one the company depicted to be their sales funnel in the first place. From this perspective many sales funnels companies employ are delusional and grounded in false belief systems regarding the linearity of the purchase process and miss the beauty of the complexity involved in decision making.  Taking the point of view of the customer reveals insightful details about the process:

1. Searching & Browsing: over 80% of browser sessions start with a search. Over 90% of people search online while considering a major investment like a digital camera, a trip or a car. Search is the primary means through which people start browsing the web.
2. Recommendations & Persuasion: As soon as one fires a search, conversation appears. Forums full of second hand advice start to influence our decisions. Some people out there have a vast amount of knowledge and their opinions persuade our own opinions.
3. Reinforcement & Sacrification: New information enforces our expectations but makes us also sacrifice initial assumptions, as new information emerges from the conversation.
4. Usage & Value Creation: One decides to get involved with a solution or product. Usage reveals new requirements and reveals non-predetermined unexpected benefits. Value is created through the way how a solution is actually used, not what it appeared to be in the first place.
5. Value Recognition & Self Expression: One starts to recognize the true, deep and hidden value the solution represents. You may as well call it wisdom in the context of using the product. Self expression leads to recommending and persuading the decisions of others: fancy details and complex reviews are being revealed to others on internet forums.

A friend of mine, Anssi Mäkelä from Nokia did a little mystery shopper experiment. As an avid Nike fan, he was looking to buy a pair of running shoes from the internet and took a screenshot of each website he visited in the process. Out of the around 180 screenshots only two were from websites owned by Nike. He only went to their website to have a feel of the products, as is the case with high-definition digital advertising.

The word engagement is so deep that it has even made itself to the values of Nokia. In their lobby I saw a banner reading “engaging consumers“. the same words insisted by a marketing person from Louis Vuitton in a conference talking about social media and how it relates to their brand. What this is to me is an oxymoron: active engagement and passive consumption do not go into the same sentence without a logical conflict.

“56% of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with, and better served by, companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.”
– Center for Media Research (2008)

The potential buyer no longer comes through the front door to be lured through various steps to become a customer. Because of Google, he is entering through any door he wants instead – even a window or a backdoor – armed with the opinions of his peers carried over from the conversations along the road. As he starts to use the product, he starts to speak to other customers about the true benefits and deficits of the product: even dodging manuals to hack the product to make it what one wants, as has happened at Ikeafans.com.

From this perspective, the word consumer describing passive behavior is no longer valid. Alternatives have been suggested for the new era of participation, such as produsage and prosumerism. In any case what we are actually talking about is empowerment. The customer is not just engaged, but in an ideal situation is empowered to go beyond the product: rate, comment, converse, feed forward, troubleshoot and hack the product in the context of other empowered customers.

Give a man a fish and he is engaged. Give a man a fishing rod and he is empowered.

Smart companies know how to leverage co-creativity. Such is the case with MyStarbucksIdea.com, understanding the importance of customers as active participants in product and service development processes. The value thus is created in interaction and not embedded in the product and production processes alone. This is what Esko Kilpi talks about in his blog about interactive value creation.

Sales funnel is a selfish concept utilized by companies who are mainly interested in themselves. Words like “capturing leads”, “lead acquisition”, “customer retention” and “engaging consumers” are concepts emerging from looking inside-out from oneself as a company, rather than outside-in.

Smart companies switch off their corp-ego-centric world view and make customer-centricity a true value evident in their tactics in practice, not just an empty shell in their mission statement. To push the boundaries a little bit, attention and awareness are also selfish concepts. The true currency is not attention but the intention of your customers: intent to do something, not just attention to marketing messages. In an Intention Economy,  customers are empowered participants.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com

As Clay Shirky outlines in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, as the transaction costs (in reference to British guru on economics Ronald Coase) for cooperative work drops as a consequence of internet enabled mass collaboration, things tend to happen in a decentralized way without the need for centralized formal organizations. There are many examples of such forces at play, e.g. Wikitravel or OhMyNews.

In Finland we have witnessed the emergence of a decentralized virtual organization called Sometu (sosiaalinen media oppimisen tukena – social media in support of learning). This (dis)organization consists of over 3000 teachers, researchers and other people interested in social media in education. Sometu was formed in the end of 2007 and has grown rapidly since. Their main tool is Ning, but they use a wide variety of other social media tools to carry out educational experiments.

Now that Ning is going more commercial and social media conversation is becoming more overheated and tiring on the educational sector, people like Teemu Leinonen (at ITK-conference) and Tarmo Toikkanen have started to question the aim of Sometu and its mission. Sometu has started to live a life of its own as an echo chamber for educational social media fanatics with their own little experiments with a questionable degree of impact. With a more clear purpose such a (dis)organization could become much stronger and meaningful force in transforming the educational sector. Will it be capable for this?

With great interest I read Dave Pollard’s post on the Lifecycle of Emergence. He talks how intrigued he is of “flow” models depicting the dynamics and cyclic nature of complex systems. He talks about the details of his discovery of Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s (Berkana Institute) model of Lifecycles of Emergence and explains the model with the following picture:

The Lifecycle of Emergence. Illustration: Dave Pollard, original by Chris Corrigan

When I saw this picture Sometu network immediately came to my mind. As I see it, it was set up by pioneers who named the network. Then it started rapidly evolving as a network as other enthusiasts joined, eventually emerging as a community of practice for using social media in educational practice. A lot of attention and success stories were built, illuminating the (dis)organization’s activities. As more newcomers joined and as the activity and transparency of the group’s activities grew, it became a major system of influence for educational transformation – until someone said that the emperor wears no clothes.

As with anything, technology is like a chair without two legs if the cultural transformation underlying it is missing or unclear for the user. If things get technologically driven – as Sometu seems to be too much so for some people – the question then becomes what is the cultural innovation behind the scenes. This could be concentrated as a mantra, mission or vision for such an organization, but such statements may become empty in meaning.

Influencing real change in education is exceptionally hard. Networks like Sometu need to carefully examine the real competencies they have and focus on those to avoid decline and jump to a new cycle of opportunities. This will be hard, especially if even the originating founders don’t know themselves what would be the forces that will keep their vague network together in the future – simple interest in tools for education is not enough.

Just as Bruce Sterling said to mobile developers at the Mobile Monday Amsterdam:

“I want you to think real hard about the values you are going to save and stop worrying about the plastic”.

But what would be the opposite of Six Thinking Hats, points of view to a conversation that would be damaging and non-productive from the group effort point of view. Something that would eventually bring the conversation to a halt, a dead-end or even a fight? On a long lunch today with my colleagues we designed just that.

Six Non-Thinking Socks

How to destroy a potentially fruitful conversation and brainstorming session by just being present.

1. White Socks – Direct Interruption

What ever is being said is being interrupted by speaking over and loud. If someone starts to interrupt you too, just rise your voice and continue.

2. Red Socks – Getting Personal

Every point that is provided is cleverly turned into a personal assault targeting the character and personality of the fellow team player.

3. Black Socks – Unthinking

Use every logical fallacy in the book to confuse the conversation with arguments that first sound reasonable but turn out to be totally flawed in the very details.

4. Yellow Socks – Blatant Ignorance

When someone is speaking, just pretend that you are not listening. Look at the walls, at your clock and knock your fingers on the table. Moan.

5. Green Socks – Extreme Pessimism

It is the worst possible day of your life. Everything that is being said is viewed through lenses of absolute negativity and likelihood for failure. Cast a dark shadow on the whole conversation and start speculating what could most possibly go wrong.

6. Blue Socks – Unreasonable Haste

You are in such a hurry that there is no point in thinking about anything longer than a second – maybe two on a good day. No time to think – decisions are made based on intuition alone.

–

So, there you have it. Not too far away from your typical meeting.

Now go on and use this method in your next meeting and report back the results!

Especially real-time reporting and data has become increasingly important. Twitter and real-time mashups turn out to be most useful on the real-time web side. Various online communities on Facebook and elsewhere are providing solutions and support for those who are still out there. Events like this could be tremendous opportunities for companies customer support departments to listen and react accordingly and provide some relief to crowded phone support lines.

Most important tags for following the volcano related information on Twitter are #volcano, #ashtag, #getmehome and #roadsharing. Here is a chart that shows that the conversation is still going strong with #ashtag (started by twitter user Angry Britain at approximately 7:31am on Thursday 15th) and #getmehome rising as of sunday:

Volcano-stranded travelers have turned to social media for alternative transportation, accommodation and other support.

On Facebook, writer Tod Brilliant organized his own Facebook group “When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers” (531 members as of writing) a moment after he and his wife Andrea Barrett – who is 31 weeks pregnant – found themselves unable to fly home to California from London’s Heathrow airport after a wedding. The group features country specific advice.

Carpool Europe (1575 members as of writing) on Facebook helps people to find a ride in Europe.

Stuck in Helsinki – accommodation during the ash cloud (250 members as of writing) is providing a channel for those stranded in Finland.

Dohop.com travel search site organized an interactive Google map mashup of the ash plume showing aiport status.

On the real-time data side, Radarvirtuel.com shows airplane traffic and the ash cloud on a real-time map.

TED quickly approved a group to organize TEDxVolcano in London after a whole group of people participating at the Skoll World Forum got stranded.

Someone even set up a Twitter account for the ash cloud and gained over 2000 followers in a short time. Another volcano pretender here.

Roadsharing.com and Couchsurfing.org websites designed for sharing rides and accommodation just became more popular, not to mention image pools on Flickr.com for volcanic eruptions.

Various Airlines are helping their customers on Facebook and Twitter regarding the issue. Good job so far by airBaltic (33 300 members as of writing) with ongoing updates on the issue. The finnish arline Finnair is not doing as well, with only some official updates on Facebook (7500 members as of writing) and no real support. Finnair’s  Twitter account is also completely silent.

What facinates me is how quickly the traditional recruitment processes are getting inefficient and old because of the emergence of new digital tools for matching open jobs with potential providers. It is already well known that everything that could be automated, will be automated. Outsourcing of repetitive work to machines or outsourcing partners is not new. But how about your own employees? The workforce of the future is a netforce, mobilized through the internet to participate in organizational tasks and processes upon need.

In an uncertain environment companies keep underused people on a payroll because they may need them very soon again. Outsourcing tasks is often a cumbersome management problem of finding the right providers, working out deals and keeping up with the quality of deliverables.

Utilization rate may be very low for certain people working for an organization. A good example might be advertising agencies: the company’s real core asset is the ability to conceptualize new ideas for marketing and communication and sell them to a customer, yet a lot of flash coders, graphic designers and copywriters sit underused with lack of projects on sight. At best, the additional time is used to work on pitching new customers.

Pitches for a Job at Elance.com

Digital recruitment processes will change this. Reqruitment markets like Elance.com, RentACoder, Guru.com, oDesk and designer support services like iStockPhoto and 99Designs in combination with latest digital working environments may as well change the world of reqruitment and how routine work is carried out. On-demand online workforce will help coping with uncertainty through decreased overhead and transaction costs. The end result will be increased efficiency, reduction of labour costs and falling prices. In other words, comptetive advantages.

Provider Profile at Elance.com

New business models will emerge, where a company employs only effective communicators, such as key account managers, (online) collaboration experts and creative problem solvers. The value of work done alone will drop dramatically. The work that used to be predictable and based on expertise grounded in training and repetition will be outsourced and will start to move freely between organizations. The new netforce will work for multiple employers at one time and be available on-demand. Such an organization will become small, flat and agile like nanotechnology, although the turnover per employee may rise dramatically.

It will be easy to compare potential providers and individuals, because other organizations will do the evaluation for you. Digital CVs will include dynamic real-time performance indicators based on peer-reviews from other organizations. No more endless interviews with potential employees who selectively expose to your their past activities and try to cast as optimistic picture as possible about themselves. No more probation times, headhunters, psychological tests or other resource intensive practices for finding out if someone is good for you or not. The digital reqruitment environments will do the work for you automatically.

Skills comparison at Elance.com

And if this is not enough for you, throw in crowdsourcing. Outsource repetitive small tasks and even idea generation to an unknown group of people through the internet. Starbucks is using MyStarbucksIdea to generate new ideas on how to improve their services and products. Amazon not just outsources your servers and data, but also helps you with people in the machine with a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, a name inspired by a legend of an ancient machine that could play chess. A finnish company called Microtask is working on something they call cloud labor. They promise to split work assignments into tiny tasks and distribute these around the world with automatic logistics and quality control.

Do you really have the option not to consider netforce in the cloud as a competitive advantage? If it’s not you who does this, one of your competitors might as well.

I would love to hear what you think about it. Should I do more of these?

Newsmastering is about being an information DJ: as an expert, you select highly valuable resources as a News Radar for your readers. If this radar is on your company website, it enables more dynamic content and thus a good reason for your readers to return to your site periodically. As an added benefit, search engines are going to reward your activities.

Here is our Newsmastering Architecture me and Ville Orkas from Dicole implemented for these purposes:

Dicole Newsmastering Architecture

What we essentially have is:

1. Our employees and partners link to interesting resources or publish their own content online.
2. The sources get picked up by a fully automated news hub, that analyzes the sources. Our hub discovers the original URLs, makes automatic summaries of articles, discovers original sources, creates bit.ly links for link tracking and fetches website screenshots and/or first image from the news item for publishing purposes.
3. The sources get synced with a newsmastering database, in this case we are talking about a small news database application built with Zoho Creator.
4. The newsmater uses the news database to rewrite a) titles b) descriptions c) sources d) authors and other relevant information. Also the newsmaster picks a relevant picture for the news item, e.g. a website screenshot or an image from the news item itself.
5. Once the newsmaster is happy with the refined item, it is marked for publication.
6. Dicole Radar on dicole.com website picks up the published items and generates a News Radar available here.
7. Yahoo Pipes takes the published articles and generates a proper RSS feed out of the news database.
8. Google FeedBurner provides additional features for the RSS feed.
9. The hand picked news items in the RSS feed are published through APIs (empowered with Twitterfeed) to Facebook, Twitter and other relevant services.
10. A Social Media Listening Architecture is used for following reactions to hand picked news radar items online.

Basically our implementation is a very elegant Web 2.0 mashup, using the latest technologies to build an application with the least ammount of effort. Here is the final result on our website:

Dicole Radar at www.dicole.com

Newsmastering is something that is fully enabled by RSS and powerful middleware technologies. Newsmastering is something wire editors should do at every publisher wanting to be effective online.

Newsmastering once well implemented, is quick and doesn’t require much additional resources. You are harnessing the power of your network to discover the most relevant resources anyway.

Bloggers and specialized explorers on various topics should provide a service like this to their readers. Simply linking to resources through Twitter and del.icio.us etc. is not enough: specialists know what their readers need and can describe in a concise way why a certain resource is useful. Sometimes the titles of original posts are not very good and thus rewriting the titles is important for additional value.

There are multiple different ways for implementing news radars. If you are interested, Dicole is now providing consulting for publishers who are looking for implementing their own News Radars to increase the speed, relevance and impact of their content online.

Here are some notes I just produced with Emily Rosser from Macmillan Education, UK and Oliver Meyer from Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Germany regarding the future of online tools in language education.

Tools for Learning: Trends and Implications

Everything that can become digital, will rapidly become digital. Everything that could be automated by computers, will be automated. The amount of information in explicit form is increasing exponentially. We are moving towards an age of transparency: people produce user-generated content in the form of status updates in social networks, videos, interactive content, podcasts, blog posts, links and commentary.

The dynamic web fueled by social media is affecting content in real-time. New approaches to information visualization and categorization (e.g. with bottom-up categorization methods like tagging) are needed. Approaches like commons-based peer production enabled by technical architectures of participation in combination with open content licensing schemes (e.g. Creative Commons) changes the role of consumers into active participants – or prosumers.

The hardware capabilities, internet access, content production, content distribution and underlying educational methodologies are constantly improving and changing. We are in the middle of a paradigm shift regarding online learning. Traditional books are becoming non-linear, embedded in the very fabric of the network architecture. Paid content alone is no longer relevant enough. Publishers need to come up with added value services, extending their offering and role beyond traditional realms.

Technology takes content out of the classroom to the very context where learning happens. Smart internet enabled technologies will be embedded in our environment on e.g. walls and tabletops. Portable devices like e-book readers, tablets and next generation mobile computers make content available and integrated to the environment everywhere and anytime.

Opportunities for Language Education

Digital content and delivery will help enrich the pillars of language learning:

1. Enrich input

Content that should be made available to teachers and learners needs to make full use of the multi-sensory potential that digital formats and digital delivery offer to facilitate language intake. It also allows to deal with different learning styles.

2. Enhance interaction

New forms of communication allow instant cooperation between teams within a class and beyond.

3. Provide opportunities for dynamic output

Microblogging, tweeting, social networking and other Web 2.0 applications provide an authentic setting for output and communicative tasks in real-time.

4. Tailor scaffolding to individual needs

Non-linear learning environments allow for various kinds of scaffolding with respect to different learning styles and individual preferences.

5. Provide continuous and end-of-task assessment to give individualized feedback and offer individual learning pathways

Teacher qualification and new literaricies:

The increasing amount of available information will make it paramount for teachers to know how to select quality materials in the appropriate format. Teachers and/or material writers will need to design scaffolding and communicatively and cognitively challenging tasks around any available content. Teachers have to become literate in digital technologies.

Ideas for facilitating the above:

• Development of a hub for teachers to link them to quality resources, planning and assessment tools online (e.g. to join an interconnected web of learners online).
• Development of a hub for students which gives them access to resources and tips on how to make best use of new communication tools (e.g. to build a personal learning environment).
• Personalized, flexible and delocalized online training services.

“As the demands for higher value and creativity are the norm today and the complexity of offerings has grown, we have begun to see that division of labour has reached its points of diminishing returns.”

I agree. The industrial production logic has reached its limits in the increasingly networked society. He continues to elaborate that higher value creation is impossible without interaction. There is a move from action dominated by division of labor to interaction driven by increasing complexity. The result is higher value activity.

My example that follows is very personal regarding the Finnish psyche: why Apple is doing better in interactive value creation compared to Nokia?

Closed Design Process

Apple is very well known for its secrecy in creating new product. Nokia is well known for embracing openness through open source and open platforms. So from interaction point of view, Nokia should be doing better. Or is it?

In innovation, if you believe you know better than anyone in the world  how to complete a certain task, there are good reasons to operate in a closed manner. If you know for sure that in-house resources, ideas and capabilities are limited in achieving a certain goal, you should open the process up for outside contributions.

Apple has a focused design process and knows how to do it. It has a vigorous design process outlined here, including some basic principles grounded in perfectionism:

Pixel Perfect Mockups [...] removes all ambiguity.
10 to 3 to 1: [...] start with seven in order to make three look good.

Nokia is known to be an engineer driven land, where production efficiency often has the ability to dominate final design decisions. They might have better technical devices, but not the most original and detailed approaches to UI design. What matters is the ability to produce a truck-load of devices with minimum costs.

Apple constantly designs new products ending up as trendsetters. Their activities doing so seems almost effortless. In the background, there is obviously the unquestionable belief in their own design ability.

Open Value Creation

Let’s take the iPhone. It’s beautifully designed. What Apple doesn’t know, is how people would use the device. Every usage pattern is contextual in nature.

What you have on an iPhone is a minimum set of features that would be needed for an internet-connected phone and multimedia device. The end-user is the final missing piece in completing the product. Apple created the Appstore, so that people could come up with new ways for using the device. If you are a sailor, you might need some maps for sailing. If you love restaurants, you might have a restaurant guide. If you are a Star Wars fan, maybe you have lightsaber in your pocket. The clue is that Apple doesn’t have the resources nor the crystal ball to say how the device would be used.

Open interactive value creation is about designing the bare minimum and let people build on top of the platform and have the ability to try (almost) everything. Apple has invested in communicating their design principles regarding the iPhone. Take a look at any of the engineering documents and you see the difference. That’s why so many applications look so great: everyone is working on an app as if it would be eventually approved by Steve Jobs himself.

Ambiguity of Designing for Demographics

Nokia has a very different strategy. It runs focus group studies, figures out various demographics and designs phones for the imaginary average middle of the gaussian shape. At least that’s how it looks like. You end up with products like the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic and a myriad of other differently branded products obviously targeting different demographics.

As a result your phone will be full of pre-loaded apps, music and other details that a typical average user in the target demographic might use (let’s bet in this case we are talking about a 25-35 year old hip cool group that has  a life). The end result? You use 5-10% of the features, because nothing is really exactly right in context.

This is why designing for demographics creates unnecessary clutter and ambiguity in product design. Apple seems to know this by making the phone as simple as possible: one device, you customize the rest for yourself: apps, music and physical appearance.

The byproduct of the way how Apple designs their core offering and how people build on top of it is meaningful conversation. Creative work, that people do in interaction. Pushing boundaries.

What really matters is context. The context of use. The conversation that happens around a particular context. The way how the company listens and links this conversation back to its R&D. Designing a product too far and insisting on saying what it is doesn’t result in interactive value creation.

As far as engineering goes, Nokia is very open on the technical level but lacks the ability to be open on the design level.

Nokia is very open in the beginning, but behaves more closed as they make final decisions on how the device would be used.

Apple is very closed in the beginning, but becomes more open towards the long tail of usage.