Coming Soon

Coming soon: Disruption City 2007.

More on information systems, the information age, business, entrepreneurship, viability, futures, Web 2.0, social computing, knowledge management ... the age of asymmetry, the end of hierarchies, & all the creativity that comes from the chaos of disruption.

"One man's earthquake is another man's new town."

The new site should be ready in a few days.

The Last Post Is Always The Most Important

For those that haven't seen the proof that Santa exists, here it is.

Happy Christmas.

Macclesfield Station 0709: the last Friday before Christmas

Heathrow is fogbound, so I am at Macclesfield station with a ticket to West Drayton and back. It is dark. The station and train are almost deserted. Only the madmen are left.

Happy new year, electronic communication. Happy new year to video and telephone, to mobile and email, instant messaging and txt. There has to be another way.

Next year, please, I travel with my girls to sunny destinations. There is no hour so ungodly that it cannot be punctured by the chatter of small girls. Next year, please, I will no longer be the lonely sod in the dark… ("a solitary mister")

Please.

Happy new year, all. This e-stuff is marvellous. This fossil-stuff, fossil-travel, is killing us.

Happy new year, and a toast to the Information Age!

"the light sings eternal/ a pale flare over marshes"

"Through networking, blogging, downloading, internet calls, gaming and God knows what else in 2007, new digital technology defines ever larger parts of our lives. It is, to anybody over 18, bewildering. But it works and consumes little energy. If we all spent our lives on the net and talking on mobiles instead of driving and flying, global warming would cease to be a problem. But, also, to be honest, I like this stuff. It makes me oddly happy, even though I am too old to grasp even 10% of what is going on. Much more is to come. I think this is good news. So there you go, an upbeat ending. The new year burns bright on the horizon. Have a good one. But, hey, let’s be careful out there."

This is Bryan Appleyard writing in the Sunday Times.

I like Bryan Appleyard, the writer. I always seek out his articles in the only print paper I buy (yes, Murdoch's tome). I don't mean my liking for Appleyard to be taken in a childish way i.e. to mean that I follow him, or even less that I always agree, or even always admire. I don't. But he always interests me. He's always a good bet. He writes loosely, sometimes. Sometimes he is tight.

He is, in the vernacular, class.

One day, maybe we will get him to Manchester and I will find out what he likes to drink. Consider yourself invited, Bryan.

There is so much in the cited article that resonates with the bigger themes of our course. Please read: agree, disagree, like, dislike ... but this is a great siren for the year that is ending. This year in our age of asymmetry.

The title and photo are Ezra Pound. A little light is enough, sometimes.

The New Normal

Kendrick Strikes Again.

Ian writes....


"
Hi all

In answer to Peter’s provocation about change…..

It's all about the new normal.

It’s the Beer talking. Well sort of. Stafford made an argument (in the early 70’s - now there’s prescience for you) that the exponential rate of change is/will be caused by our species’ progress in technology. He plots a graph, (can’t remember which book, Brain, Heart or Platform – will check it out when I return home on Wednesday), showing our developments over the centuries. He discounts the theory that “change has been ever thus”, showing that the increments get ever larger and closer together, hence an exponential curve. I will dig out the reference.

But that is not my argument. I am sure mine is not original but here goes.

As a species we have always been compelled to connect people and things together and that has been, and continues to be, a prime mover in our (technological) development. From ancient forms of writing, Marathon man, printing press, Morse code/telegraph, radio, television, computer, internet we have strived to connect one to one, one to many and many to one. We are now at the point where one to one is instantaneous around the planet with free voice and video (I use it all the time, in my youth it was only in Thunderbirds that such things happened, indeed many of the ideas that were scifi in my youth are now not only reality, but better than the scifi items and happened earlier than predicted. There is a principle with technology that what is predicted comes late and does not really deliver. Then it comes back, much bigger and more powerful than predicted. As the Zen Koan says "first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is" Chasmic or what? Moore uses the Koan as his intro to Chasm, it's not that I am an aging hippy. Well not completely that anyway...), same thing for many to one and one to many. Further, we can now connect to more abstract representations of ourselves: organisation to organisation, blogs, web sites, web services; without actually being present at either end: web crawlers, search engines that can sus sentiment, aggregators, DIGG and so on.

This level of connectivity drives complexity in our interactions. I am using the definition of complexity as “being the number of possible states of a system”. As complexity increases, so does unpredictability because things get connected in unknown ways and emergence (a hot topic in the systems and complexity community) happens. The one thing that we all agree on is that emergence is, at best, very difficult to predict, potentially impossible. The meteoric rise of Google, eBay and the like show this, underpinned by our old friends Moore, Metcalfe and Coase. Few could/would have predicted the rate of growth and eventual (current?) size of Google/eBay. Increasing complexity driving increasing unpredictability driving increasing and ever more unpredictable change. Can’t see it stopping for a while.

If I may paraphrase Don Tapscott/Dave Ticoll (digital 4-sight) "people keep asking me, after 911, the tsunami, Katrina, google, eBay and the like, when will it get back to normal. I tell them the answer is that it already has. This is the new normal. Get used to it". What is needed are tools that help us cope and maybe even survive and thrive in this new apparently chaotic world, our new normal. Ashby is key here and all that cascades out of his Law of Requisite Variety. "Only Variety Can Absorb Variety" is a far better answer to the Ultimate Question Of Life The Universe And Everything than "42". I even suspect that Douglas Adams might concur. That the words seem innocuous and at first glance meaningless should not deter us. Investigation of them will get repaid a thousand fold. Any tools that we use must, IMHO obey this Law. Stafford's works are based on it. Moore and Christensen conform as does Blue Ocean.

We have not seen, in my opinion, the big changes yet. My view is that we will see “phase changes” going on before long. Connectivity with communication will drive it. As the folks in Funky Business http://www.funkybusiness.com say at the beginning of their book, “Marx was right”. But not with the manual workers, only when economies and power start to be driven by knowledge workers. Which is about now. As Nordström and Ridderstråle point out “The revolutionary reality is that 1.3 kilograms of brain holds the key to all our futures”. Oh, and they quote and use Ashby’s Law.

Provocative? Me? Oh behave!

Cheers and happy midwinter and new year.

Ian

PS – on a sadder note Amanga The Dog passed today after 14 and a half years of giving only unconditional love and acceptance from her moment of birth until her death. Would that we could all do the same in all of our relationships. We will miss her.
"

The Springtime of a New Age

Time Magazine's person of the year is you.
See also, the BBC coverage

Look at this together with "Midwives to the Emerging World" (originally in The Telegraph), and tell me: Is it not springtime already?

Service Oriented Architecture and SAP

Thank you to Phil Drinwater for the following.

Following SAP CEO Henning Kagermann’s presentation at SAP's fourth annual analyst summit, Shai Agassi, president of the Product & Technology Group, laid out the company's technical vision. He believes that SAP is in position to lead the chasm-crossing from the client-server model to enterprise SOA, and become the dominant software platform.

He cited Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm , in which the author states that the first company to cross the chasm–to transition from one technology generation to the next–can galvanize 80- to 90 percent of the ecosystem. An ecosystem doesn't want to adopt multiple platform standards, and would rather have one strong platform, one backbone running core processes, to build around.


Philip Drinkwater
The University of Manchester

A Disruption? A Ripple? Warp-speed? Renaissance?

Future scenarios continued:

Do you remember Ian talking about the pace of change accelerating? I invite Ian to comment further, as I recall him talking about the argument that the pace would continue to pick up. I cannot remember the source he cited.

Two exhibits discovered in two minutes on a Sunday morning.

Exhibit number one:

We talked about newspapers and the media. Here is more evidence consistent with our thinking.

Exhibit number two:

An idea more dazzling than an Olympic vision. Its architect was born, worked and studied in the Disruption City.

Commenting broadly, the wave of architectural new thinking that we are seeing is attributable in part to computer technology or, more accurately, the symbiosis of human imagination and computer technology. As the Foster profile says, "Today, Foster and Partners works with its engineering collaborators to integrate complex computer systems with the most basic physical laws..."

A disruption? A ripple? Warp-speed? Renaissance?

Odds Overcome?

Despite all, Conrad is attracting friends.

A Photo Finish

It was a photo-finish. The Naked Chasm Jumpers took the prize.

Thank you to the great judges who made the decision:

• Jackie Carruthers of Consult Osmosis
• Euan Semple of Euan Semple
• Yaprak Temren of Insead MBA Class

and our fourth official, Ian Muir-Cochrane of BBC Radio 4.

Photos above courtesy of the 00aet skunk works.

We might be right

Remember the class wiki? The Web 2.0 hypotheses?

We might be right, you know. I do think that we are evolving into a post-bureaucratic world (and of course many commentators have said this). Here's some more evidence. Note also, the guerrilla action that seeded this. Down with hierarchies! Up with skunk works! Hurray for talented people being talented!

Charlie and Lola

The internet is truly and unequivocally a marvellous thing as tonight I have discovered, for the first time, that I can watch Charlie and Lola whenever and wherever I want. With a 3G card in my laptop, and soon in the Mac as well, I might even start turning up at committee meetings. Just don't expect me to listen!

The Future of TV

This is a good resource for those thinking about the future of TV.

"The First Flowering of the Network World"

This lovely BBC report is perfectly timed. It resonates with all we have been saying. It is a great postscript for the course.

The Mythical 100%

One thing that I think about occasionally is the way in which we mark student work. Let's imagine that we get an assignment created by a student over a four-week period and it is really, really good. It is as good as we could possibly expect.

The student hands it in and we academics look at it.

What mark do we award? 70%? 75%?? 82%??? Has anyone ever marked at 85%???? Anyone ever marked at 90%? What about 95%?

Does 100% exist?

Now then, to turn to the matter of Chris Bliss, talent-spotted by Maura Brooks of Leeds and also seen on Disappearing World.

Chris gets nearly 8.5 million hits, and nearly 6.5 thousand ratings. His average score = 4.5/5 i.e. 90%.

So where did the other 10% go? How good do you have to be?

Sharpen up, Chris! Keep trying.

The Kids Are Gifted

Semple is reading The Kids Are Alright. Its serious business.

And, making an obliquely related point, its time we started talking about the relationship between the internet and The Gift. More soon.

Athena and Mars in the Asymmetric Age

All around us, everday, there is evidence of how our world is changing. Our new age of mass communications is changing society. It is even changing warfare. Today, on the train, I noticed this story in a friend's copy of The Guardian. It tells of the Israelis attempting to disintermediate the media in the conflict with the Palestinians. I make no comment on the article, the conflict, or any other of the tragic episodes of war that currently afflict the globe. But it restored to my mind Arquilla and Ronfeldt's book 'In Athena's Camp'. The Israeli initiative is by no means the first military cause that seeks to exploit the immediacy and ubiquity of the internet as a communications device. It just adds to the weight of evidence gathered since Arquilla and Ronfeldt published their book in 1997. I am sure you can think of other examples.

Now, a few days after lecturing on skunk works, I am beginning to wonder if we are all writing a whole theory of asymmetry wherein a faster-paced, networked society loads the dice in favour of the alternative, fleet-footed initiative, rather than the command and control of the incumbent.

Is this the age of asymmetric strategy?

The Slow Attrition of the Soul

Today we have another good example of how blog, in the right hands, is a powerful knowledge tool. Indeed, "powerful knowledge tool" is too techological a term, too clunky a way of expressing a medium that seems as natural and human as handwriting.

"Sent from a mobile phone, probably from the cab of an ambulance."

Once again we cite Tom Reynolds.

It is worth spending time with this site. All those of us who are interested in how our taxes get spent, or how our cities function, or how people react in drama and crises, will find something in Random Acts of Reality.

A Tale of Our Times: the Method and the Fetish.

Faced with the complexity of technology and change, there has been a huge interest in methods designed to help organisations move from one state to another. Sometimes these methods are controlled and utilized by consultants. Sometimes they are passed over to the organisations themselves.

An industry has grown up:
- Systems development methods
- Software engineering models
- Change management methods
- Project management methods

Methods have become an issue in their own right. They have become a complex issue, perhaps adding to the complexity endured by the organisation. Coping with the complexity of the method might even become a way of disengaging from the actual task at hand (i.e. the organisational change project). It becomes a fetish.

What then is the utility of methods? How do you tell good from bad?

This week we will hear stories of organisational change. Please be prepared to bring your own as well. Many of us will have tales to tell.

The Loneliest Man in MySpace ?

Is this man so out of step with the age that, even with the multiple networking features of MySpace, he cannot gather any friends?

Or is he simply a different class?

Hoverstadt's Library

Here are books from Patrick's library. I have not read the Hurst book, 'Crisis and Renewal,' so perhaps I'll start there.

Stafford Beer
Almost everything Stafford wrote is worth reading. But isn’t easy – although I do have a mate who said she kept “Heart of Enterprise” as her bedside reading because she loved the elegance of the writing (not because it sent her to sleep). “Heart” is a good place to start though it is quite thick, “Diagnosing the System for Organisations” is a lot thinner, but misses all the underlying theory.

W. Ross Ashby
If you thought Stafford’s stuff was hard…. But Ashby is the man who invented Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety – which for management is as fundamental and inescapable as the law of gravity, so the guy deserves a mention even if his books are a wee bit tricky. Thin books, but oh so dense and with loads of sums.

Chris Alexander – “Notes on the synthesis of form”Interesting chap – an architect who wrote “Notes” on designing complex systems – specifically physical systems, but the book was rediscovered years later and became a standard text for object orientated programmers. His thinking is very systemic and he does nice job of demonstrating how Ashby’s law is critical to designing physical systems. Thinnish and easy.

Candace Pert – “Molecules of Emotion”If you thought you understood how you work, think again. Her stuff also applies to organisations and how they take decisions; I read this and started to see the traditional strategic model (even more than I did before) as a kind of organisational psychosis. Also worth reading as a savage critique of sexism and denial in the scientific community.

Humberto Maturana & Fransisco Varela - “Tree of Knowledge”Some people love “tree” and some hate it, but Maturana’s work on structural coupling and autopoiesis is seriously important stuff and turns a lot of conventional thinking about evolution and competition on its head. A thin book and relatively easy reading (oh and it has some slightly weird cartoons in it).

David K. Hurst
Every MBA student should read “Crisis & Renewal” When you are in a situation in which it has become relevant, it may be too late. His approach is very Mosaic, but he had to learn it the hard way. Medium thickness, but easy reading.

Niccolo Machiavelli
Brilliant, beautifully written and as relevant today as it was in 1513. This is a thin book that should be a must for anyone interested in management.

In the land of Gilgamesh and the garden of Eden.....

from Patrick
In the week when George W got a bit of a kicking in the mid term polls which by all accounts was because of the handling of Iraq post war, I thought it might be worth looking at this using the Mosaic Transformation model.

The post war taming and reconstruction of Iraq was tackled largely using the classical change model: get a government (start at the top of the hierarchy) and then get them to build and/or change successive levels of public infrastructure. I say largely tackled because of course, the exception was Kurdistan in the north. Overwhelmingly, this approach has failed as indeed it was doomed to do. Too big a job, with far too many highly diverse, but massively interconnected problems, and far too little management resource available, in other words, yet another doomed attempt by a government to break Ashby's law. And the inevitable result is that very few problems have been sorted at all and very few areas function.

So how could it have been different? Well a Mosaic solution would firstly have started with identifying the necessary changes as discrete packets of achievable changes and second would have involved searching for available resource to effect them. So two huge resource pools that were disbanded immediately post war were the Iraqi army and the civil service, without this level of resource, only very limited change was ever going to be possible. It is generally recognised now that this was a mistake, but from a mosaic perspective, the folly of doing this was very clear. As far as discrete changes go, the design was to institute change across the country, but that hasn't happened, a very very familiar pattern of failure: of course some areas would be harder and slower to change than others. The mosaic solution is to simply accept it, protect the boundaries of the areas you are able to change (in this case literally protect the boundaries from insurgent infiltration) and work within the areas where change is possible.

The failure pattern we can see, is so familiar, failure of the top-down, homogeneous change plan and its gradual replacement by a more heterogeneous pattern of ad hoc changes - like Kurdistan, a functioning state within a state. And if they had planned for discrete changes? We would probably have had significantly more development in the fast-track parts like Kurdistan, and certainly, the south around Basra could have been further advanced than it is now. Some parts of the centre would be as far from reform as they are now, but could have been prevented from causing quite as much disruption as they have. Outside the boundary protected enclave of the Kurds, that disruption that looks as though scupper the whole project and condemn another generation to anarchy in the land that first gave us civilisation.

from Peter
Riverbend: the voices are out there.

McFlog?

No need to start singing, Aretha. This time we know that its us being zoomed.

McFlog? McDonalds create false blogs!

Thanks to Tudor Rickards for this.

Snakes on a Plane

From your correspondent in Drogheda.

I was told today about the internet phenomena surrounding the film Snakes on a Plane. I confess, I had not heard about this before. The internet phenomena seem to be of two kinds:
- Viral marketing that becomes hijacked by fans (they start creating promotional material themselves).
- Something approaching open-source scriptwriting wherein five days of extra filming are introduced to respond to fan suggestions.

However, I know little, and as ever with viral campaigns, the question is 'Who's zoomin' who?'

Does anyone know more?

Time for a Bonfire Party?

Those who have not yet rethought the whole issue of internal corporate communications might be interested in the lead taken by Leeds City Council working with Chrysalis. Today I heard their first podcast material designed to allow Joanne Hopkins' BPR Team relay findings and issues to stakeholders. It is only a pilot but as I heard the podcasts and was told about the plans for new web environments, I became convinced that it will consign the old reporting protocols to history.

More news when I have it.

Tom Peters wrote once very entertainingly about having a bonfire party wherein, to the distracted surprise of your work colleagues, you incinerate all your office paper. Soon, maybe, it might be safe to do this.

"A Web of Interdependencies"

For those that are interested, Brian Eno's opening lecture to 'Free Thinking 2006' is available for a few more days on the BBC Radio 3 site.

A nice quote: "Everyone is smarter than any one"

The Word, Jeff.

Thank you to Jeff for the extra effort he went to in order to get online last week. Jeff has an exciting job in SAP, and is one of the authors of this book. It has sold a lot!

Great to talk to you Jeff, thank you.

Thank you also to the main event last week, Karl Wills of Abacus Billing. It was great to hear about strategy and operations at the cutting edge of modern, hi-tech business.

Thank you Karl, talk to you again soon.

Kendrick's Library

No doubt Kendrick's library is an interesting place to spend some time. Here are his notes on some of the books he has mentioned to you.

Pour the ginger tea, Ian...

Geoffrey Moore

Check out chasmgroup.com You can subscribe to a free email newsletter. I do.

Crossing the Chasm
The original work from the early ‘90s. Now revised so that the case studies/examples are more up to date. Still an excellent read, in Moore’s conversational style. Essential, unless you get a copy of….

Inside the Tornado
The follow on from CTC, focuses on what it is like to be in the hyper growth Tornado phase of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Includes an overview of CTC. Probably the best “Chasm” book, if you only want one.

Living on the Fault Line
Again from Moore, covers life in the internet age. Some say it is dated now, being pre dot com fiasco era. I still reckon it is very good. The slide that I use about risk, capitalisation etc is from this, as is the culture model of William Schneider. Recommended.

The Gorilla Game
Supposedly a guide to how to “read” technology companies and spot the emerging Gorillas. Never achieved the success of his other works and possibly his weakest, IMHO.

Dealing with Darwin
Moore’s latest work, focuses on what happens after the original Chasm crossing and the category matures. Feels like a response/trump to Clayton Christensen’s works on innovation. It is here that Moore reveals 14 innovation types. Excellent, highly recommended.

Clayton M Christensen

Another Harvard guy. Made his reputation by focusing on how innovation works.

The Innovator’s dilemma
The original work from Christensen. Introduces the concept of disruptive innovation and how large companies put themselves in potentially fatal danger by focusing on satisfying their customers and continuous improvement. Meanwhile a disruptive innovation comes along that seems trivial but ends up taking customers and business away from the large incumbent market leaders. After this book, Silicon Valley firms started to hire Vice Presidents of Disruption. No, really. An excellent work, Christensen is more academic in his style that Moore.

The Innovator’s Solution
A guide to how incumbents can deal with disruptive innovation. A well argued, rational read. Recommended.

Seeing Whats Next
A bit like Moore’s Gorilla Game, Christensen shows how to use knowledge of how disruptive innovation works to spot how winning disruptors configure themselves for success. One of the best books on high tech strategy, IMHO. Highly Recommended.

Other authors

Kim and Burgoyne – Blue Ocean Strategy
A Blue Ocean is a nice place to be. Full of oxygen and empty apart from you, no competition. The opposite is a Red Ocean, full of competition, red with blood. K&B show how to establish Blue Oceans in a very practical and sensible way. Entirely compatible with Moore and Christensen but easier than either of them. Chapters on Bill Bratten, the man who turned around New York from being crime ridden and dangerous into a much safer place. One of the greatest leaders I have ever read about and certainly one who understands the principles of variety management/requisite variety espoused by Stafford Beer and W Ross Ashby. Very good read.

Markides and Geroski - Fast Second
An examination of companies who prosper by waiting until a category is established and then stepping in to win the big prize. A great idea for a book…..but….. I could not get into this one. Feels like a rehashing of Moore and Christensen without adding too much value. Worth a look though.

Warren Bennis - Organising Genius
An examination of a number of “great groups” from history, including Disney, Apple, Xerox PARC, the team who got Clinton into the White House, Los Alamos (original A bomb) team and the original Skonk Works at Lockheed, (forever referred to as Skunk Works) at Lockheed. Bennis explores what it is that separates these groups from history. He draws some very interesting conclusions. A great read and highly recommended. I have a short form/summary PDF of this if anyone wants a copy.

Stafford Beer

Where to begin? Probably not here as Patrick’s lecture next week will cover the Viable Systems Model and related topics. All of Stafford’s books are serious works but can be a bit daunting. For those who would like an introduction without having to read Stafford, check out Barry Clemson, Cybernetics: A New Management Tool, Volume Four. Specifically commissioned to be an introduction to the VSM.

Arie de Geus – The Living Company
A look at how to build and lead in a company that works as a living entity rather than a machine. An excellent read, it is here that Arie introduces his 4 rules of long lived organisations. Recommended

Kees Van Der Heijden – Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation
Probably the most authoritative work on scenario thinking. Excellent but not one to skim read.

Gill Ringland – Scenario Planning
Gill was the person who led the ICL team that produced Coral Reef and Deep Sea. Her book is a good set of case studies and different approaches. Not as heavyweight as Kees’s work but recommended all the same.


That’s enough for now.

Cheers

ian

Big Systems

BusinessWeek InfoTech 100

Welcome to the world of SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and every blue chip company in the world.

Free Thinking Festival

The BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival is in Liverpool 3rd to 5th November. Questions include 'Who does technology put in charge?' and 'Will the 21st Century be the Lonely Century?'

Brian Eno, briefly mentioned by Ian in the last session, gives the 'Free Thinking' lecture.

Ultimate Knowledge?

What would the ultimate information system give the business?
Would it be information about the future?

If we could see the future coming, would this be ultimate knowledge?

This week Ian Kendrick presents on Scenario Thinking.

On this topic, please see the following. The notes are Ian's.

"Quantum Leap..." Peter Schwartz (prime mover in future thinking/scenario work and co-founder of Global Business Networks) co- authored this article/scenario on the future of computing.

"Why the future doesn't need us...... " Don't know if you saw Horizon this week on the emergence of Human 2.0. It included major references and interviews with Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and inventor of lots of stuff. Much of the ground covered by Horizon was also in an article by Bill Joy (Chief Computer Scientist & co-founder of Sun Microsystems), published in Wired Magazine (when it was far more heavyweight than today's comic) in 2000. It caused a major stir at the time, coming from such a respected individual.


Also, an important article that relates more generally to what you learn here, and elsewhere in the MBA, concerns Jack Welch & GE. Remember the video that Phil Drinkwater played you in week 1? Well, have a look at "Tearing up the Playbook...." Jack Welch's business rules are being challenged from some unexpected directions. Fortune Magazine published this piece earlier this year:

Down With Hierarchies!

Try 'Listen Again' on the In Business site.
Ian has the podcast but for technical reasons as yet unexplained, I have been unable to email this to you.

If you are interested in Ricardo Semler's book, 'Maverick', it is available from Amazon.

The Great Seduction

Web 2.0, its worse than you think!

Web 2.0, its bigger than the corporates can imagine!

Our Class Wiki

Our class wiki is now available. You will be able access it by following the instructions distributed by Louise.

We should try to agree on the likely impact of Web 2.0 by amending (or recreating or destroying) the 'Web 2.0 hypotheses.' We are also seeking your thoughts on the MBS bar. What's your vision? How would you develop it?

Thanks to Paul for this.

Media City UK

Here is the link to Media City UK

How We Became Who We Are

Are we separate from the technology we use? Is it incidental to who we are?

If we had grown up in a different technological environment e.g. that of a Victorian child, would we be who we are? Or would we be, in some ways, different?

Does the mind make technology and then technology make the mind?

Take video games as an example. With an industry the size of Hollywood, how do they affect today's children?

The text below is sourced from:
http://www.mediafamily.org/research/report_vgrc_2004.shtml


Video games are natural teachers. Children find them highly motivating; by virtue of their interactive nature, children are actively engaged with them; they provide repeated practice; and they include rewards for skillful play. These facts make it likely that video games could have large effects, some of which are intended by game designers, and some of which may not be intended. Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that several companies are now designing video game consoles for preschoolers (Kim, 2004). Given the potential video games have to influence, we should pay attention to the fact that children are spending increasing amounts of time with them at younger and younger ages.

Video games have been shown to teach children healthy skills for the self-care of asthma and diabetes, and have been successful at imparting the attitudes, skills, and behaviors that they were designed to teach (Lieberman, 1997; 2001). In a study with college students, playing a golf video game improved students' actual control of force when putting, even though the video game gave no bodily feedback on actual putting movement or force (Fery & Ponserre, 2001). There have even been studies with adults showing that experience with video games is related to better surgical skills (e.g., Pearson, Gallagher, Rosser, & Satava, 2002; Rosser et al., 2004; Tsai & Heinrichs, 1994). Research also suggests that people can learn iconic, spatial, and visual attention skills from video games (De Lisi & Wolford, 2002; Dorval & Pepin, 1986; Green & Bavelier, 2003; Greenfield, deWinstanley, Kilpatrick, & Kaye, 1994; Griffith, Volschin, Gibb, & Bailey, 1983; Okagaki, & Frensch, 1994; Yuji, 1996). Finally, research on educational software has shown that educational video games can have very significant effects on improving student achievement (Murphy, Penuel, Means, Korbak, & Whaley, 2001).

Given the fact that video games are able to have several positive effects, it should come as no surprise that they also can have negative effects. Research has documented negative effects of video games on children's physical health, including obesity (Berkey et al., 2000; Subrahmanyam et al., 2000; Vandewater, Shim, & Caplovitz, 2004), video-induced seizures (Kasteleijn-Nolst Trenite et al. 1999; Badinand-Hubert et al., 1998; Ricci & Vigevano, 1999; Ricci et al., 1998), and postural, muscular and skeletal disorders, such as tendonitis, nerve compression, and carpal tunnel syndrome (e.g., Brasington, 1990; SaftetyAlerts, 2000). However, these effects are not likely to occur for most children. The research to date suggests that parents should be most concerned about two things: the amount of time that children play, and the content of the games that they play.

Simply put, the amount of time spent playing video games has a negative correlation with academic performance (e.g., Anderson & Dill, 2000; Anderson et al., under review; Gentile et al., 2004; Harris & Williams, 1985). Playing violent games has a positive correlation with antisocial and aggressive behavior (most researchers define violence in games as when the player can intentionally harm other characters in the game; e.g., Anderson & Dill, 2000; Anderson et al., under review; Gentile et al., 2004). Content analyses show that a majority of games contain some violent content, and about half of those include violence that would result in serious injuries or death (Children Now, 2001; Dietz, 1998; Dill, Gentile, Richter, & Dill, in press). A majority of 4th - 8th grade children prefer violent games (Buchman & Funk, 1996; Funk, 1993).

Looking across the dozens of studies that have now been conducted on violent video games, there appear to be five major effects. Playing violent games leads to increased physiological arousal, increased aggressive thoughts, increased aggressive feelings, increased aggressive behaviors, and decreased prosocial helping behaviors (Anderson, 2004; Anderson & Bushman, 2001). These studies include experimental studies (where it can be shown that playing violent games actually causes increases in aggression), correlational studies (where long-term relations between game play and real-world aggression can be shown), and longitudinal studies (where changes in children's aggressive behaviors can be demonstrated). For example, in a study of over 400 3rd - 5th graders, those students who played more violent video games early in the school year changed to become more physically aggressive later in the school year, even after statistically controlling for sex, race, total screen time, prior aggression, and other relevant variables (Anderson et al., under review). Apparently practice does make perfect.

The research also seems to show that parents have an important role to play. Children whose parents limited the amount of time they could play and also used the video game ratings to limit the content of the games have children who do better in school and also get into fewer fights (Gentile et al., 2004). Regarding limiting the amount, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children not spend more than one to two hours per day in front of all electronic screens, including TV, DVDs, videos, video games (handheld, console, or computer), and computers (for non-academic use). This means seven to 14 hours per week total. The average school-age child spends over 37 hours a week in front of a screen (nine hours of which is with video games, although there are large sex-differences - boys average 13 hours/week and girls average five hours/week; Gentile et al., 2004). We all like to think our children are above average, but on this dimension it's not a good thing. Regarding content, educational games are likely to have positive effects and violent games are likely to have negative effects. Almost all (98%) of pediatricians believe that violent media have a negative effect on children (Gentile, Oberg, Sherwood, Story, Walsh, & Hogan, 2004).

The conclusion we draw from the accumulated research is that the question of whether video games are "good" or "bad" for children is oversimplified. Playing a violent game for hours every day could decrease school performance, increase aggressive behaviors, and improve visual attention skills. Instead, parents should recognize that video games can have powerful effects on children, and should therefore set limits on the amount and content of games their children play. In this way, we can realize the potential benefits while minimizing the potential harms. The accumulated research shows that the video game industry must stop giving a mixed message to parents - that they have a good rating system but that there's no research to show that video games can have harmful effects. There is starting to be a large body of evidence that games can have powerful effects, both for good and ill.

"Innovation not litigation"

Did I ever doubt you, Google?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2404038.html

Travel Agents

BBC story on the decline of the package holiday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi?redirect=st.stm&news=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=5396274

Open Source

Click away ... the web contains a bounty of articles about open source. Below is a small selection. The last concerns open source pharmaceuticals, though please also use Google if you are interested in this topic.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1375194866;fp;16;fpid;0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/01/open_source_tak.html?chan=search

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/10/open_source_inn.html?chan=search

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051228_262746.htm?chan=search

http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/03/24/2056230.shtml?tid=74&tid=132

Gender Statistics

Three months is too long an interval, I think, to measure usage of internet in 2006, but that caveat aside, these are still useful statistics.

http://www.citizensonline.org.uk/statistics

Gender differences in take-up of online games is dealt with here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5407490.stm

(Online games is an area I know little about but I am learning from MSc student Howard Leung .... like MySpace, YouTube etc., there are some colossal user statistics).

Death of a President

Please note, Ian Kendrick's suggestion that you watch 'Death of a President' ahead of our week 5 lecture.

http://www.channel4.com/more4/drama/d/death_president.html

More4 tonight 13th October, 21.00, and Channel4 19th October, 22.00.

Semple Speaks

http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/disembodiment.html

Time List of "Coolest" Websites

http://www.time.com/time/2006/50coolest/index.html

The Very Ordinary Case of Anna Eagin

This is a piece I wrote & have used in projects with Office an Taoiseach (Ireland) & Department of Communities and Local Govt (UK). I've doctored it slightly here...

It is called 'The Next Revolution Will Just Walk In The Door', or 'The Very Ordinary Case of Anna Eagin.'

Here we go ....


Anna Eagin is aged 15 and a half: Top of the Pops is now dead. MTV and its like are the source of constant enquiry: Can they survive? Anna (favourite bands The Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom) is typical of the new generation that don’t need Top of the Pops or MTV. They have YouTube and MySpace. Anna is skilled in both. She communicates with school friends and family using these sites and a variety of others, including Flickr and her blog site. She also meets new friends through these sites. Tonight she is talking to fifteen-year-old ‘SydneyKid’ over in Australia. He turns out to be called James and is into English music and volleyball.

Aged 17 and a half: Anna has become a concerned environmentalist. She has an RSS feed to the BBC for news on this subject. She also uses sources from Greenpeace and other organisations. Her particular passion is campaign for the whale. She enjoys several ichat video conversations with Cath and Mike, two well-known environmentalists in their research station in Canada. She also writes very succinct, poignant messages about the whale on her blog site. She builds up a small but appreciative readership.

Aged 19 and a half: ‘Reclaim the desert’ is the name of a local campaign in Anna’s neighbourhood. The desert in question is a small area of open land that has fallen into disuse. Although it is just behind a row of shops, it features a pretty view to the local canal. It used to be a green site but now cars have started parking there and local market traders store equipment and trailers over weekends. It has become alternately muddy or parched (hence the name for the campaign). Anna can remember when she played there as a small child and joins the campaign, helping to create the website. She also uses her video camera & Mac to record and edit the recollections of elderly people. ‘There wasn’t a romance in the district that didn’t at some time find its way to the small bench there by the canal’ says Betty, aged 71.

Aged 21 and a half: Anna applies for and gets a management job in your organisation. What will you tell her? Will you tell her that her skills (writing for new media, blog, wiki, video) are no longer needed or that they should be confined to her evenings and weekends? Will you instead teach her the traditional art of writing papers and reports (black on white, stagnant paragraph after stagnant paragraph, token colour graphs to liven up the beleaguered reader). Will you encourage her to conform to a culture of formal meetings (the longer and more snooze-inducing they are then the more worthy they must be)? Or will you instead decide that it is the organisation that must learn from Anna? And what will Anna say? What will she think when she encounters staff who don’t know what’s happening in the next department, never mind across the globe? Do you think that she will tell them about Cath and Mike? Do you think that she herself will be bold enough to say that there are lessons to be learned & that she can teach new things to an old organisation? Do you think she will tell them about Betty?

I think Anna will speak up.

She will say, “I think there’s a better way of doing what we are trying to do.”

The next revolution will just walk in the door.

Gearing up for the Social Computing Debate

Euan sent me this link related to London Business School:

http://mbablog.london.edu/


...also, on the topic of blogs, and getting ready for this week's session, I wonder if you think that this is management information?

http://randomreality.blogware.com/

I especially like this posting:

http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/1/45188.html

... and, on the general topic, see some of the earlier postings like

http://mbsmis2006.blogspot.com/2006/10/goldrush.html
http://mbsmis2006.blogspot.com/2006/10/al-gore-diy-media.html
http://mbsmis2006.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-space-trumps-youtube.html

Al Gore & DIY Media

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-2393528.html

Goldrush?

From zero to $1.6billion in 18 months.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5414432.stm


and some of the comment in the aftermath

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6038116.stm

Phil Drinkwater's Blog

Please note that Phil has put material relevant to his session at his blog site

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/PhilDrinkwater

So Much To Answer For

It is our fate to live/work in the city that invented industrialised society, and then, for an encore, came up with the computer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/3781481.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Kilburn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Calland_Williams

http://www.computer50.org/mark1/

No city more deserves the world's leading Tech-Business School.

Raiding Euan Semple

You need to see these:

http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/if_youre_not_ca.html

and

http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/genius_from_gar.html

and more seriously, sort of,

http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/ibm_alumni_to_m.html

BBC and Microsoft

We talked about Apple as a media company.
Now, here's the BBC collaborating with Microsoft.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5390000.stm

A new world, indeed.

See also Martin Cahill's blog

http://dontthinktwice.wordpress.com/

Real, not utopian

Don’t confuse the message. The future will not be utopia. The seismic changes brought by new ICT will bring ill and good.

But the message is that they will be seismic. They are seismic. This was a central thesis in lecture one

And seismic change brings opportunity. Here is a recent BusinessWeek article.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997001.htm?chan=tc?link_position=link1&campaign_id=nws_tech_Aug8

And here is the 2001 BusinessWeek article that I referred to.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_13/b3725001.htm

I still consider this 2001 article to be well-judged, but I would extend it a little. I would argue that its becoming increasingly obvious that the spinal bureaucracy of any company in any sector is highly susceptible to reform. The cost and quality benefits seem to be ready for harvest.

Why?

• We already have enterprise systems and their like (weeks 6 and 9), and these will continue to develop, offering more automation to the workplace. Moreover, they are extending their range as companies like SAP and Oracle develop them around new ‘event architectures’. We’ll see how these develop but hitherto industry has been ready to adopt these large-scale systems.
• But still more important in this regard, in my view, is Web 2.0 (weeks 3 and 4). These media-lite developments on the web hog headlines for their impact on youth culture and media industries. It is all very exciting, but I’d make the additional point that they offer all companies an alternative to the base tools of bureaucracy. Who needs the bureau, the pen and the form when they can have Web 2.0?

Bureaucracy is of a time and a technology. It carries technological assumptions within it (the very name, bureaucracy). Many commentators have been saying for some time that the new technologies would challenge and topple many of the assumptions and associations of bureaucracy. Web 2.0 is the most potent expression of the alternative that we have yet seen.

And on this subject, I often like to tease delegates on government courses with these two questions:

Who said? “The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its pure technical superiority over any other form of organization.”

• Henry Ford
• Max Weber
• Peter Drucker
• Karl Marx
• FW Taylor

Who said?
“It is horrible to think that the world would one day be filled with little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards the bigger ones.”
“The great question … is what we can oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”

• Henry Ford
• Max Weber
• Peter Drucker
• Karl Marx
• FW Taylor
  

Think about the answer. The point is, in the end, that bureaucracy is not God-given. It is of a time and a technology. I consider it realistic, not utopian, to argue that companies of the near future will be sufficiently different to the bureaucratic archetype so as to deserve an alternative label.

My Space trumps YouTube

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=mktw&guid=%7B1425D570-12BE-4157-A598-5A7BBF5D2FBB%7D&

Final Schedule

Please note minor changes to the schedule previously announced. We will now run in the order:


Week 1. Introductions and History.
Week 2. The Chasm, and Group Assignment Clinic
Week 3 and 4. Social Computing
Week 5. Scenario Thinking
Week 6. Big Systems 1 (Alignment, Competitive Advantage, ERP)
Week 7 and 8. Change Management
Week 9. Big Systems 2 (Practical Issues)
Week 10. Presentations

The intranet site for the course will be updated. Thank you.

Best of the Web

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/newsletter/index.html

Blogging explained

There is some interesting reference material for blogging here:



http://www.intomedia.org.uk/index.php?pid=1271

Technology Pages at the BBC

I would recommend that you keep a watching brief on the technology pages at news.bbc.co.uk
There is always something valuable there. For example:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5370122.stm


and


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5370688.stm

Welcome

Welcome to the Thursday late-shift.