We live in an interconnected world where machines log on to other machines to do work on our behalf. That’s what del.icio.us now does every night: it gathers up all the tagging I did during the previous day and posts it on this blog. It’s part of a mashed-up, service-oriented world. I’m writing this posting using ScribeFire, another mashup, which also posts to the blog on my behalf.
Some of my discomfort with IntroNetworks: it seems like more of “an application” than “a service” (in the mashup sense of the term). I’m really enthusiastic about IntroNetworks, and really impressed with what Chuck Steinfield did with it. It’s accurate, in uncanny ways, but it feels so separate. That separateness is probably both the result of technical limits and the culture around conferences the company serves. It certainly is a world where there is no profile standard that everyone adheres to and everyone would rather keep their profile information private, isn’t it?
The morning I left for the airport, after the Communities and Technologies conference, I bumped into a grad student in the lobby, who was waiting for a taxi to take her to the bus stop. We decided to run for it instead and struck up quite the conversation as she struggled with two bags, one with a handle that was way too short, and with one shoe strap that kept falling off. Afterwards, I found that she was “standing right beside me” in the IntroNeworks “me display.” Too late for an intro, but useful for a follow-up, better than the business card she’d given me. We got to the bus just in time and she sat a row behind me on the other side of the aisle (the bus had wifi!) and we looked each other up. “Oh, that’s you.”
A few days later, Jerry Michalski’s Yi-tan call about “exhaust data” and Facebook turned up an interesting connection. Grant McCracken observed that Facebook does a pretty good job of keeping a connection going after it’s been established, say, at a conference. He wrote about it later. Facebook certainly does a good job of drawing you back in and creating a sense of social activity — of life on the net. Someone on that Yi-tan call said something like “every venture capitalist these days will ask you what kind of a Facebook application strategy you have.” Facebook’s very openness is compelling. Online, there is no meaningful distinction between “business” and “social” And it’s certainly persistent.
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Shirley Williams and I heard about the book at the same time, but she read it right away and I’m still wending my way through it.
Andy Mulholland, Chris S. Thomas, Paul Kurchina with Dan Woods, Mashup Corporations; the End of Business as Usual; A chronicle of Service-Oriented Business Transformation (New York, NY: Evolved Media Network, 2006). A lot of the issues in the book revolve around the business opportunities that result from reducing some of the barriers that are embedded in traditional IT — between departments and between the “inside” and “outside” of an organization. Here’s what I think is their key diagram (with my annotations in red):
XML and service oriented architectures, according to the authors, now allow organizations to bridge across all of those boundaries. Data can flow and so can value. The organization opens up and allows an ecosystem of value creation to form around the services it provides. And that process requires that “shadow IT” be recognized as a valuable contribution to the organization’s functioning.
It’s all told in an engaging story about a company that sells pop corn poppers. The characters have humorous names like CEO Jane Moneymaker, Marketing Manager Hugo Wunderkind, and CIO Josh Lovecraft.
It seems to me that it’s communities of practice (CoP) that make sense of boundaries, whether within a company, on the boundary and outside the company. The technologies by themselves won’t do it and the authors recognize that (if only to comment on the fact that “online communities need to be kept under control”). There’s no mention of the semi-formal technology stewardship that bridges between formal IT, shadow IT, the formal organization, and informal communities of practice. Now it may be that the communities that form in such a company using Web 2.0 technologies are less cohesive or more dispersed than those we see in gated communities (somehow they “look different” than what we’ve recognized), but communities have a critical role to play.
A very good book! You should read it, too!
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