archive.Joe Lamantia.com

In a world that’s moving so fast it’s hard to keep track of when you are, let alone where, there’s a need for experiences that move at more relaxed paces. This basic need for deliberately moderated and human-speed experiences better tuned to the way that people make and understand meaning is the origin of the Slow Food movement.

Naturally, there’s room for a virtual analog of slow food. I’m calling this kind of mediated experience that flows at a kinder, gentler pace “slow media”. Dawdlr, “a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: what are you doing, you know, more generally?” is a good example.

Assembled one postcard at a time, Dawdlr exemplifies the collective form of Slow Media, one you can contribute to by creating some content using a standard interface and then submitting it for publication, as long as it carried the proper postage. The paper blog – now updated and known as papercast – might be a precursor.

What are some other examples of Slow Media? Back in January of 2007, AdBusters asked, “Isn’t it time to slow down?” during their national slowdown week.

Slow food has a website, annual gatherings, publications, a manifesto, even a mascot / icon – the snail of course. What’s next for slow media? Maybe a slow wiki, made up of image-mapped screen shots of chalkboards with writing?

In addition to the customary joys of DIY life in the new mediaverse – contending with opaque and incomplete documentation, reconciling conflicting content models and templates, and the seemingly endless repetitive labor of manually naming, tagging, and reviewing migrated items – changing publishing platforms means the opportunity to explore what it will be like to be an Information Archaeologist in the future.

Operatively, this means digging deep into the many layers of cumulative information strata beneath the gentle orange user experience that greets visitors to JoeLamantia.com. When performed on a website you’ve created and maintained for almost 10 years, the experience is a mix of cleaning out your attic, workshop, or garage, and excavating the foundations of a former residence.

Such an effort yields a rich assemblage of digital artifacts:

• dozens of orphaned HTML pages comprising a design portfolio, created by hand using deprecated markup and tags
• “multi-ethnic” style-sheets cross-bred and reused for so many different site looks or designs over the past ten years that deleting style references is like playing russian roulette with your user experience
• four or five derelict publishing package installations (MT, WordPress, etc.), spanning technologies from PERL/CGI to PHP RUBY – the Infoverse equivalent of a collection of abandoned and decaying rust belt factories
• hundreds of half-empty shell pages populated with dummy content, created during tests of publishing tools
• multiple sets of overlapping archives, accumulated over generations of upgrades to blogging tools. the trend here is toward increasingly human-readable output files, away from the raw database style naming of early blogging platforms
• a score of miscellaneous documents, audio / video files, and MS Office format files stored on the server for temporary download, now comprising a retrospective of outdated resumes, drafts of deliverables for long-over projects, and backups from system crashes long-forgotten
• numerous design tools and templates, now linked from external publications, and indispensable to unknown thousands of downloaders

Just like the older layers of cities and habitations uncovered during new construction, these cumulative information castoffs tell stories within a larger context: changing career plans and jobs, new technologies and tools, shifts in business and economic climates, life events, aspirations and interests, hardware failures.

What will the information archaeologists of the future find when excavating our virtual habitations and workplaces? How will they map and understand what they find? What meanings will they make, and what insights into our lives will they draw, from the information (waste? pollution? byproducts?) we create at such stupendous rates?

Like so many life forms before us, we are very busy living in the moment, not thinking overly much about the vast deposits of information detritus we leave behind in the course of saving dozens of versions of text files, booking air travel, sharing photos, or obeying regulatory compliance directives for medical archives.

But in the long view, all this will matter in some way. Witness the fact that 10% of the land area of the former Soviet Union is contaminated with radioactivity or industrial pollution.

What is the difference between pollution, waste, and recyclable and reusable matter in the infoverse?

Can we make use of these vast deposits of information in new ways?

The Garamantes of the Sahara relied on deeply buried reserves of fossil water to sustain a brief empire, a culture that flowered and perished entirely in line with it’s ability to exploit finite reserves of irreplaceable groundwater (paleowater)stored in aquifers.

Living off the fruits of past accumulation is a habit we’ve not shaken yet in North Africa (Libya’s Great Man Made River project supplying 6,500,000 m³ of freshwater per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere is the largest engineering effort in the world), or here in the United States, as we drain the enormous Ogallala Aquifer – that supports nearly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle produced in the United States – at an alarming rate.

As (it seems, always…), Sterling has visited this future, in his novel Holyfire, which mentions wildcatters who get rich discovering lost landfills rich in plastics and other rare materials, in former Eastern Europe.

Moving past the archeological horizon brings us to the geologic time scale.

Will future virtual economies depend on the industrial style extraction, processing and mass consumption of these new informational strata we are laying down today, in the same way that we depend upon fossilized forests of the Carboniferous era to power our new hydrocarbon age?

The vast oil and coal deposits that power our economy exist because the bacteria and other decomposer organisms of the time were unable to effectively break down plant cell materials. We recreate this cycle by mining assorted fossil fuels, turning them into plastics that existing decomposers are unable to break down, and then dispersing these new proto-fossilized non-degrable materials widely throughout our own environment (yielding contemporary phenomena such as plastic micro-particulate contamination of tidal waters, and dating of landfills by the plastic materials preserved in them.

Good design is the result of an unusual mix of two very dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing that must work together to a com­mon end; reduc­tive approaches (to define a prob­lem) and holis­tic approaches (to solve — or rede­fine — the prob­lem by con­sid­er­ing every aspect).

The com­bi­na­tion is a pow­er­ful syn­the­sis which relies on a bal­ance between com­pet­ing forces.

Design­ers have under­stood the impor­tance of this bal­ance — and thus the indis­pens­able role of holis­tic think­ing in design meth­ods — for a long time. But as a con­se­quence of the long-standing dom­i­nance of indus­trial pro­duc­tion processes and log­ics, which elim­i­nated or severely restricted oppor­tu­ni­ties for most peo­ple to design any part of the fab­ric of their every­day lives, holis­tic approaches and think­ing have had min­i­mal vis­i­bil­ity in the mod­ern cul­tural land­scape.

That seems to be chang­ing, and I sus­pect few would dis­pute the rise in vis­i­bil­ity and impor­tance of design within the cul­tural land­scape. Some might say we are in the midst of a renais­sance of design (that com­par­i­son breaks down under a crit­i­cal lens, in the end demon­strat­ing more the pos­i­tive aspi­ra­tions of design advo­cates than any­thing else).

Look­ing at the cul­ture as a whole, the rise of design is one aspect of a larger and much more impor­tant cul­tural shift: the rise of holis­tic think­ing. This shift towards holis­tic views is chang­ing the things we talk about and think about, and hold cen­tral as the ele­ments of our basic frame of ref­er­ence — in short, the way we con­ceive of the world.

The con­cepts in the list below are good exam­ples of the rise of holis­tic think­ing across dis­ci­plines and fields. Seem­ingly willy-nilly (which is exactly the point!), all these ideas rely on, include, or enhance holis­tic view­points at some level:

• net­works
• col­lec­tive intelligence
• emer­gence
• the Inter­net
• sys­tems thinking
• glob­al­iza­tion
• design think­ing
• sus­tain­abil­ity
• cross-cultural com­mu­ni­ca­tion
• cli­mate change
• ethnog­ra­phy
• multi-culturalism
• pat­terns
• com­plex­ity
• inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion / localization
• social media
• the mashup
• ecol­ogy
• remix­ing
• col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­duc­tion models
• the green movement
• open source
• urban­ism and urban plan­ning
• the cre­ative class
• archi­tec­ture of participation
• the knowl­edge economy

It’s no acci­dent that this list is also an index of many of the major ideas and con­cerns of our day. What does it mean? Well, it’s good for design at the moment. And maybe there’s a book in it for some­one with the time to syn­the­size an idea and work up a solid treatment…

Jung posited the idea of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious (later refined, but a good point of depar­ture). Do Daylife and sim­i­lar stream aggre­ga­tors / visu­al­iz­ers (I’m reach­ing for a han­dle to describe these enti­ties) like Uni­verse, point at what a col­lec­tive con­scious could be?

Uni­verse

Some pre­cur­sors might be Yahoo’s Taglines and TagMaps, Google Zeit­geist / Trends, and the var­i­ous cloud style visu­al­iza­tions like clouda­li­cious, etc.

Plainly, the num­ber and vari­ety of tools and des­ti­na­tions for visu­al­iz­ing what’s on the mind of groups is grow­ing rapidly.
If the par­al­lelism holds, mean­ing Daylife and kin are them­selves points of depar­ture, where is this going? I’m not think­ing of col­lec­tive intel­li­gence — just the visu­al­iza­tion aspect, and how that may evolve.

The Lessons From Failure Series (curated by Christian Crumlish) kicked off today at Boxes and Arrows, leading with my meditation on being an entrepreneur and what it means to face failure as a member of a rigidly defined society, titled It Seemed Like The Thing To Do At The Time. Stay tuned for three further installments from talented fellow panelists.

Also, look for part two of my series on designing healthy user experiences for portals using the IA Building Blocks in early July. Part one – The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals – describing the structural and usability weaknesses of flat architectures, was published in December.

Many thanks to the hard working volunteers at B+A for creating a forum for these ideas and the community around them!

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I’ve been working on for a while in the background, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I’ve written about organizations and failure – Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations – in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl

Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.

Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future
• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience
• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control
• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises
• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges
• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land
• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks
• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes
• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn’t allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations

In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known – and mostly successful! – people.

“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – EPICTETUS

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – THOMAS EDISON

“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – HAVELOCK ELLIS

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” – ANAIS NIN

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” – RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other.” – SHANTIDEVA

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – JOHN DEWEY

2007 looks to be the year that the user experience, information architecture, and design communities embrace systems thinking and concepts.

It’s a meeting that’s been in the making for a while –
At the 2006 IA Summit, Karl Fast and D. Grant Campbell presented From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: the Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture.
Gene Smith has been writing about systems for a while. At the 2007 summit Gene and Matthew Milan will discuss some practical techniques in their presentation Rich mapping and soft systems: new tools for creating conceptual models.
Peter Merhholz has been posting and talking about the implications of some of these ideas often.
– and seems to have reached critical mass recently:

• Adam Richardson Why Designing Systems Is Difficult
• Adam Greenfield on Two things product designers and manufacturers need to know
• Jeff Lash with Make your product part of a system

Here’s a set of reading recommendations related to systems and system thinking. These books, feeds, and articles either talk about systems and the ideas and concepts behind this way of thinking, or contain work that is heavily informed by systems thinking.

Either way, they’re good resources for learning more.

Tags:
http://del.icio.us/tag/systems_theory
http://del.icio.us/tag/systemstheory
http://del.icio.us/tag/SSM

Feeds:
Resilience Science recently featured three excellent essays on the work of C.S. Holling

Books:

• Ervin Laszlo – The Systems View of the World
• Ludwig Van Bertalanffy – General System Theory
• Gerald Weinberg – An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine – The End of Certainty
• Manuel De Landa – 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
• and also War In The Age of Intelligent Machines
• Steven Johnson – Emergence
• Manuel Castells – The Rise of the Network Society (vol. 2 of The Information Age trilogy)
• C. S. Holling – PANARCHY: Understanding Transformations In Human And Natural Systems

And for a lighter read, try anything by author Bruce Sterling that features his recurring character Leggy Starlitz – a self-described systems analyst (likely the first example of one in a work of fiction that’s even moderately well known…). His stories Hollywood Kremlin, Are You for 86?, and The Littlest Jackal (two in short story collection Globalhead), are good places to start. The novel Zeitgest focuses on Starlitz.

Articles:
Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience

We’ve needed to bridge the gulf between views of design rooted in static notions of form and function, and the fluid reality of life for a long time. I hope this new friendship lasts a while.

Con­tent man­age­ment efforts are justly infa­mous for exceed­ing bud­gets and time­lines, despite mak­ing con­sid­er­able accom­plish­ments. Exag­ger­ated expec­ta­tions for tool capa­bil­i­ties (ven­dors promise a world of automagic sim­plic­ity, but don’t believe the hype) and the poten­tial value of cost and effi­ciency improve­ments from man­ag­ing con­tent cre­ation and dis­tri­b­u­tion play a sub­stan­tial part in this. But unre­al­is­tic esti­mates of the scope of the con­tent to be man­aged make a more impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to most cost and time over­runs.

Scope in this sense is a com­bi­na­tion of the quan­tity and the qual­ity of con­tent; smaller amounts of very com­plex con­tent sub­stan­tially increase the over­all scope of needs a CM solu­tion must man­age effec­tively. By anal­ogy, imag­ine build­ing an assem­bly line for toy cars, then decid­ing it has to han­dle the assem­bly of just a few full size auto­mo­biles at the same time.

Early and inac­cu­rate esti­mates of con­tent scope have a cas­cad­ing effect, decreas­ing the accu­racy of bud­gets, time­lines, and resource fore­casts for all the activ­i­ties that fol­low.

In a typ­i­cal con­tent man­age­ment engage­ment, the activ­i­ties affected include:

• tak­ing a con­tent inventory
• defin­ing con­tent models
• choos­ing a new con­tent man­age­ment system
• design­ing con­tent struc­tures, work­flows, and metadata
• migrat­ing con­tent from one sys­tem to another
• refresh­ing and updat­ing content
• estab­lish­ing sound gov­er­nance mechanisms

The Root of the Prob­lem
Two mis­con­cep­tions — and two com­mon but unhealthy prac­tices, dis­cussed below — drive most con­tent scope esti­mates. First: the scope of con­tent is know­able in advance. Sec­ond, and more mis­lead­ing, scope remains fixed once defined. Nei­ther of these assump­tions is valid: iden­ti­fy­ing the scope of con­tent with accu­racy is unlikely with­out a com­pre­hen­sive audit, and con­tent scope (ini­tial, revised, actual) changes con­sid­er­ably over the course of the CM effort.

Together, these assump­tions make it very dif­fi­cult for pro­gram direc­tors, project man­agers, and busi­ness spon­sors to set accu­rate and detailed bud­get and time­line expec­ta­tions. The uncer­tain or shift­ing scope of most CM efforts con­flicts directly with busi­ness imper­a­tives to care­fully man­age of IT cap­i­tal invest­ment and spend­ing, a neces­sity in most fund­ing processes, and espe­cially at the enter­prise level. Instead of esti­mat­ing spe­cific num­bers long in advance of real­ity (as with the Iraq war bud­get), a bet­ter approach is to embrace flu­id­ity, and plan to refine scope esti­mates at punc­tu­ated inter­vals, accord­ing to the nat­ural cycle of con­tent scope change.

Under­stand­ing the Con­tent Scope Cycle
Con­tent scope changes accord­ing to a pre­dictable cycle that is largely inde­pen­dent of the specifics of a project, sys­tem, orga­ni­za­tional set­ting, and scale. This cycle seems con­sis­tent at the level of local CM efforts for a sin­gle busi­ness unit or iso­lated process, and at the level of enter­prise scale con­tent man­age­ment efforts. Under­stand­ing the cycle makes it pos­si­ble to pre­pare for shifts in a qual­i­ta­tive sense, account­ing for the kind of vari­a­tion to expect while plan­ning and set­ting expec­ta­tions with stake­hold­ers, solu­tion users, spon­sors, and con­sumers of the man­aged con­tent.

The Con­tent Scope Cycle

The high peak and ele­vated moun­tain val­ley shape in this illus­tra­tion tell the story of scope changes through the course of most con­tent man­age­ment efforts. From the ini­tial inac­cu­rate esti­mate, scope climbs con­sis­tently and steeply dur­ing the dis­cov­ery phase, peak­ing in poten­tial after all dis­cov­ery activ­i­ties con­clude. Scope then declines quickly, but not to the orig­i­nal level, as assess­ments cull unneeded con­tent. Scope lev­els out dur­ing sys­tem / solu­tion / infra­struc­ture cre­ation, and climbs mod­estly dur­ing revi­sion and replace­ment activ­i­ties. At this point, the actual scope is known. Mea­sured increases dri­ven by the incor­po­ra­tion of sup­ple­men­tal mate­r­ial then increase scope in stages.

Local and Enter­prise Cycles

Apply­ing the context-independent view of the cycle to a local level reveals a close match with the activ­i­ties and mile­stones for a con­tent man­age­ment effort for a small body of con­tent, a sin­gle busi­ness unit of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, or a self-contained busi­ness process.

Local Con­tent Man­age­ment Scope Cycle

At the enter­prise level, the cycle is the same. This illus­tra­tion shows activ­i­ties and mile­stones for a con­tent man­age­ment effort for a large and diverse body of con­tent, mul­ti­ple busi­ness units of a larger orga­ni­za­tion, or mul­ti­ple and inter­con­nected busi­ness process.

Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment Scope Cycle

Scope Cycle Changes

This graph shows the amount of scope change at each mile­stone, ver­sus its pre­de­ces­sor. Look­ing at the changes for any pat­terns of clus­ter­ing and fre­quency, it’s easy to see the cycle breaks down into three major phases: an ini­tial period of dynamic insta­bil­ity, a sta­tic and sta­ble phase, and a con­clud­ing (and ongo­ing, if the effort is suc­cess­ful) phase of dynamic sta­bil­ity.

Scope Cycle Phases

Where does the extra scope come from? In other words, what’s the source of the unex­pected quan­tity and com­plex­ity of con­tent behind the spikes and drops in expected scope in the first two phases? And why dri­ves the shifts from one phase to another?

Bad CM Habits

Two com­mon approaches account for a major­ity of the dra­matic shifts in con­tent scope. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, those peo­ple with imme­di­ate knowl­edge of the con­tent quan­tity and com­plex­ity rarely have direct voice in set­ting the scope and time­line expec­ta­tions.

Too often, stake hold­ers with exper­tise in other areas (IT, enter­prise archi­tec­ture, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment) frame the prob­lem and the solu­tion far in advance. The con­tent cre­ators, pub­lish­ers, dis­trib­u­tors, and con­sumers are not involved early enough.
Sec­ondly, those who frame the prob­lem make assump­tions about quan­tity and com­plex­ity that trend low. (This is in com­pan­ion to the exag­ger­a­tion of tool capa­bil­i­ties.) Each new busi­ness unit, con­tent owner, and sys­tem administrator’s items included in the effort will increase the scope of the con­tent in quan­tity, com­plex­ity, or both. Ongo­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of new or unknown types of con­tent, work flows, busi­ness rules, usage con­texts, stor­age modes, appli­ca­tions, for­mats, syn­di­ca­tion instances, sys­tems, and repos­i­to­ries will con­tinue to increase the scope until all rel­e­vant par­ties (cre­ators, con­sumers, admin­is­tra­tors, etc.) are engaged, and their needs and con­tent col­lec­tions fully under­stood.
The result is clear: a series of sub­stan­tial scope errors of both under and over-estimatio, in com­par­i­son to the actual scope, con­cen­trated in the first phase of the scope cycle.
Scope Errors

Smart Scop­ing
The scope cycle seems to be a fun­da­men­tal pat­tern; likely an emer­gent aspect of the envi­ron­ments and sys­tems under­ly­ing it, but that’s another dis­cus­sion entirely. Fail­ing to allow for the nat­ural changes in scope over the course of a con­tent man­age­ment effort ties your suc­cess to inac­cu­rate esti­mates, and this false expec­ta­tions.
Smart scop­ing means allow­ing for and antic­i­pat­ing the inher­ent mar­gins of error when set­ting expec­ta­tions and mak­ing esti­mates. The most straight­for­ward way to put this into prac­tice and account for the likely mar­gins of error is to adjust the tim­ing of a scope esti­mate to the nec­es­sary level of accu­racy.

Rel­a­tive Scope Esti­mate Accu­racy

Scop­ing and Bud­get­ing
Esti­ma­tion prac­tices that respond to the con­tent scope cycle can still sat­isfy busi­ness needs. At the enter­prise CM level, IT spend­ing plans and invest­ment frame­works (often part of enter­prise archi­tec­ture plan­ning processes) should allow for nat­ural cycles by defin­ing classes or kinds of esti­mates based on com­par­a­tive degree of accu­racy, and the estimator’s lee­way for meet­ing or exceed­ing implied com­mit­ments. Enter­prise frame­works will iden­tify when more or less accu­rate esti­mates are needed to move through fund­ing and approval gate­ways, based on each organization’s invest­ment prac­tices.

And at the local CM level, project plan­ning and resource fore­cast­ing meth­ods should allow for incre­men­tal allo­ca­tion of resources to meet task and activ­ity needs. Tak­ing a con­tent inven­tory is a sub­stan­tial labor on its own, for exam­ple. The same is true of migrat­ing a body of con­tent from one or more sources to a new CM solu­tion that incor­po­rates changed con­tent struc­tures such as work flows and infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures. The archi­tec­tural, tech­ni­cal, and orga­ni­za­tional capa­bil­i­ties and staff needed for inven­to­ry­ing and migrat­ing con­tent can often be met by rely­ing on con­tent own­ers and stake hold­ers, or hir­ing con­trac­tors for short and medium-term assis­tance.

Par­al­lels To CM Spend­ing Pat­terns
The con­tent scope cycle strongly par­al­lels the spend­ing pat­terns dur­ing CMS imple­men­ta­tion James Robert­son iden­ti­fied in June of 2005. I think the scope cycle cor­re­lates with the spend­ing pat­tern James found, and it may even be a dri­ving fac­tor.
Scop­ing and Matu­rity

Unre­al­is­tic scope esti­ma­tion that does not take the con­tent scope cycle into account is typ­i­cal of orga­ni­za­tions under­tak­ing a first con­tent man­age­ment effort. It is also com­mon in orga­ni­za­tions with con­tent man­age­ment expe­ri­ence, but low lev­els of con­tent man­age­ment matu­rity.

Two (infor­mal) sur­veys of CMS prac­ti­tion­ers span­ning the past three years show the preva­lence of scop­ing prob­lems. In 2004, Vic­tor Lom­bardi reported: “Of all tasks in a con­tent man­age­ment project, the cre­ation, edit­ing, and migra­tion of con­tent are prob­a­bly the most fre­quently under­es­ti­mated on the project plan.” [in Man­ag­ing the Com­plex­ity of Con­tent Man­age­ment].

And two weeks ago, Rita War­ren of CMSWire shared the results of a recent sur­vey on chal­lenges in con­tent man­age­ment (Things That Go Bump In Your CMS).

The top 5 chal­lenges (most often ranked #1) were:

1. Clar­i­fy­ing busi­ness goals
2. Gain­ing and main­tain­ing exec­u­tive support
3. Redesigning/optimizing busi­ness processes
4. Gain­ing con­sen­sus among stakeholders
5. Prop­erly scop­ing the project

…“Prop­erly scop­ing the project” was actu­ally the most pop­u­lar answer, show­ing up in the top 5 most often.

Accu­rate scop­ing is much eas­ier for orga­ni­za­tions with high lev­els of con­tent man­age­ment matu­rity. As the error mar­gins inher­ent in early and inac­cu­rate scope esti­mates demon­strate, there is con­sid­er­able ben­e­fit in cre­at­ing mech­a­nisms and tools for effec­tively under­stand­ing the quan­tity and qual­ity of con­tent requir­ing man­age­ment, as well as the larger busi­ness con­text, solu­tion gov­er­nance, and orga­ni­za­tional cul­ture concerns.

It has recently become clear that we’re now in the first stages of 2.0 2.0.

And I’m pleased to report that all indi­ca­tors firmly sup­port uni­ver­sal expec­ta­tions that 2.0 2.0 will be much bet­ter than 2.0 1.0 was, or hoped to be.

In fact, 2.0 2.0 is pre­dicted to pos­i­tively blow the doors off 2.0 1.0.

Besides being cheaper, faster, and bet­ter than 2.0 1.0, 2.0 2.0 will be vastly more prof­itable, fully nour­ish­ing in a non-fattening eco­log­i­cally and eth­i­cally respon­sive way, and a supremely snappy dresser for all occa­sions.

2.0 2.0 is a bold recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the basic fram­ing tenets of 2.0, that takes full advan­tage of the new capa­bil­i­ties and pos­si­bil­i­ties latent in the emerg­ing 2.0.

Whereas the inher­ent weak­nesses of the basic con­cep­tual con­struc­tion of 2.0 1.0 were only appar­ent in the after-the-fact fash­ion that was typ­i­cal of the fun­da­men­tal lim­i­ta­tions in the 2.0 1.0 under­stand­ing of 2.0, 2.0 2.0 is a fully trans­par­ent, self-funding, scal­able, gen­uinely pro­gres­sive, eman­ci­pa­tory, empow­er­ing, and com­pre­hen­sive vision of the future evo­lu­tion of 2.0.

Now that 2.0 2.0 is here, we can look back on the inad­e­qua­cies of 2.0 1.0 with a mix­ture of pride — after all, it was the only under­stand­ing of 2.0 avail­able at the time, and it did lay the foun­da­tions for the sub­limely enhanced 2.0 that is 2.0 2.0 — and cha­grin, since we rec­og­nized even in the moment that the fullest flower of 2.0 1.0 could only hope to be an incom­plete por­trayal of the true pos­si­bil­i­ties of 2.0 that pre­cluded real­iz­ing 2.0’s full poten­tial as long as it was the dom­i­nant par­a­digm for inter­pret­ing 2.0.

Thank­fully, we can now look for­ward to the immi­nent real­iza­tion of the full promise of the 2.0 2.0 vision, as it har­nesses col­lec­tive, emer­gent, non-linear, thin­gies to bring periph­eral ben­e­fits unimag­in­able in the era of 2.0 1.0, such as improv­ing con­ver­sa­tion at indus­try cock­tail par­ties, and mak­ing every­one a good dancer.

IBM recently announced the next version of Lotus Notes will support OpenDocument Format as a native file format (as reported in IBM Bets Big On Open Source In Next Release Of Lotus Notes). This shift to an open file format is – as the majority of the coverage of IBM’s announcement correctly interprets it to be – a direct challenge to the dominance of the Office suite of productivity applications, a class of products in which Microsoft has long relied on proprietary file formats as a cornerstone of it’s market control strategy. Making the challenge explicit, the next version of Lotus Notes will also include “…built-in word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software”.

Since Microsoft relies on the integration of SharePoint and the Office suite as a pillar of it’s collaboration plans (in Gates outlines SharePoint strategy, hammers IBM, John Fontana of Network World quotes Bill Gates as saying, “The key point is that SharePoint is becoming the key platform for collaboration of all types… When people look back on what we are doing with Office [2007] here, the most revolutionary element will be what we are doing with SharePoint.”), IBM’s shift to OpenDocument Format is also a strategic move in the larger category of enterprise collaboration, itself a subset of the emerging comprehensive information working environments Forrester Research calls the information workplace.

An End to Imperialism
I’ve suggested already that the conceptual construct labeled ‘collaboration’ is at heart another instance of enterprise software and solution vendor marketing rhetoric designed to mask reality – it’s simply not possible to change established cultural, organizational, perceptual, or philosophical understandings of what work is and how it should be done with an approach centered on technology – in a quasi-utopian haze.

IBM’s adoption of OpenDocument doesn’t change this picture of the collaboration landscape. Instead, it indicates a larger shift; dawning recognition and acknowledgment that monocultures are no longer viable, or valid, or broadly acceptable in the enterprise arena.

The creation and preservation of monocultures (recently in the news associated with Microsoft thanks to Dan Greer and others’ prescience) is one of the salient characteristics of the old approach to enterprise software solutions. It is especially visible in those enterprise solutions whose intended role within a portfolio of product and service offerings is to serve as a consistent revenue source, strategic bulwark against competition, and cost shifting mechanism whereby clients paid for the development of new products and services, often under the guise of maintenance, patches, upgrades, etc.

Broadly, the old approach to enterprise solutions was an imperial model, with aspects of colonialism, that pursued a military style take and hold growth pattern.

Wikipedia offers the following introduction to imperialism:
“Imperialism is a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires. This is either through direct territorial conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is often used to describe the policy of a country’s dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country considers itself part of the empire.”

In the realm of software imperialism, the customer organization buying and installing an enterprise software package was seen as a form of territory to be occupied or controlled by one or more hostile, rivalrous software and services vendors seeking to extract continuing revenues from their occupied possessions; revenues in the form of maintenance, support, customization, administration, or other sorts of solution upkeep and extension expenses.

Empires exerted control formally through a variety of political and economic mechanisms, and informally through influence over political, economic and cultural spheres. Wikipedia’s entry for “empire” offers some instructive parallels to the enterprise solution model:

“First, in an empire there must be a Core and a Periphery. The empire’s structure relates the core elite to the peripheral elite in a mutually beneficial fashion. Such as relationship can be established through any number of means, be they aggressive, coercise, or consensual. And while there is a vertical relationship between the core and periphery, there is a lack of substantive relations between periphery and periphery. This relationship he describes as an incomplete wheel: there are hubs and spokes, but no rim.”
The relationship of interconnected elites is easy to see in the pattern of incented sales and buying decisions; “Need tickets to that exclusive event? No problem, we’ll get them for you right away…”

But it’s the idea of disconnected hubs and spokes that is key to understanding the correspondence between the old enterprise model and imperialism. How often do individual client solutions (perhaps for different departments or business units) interact with each other? How often do instances of the same solution for different clients allow effective interaction between different clients of the same vendor? How often do different products nominally part of ‘integrated’ solution sets that were in actuality assembled by aggregating the offerings of acquired companies successfully interact?
Again, without overloading the analogy, there are clear parallels between the degrees of empire and the lifecycle of enterprise solutions and vendors.

“Motyl also posits varying degrees of empire: Formal, Informal, and Hegemonic. In a formal imperial relationship, the core can appoint and dismiss peripheral elites, obviate any external agenda or policies, and directly control the internal agenda and policies.”

As a consultant, I’ve seen aggressive software and services vendors directly drive business direction, strategy, investment, and process change decisions all too often. Organizations lacking vision, effective leadership, or those entering complacency or suffering decline look to vendors for leadership by proxy, allowing or asking vendors to apply their own inappropriate frames of reference and perspectives to understand and choose courses of action in situations outside the vendor’s proper domain.

“In an informal imperial relationship, the core has influence but not control over appointing and dismissing peripheral elites, direct control over the external agenda and policies, and influence over the internal agenda and policies.”

This informal relationship is the position of the entrenched vendor that provides ‘perspective’ on many situations outside their proper domain. Vendors seeking to increase their territory within client organizations often pursue growth via this method. Alternatively, vendors will control the environment in which customers and other service providers make decisions, as in the “open API” approach wherein the enterprise exposes a portion of it’s architecture, code base, or other platform, but maintains exclusive control over the API without any binding commitments.

Wikipedia continues:

“Finally, in a hegemonic relationship, the core has no control over appointing or dismissing peripheral elites, control over the external agenda, influence over external policies, and no control over the internal agenda or policies.”
This is the stage that the existing collaboration solutions seem to be entering, as witnessed by IBM’s announcement, and Microsoft’s failure to date to advance the OpenXML standard to full legitimacy.

The Passing of Imperium
In essence, the old enterprise approach exemplified the closed system, one that was sustained by the authority and credibility of the originating vendor in the face of other competing closed systems. Fundamentally, software empires and imperialism are predicated on the validity of closed systems. What happens when open systems become the preferred model?

“Empire ends when significant peripheral interaction begins, not necessarily when the core ceases its domination of the peripheries. The core-periphery relationship can be as strong or weak as possible and remain an empire as long as there is only insignificant interaction between periphery and periphery.”

OpenDocument is designed to allow exactly the sort of periphery to periphery interaction that closed architectures prohibited. IBM’s shift to OpenDocument shows awareness that old style closed imperial enterprise systems are no longer viable. In this, they are following the changing rhetoric of those such as Larry Cannell from collaborationloop.com, who offers a strongly pro-open system view in A Vision For Collaborative Technologies:

“I believe openness breeds innovation, and there are many parts of the collaborative technology market that need a big injection of innovation. While vendors continue pushing integration as their primary value proposition for closed systems, the astute competitor will embrace openness and provide innovation within an ecosystem of collaborative technologies based on open standards. Today we have a plethora of email systems which nearly everyone connected to the Internet is capable of using. We need comparable open and simple choices for other collaborative technologies; whether it is collaborative workspaces or online communities. It will not be until we have simple open standards that foster familiarity and easy interconnectivity that will we see widespread use and explosive innovation.”

Cannell is careful here to take a positive and forward-looking line regarding collaboration, but his view of closed systems is clearly negative. And the implied consequence of a closed system is lack of innovation, one of the key signs of organizations in decline.
Didn’t I start out by saying that we should be wary of the marketing rhetoric surrounding collaboration? Yes, precisely because the majority of the rhetoric coming from enterprise vendors still exemplifies the closed system, imperialist enterprise ethos.

However, in the case of IBM, it’s clear that they’ve anticipated the consequences of ignoring the environmental shift to open systems that is at hand, and reacted accordingly, at least as regards the core document standard underlying Lotus Notes (which is still awful, BTW, just in case anyone misinterprets this article to mean I think otherwise…). The relationship of Notes to Workplace seems largely unknown at this point, and still subject to bitter infighting, in another great parallel to the imperial model. Microsoft, as the other major collaboration vendor, may be able to stem the tide against open systems in the short term, but will eventually have to respond.

My thoughts on the current form of enterprise solutions as a class / industry / way of solving business problems remain unaltered – in fact I think that IBM’s move supports many of the predictions I made earlier this year, following earlier treatments by others writing on the same subjects.