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!