Archive for category 06 Age of Access
Some ramblings on crowdsourcing
Posted by jayvanzyl in 06 Age of Access, 08 Participative Customer on February 11, 2010
Two more examples of crowdsourcing approaches.
I’ve spoken quite a bit about innovation related communities and ecologies over the last months. One component that is needed to make innovations successful, is the ability to try and predict the future. Some predictions are described as scenarios and others can come from communities where the whole world participate in submitting predictions. The community, What the future holds plays to your need to leave a legacy where people in the future will see that you were able to predict the future.
Nostradamical: predict, publish, play “Essentially Nostradamical is a fun approach to a serious topic: The ability of ‘the crowd’ to predict events with better overall success than ‘the individual’.” The focus is on getting social communities to share information about the future. They are also working on a prediction engine that uses the data from the community to intelligently make predictions.
I find this particularly interesting as most of our clients would benefit from this approach when collecting complaints, recommendations, ideas, compliments, etc from their clients, staff, etc. We are entering an era where the classical MIS (management information system) approach is just not going to cut it. Real-time information is needed as crowds share ideas, change behaviours and shift markets. Integrating financial information from your bank, with tax information from the local authority, vehicle information from your car, mobile behavior from your cellphone, E-mail information from your E-mail provider, social information from your Facebook and Linkedin accounts… And, once integrated, you should be able to have recommendations made as to when to phone, where to drive, and what to do next for optimal performance. Is this taking it too far?
Here is another example, and something more practical…
We are embarking on a rethink of our brand, something that happens periodically. LogoTournament is a crowdsource based community where designers from all over the world can design logo’s for companies. It will cost you anything from about $250 to $5000 depending on the level of response required. So, why would you do this? The old way was to give your favorite agency a detailed brief, let them come up with something, and then you select an item. This is costly and everytime you want to change something it costs you money.
To crowdsource your design you need to provide the same kind of brief, and in some cases more detailed. You set the price tag and off you go. Designers from all over the world then submit their designs in pursuit of the relatively small fee for the design. Ranking systems are used to determine the kind of designs you like and don’t like. All of this happens interactively with a design community obsessed with making a name for themselves.
Platform operating models and platform-as-a-service options
Posted by jay in 06 Age of Access, 11 Information Epistasis on April 22, 2008
The morphing of platform models and service models has resulted in a movement now focusing on platform-as-a-service. Platform operating models can be used in a number of ways that include:
- Platform can be used to serve your internal business needs (common business processes internally hosted)
- Platform can be used to service a closed community (electronic banking, trading)
- Platform can be used publicly where an open community participates (Google Apps, Salesforce.com Appexchange, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)
In one of my previous posts I wrote about 1st and 2nd order business models – one of the ways in which the platform model is evolving to allow for 2nd order based revenue models. We have done extensive work in financial services using the concept and found that there are major opportunities in creating a common global electronic platform where banks can “configure”, assemble or develop their own unique requirements. This might never happen seeing that integration with legacy systems and legislatory issues will prevent adoption.
This is the abstract of a paper we submitted in February to an academic conference:
Institutionalizing product line practices is a complex task, requiring thorough understanding of concepts, and change processes with strong business commitment. This research reveals that financial services organizations in South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom have business models that focus on business autonomy and agility to ensure financial performance without much concern for understanding technology commonalities. Business pressures are forcing these organizations to find models that can assist with leveraging common technologies more effectively. Although the set of product line practices and patterns available provide comprehensive coverage of the paradigm, financial services organizations struggle to implement the concepts effectively. This paper describes a Platform Operating Model (POM) which is used as a globally deployable change framework aimed at multi-national financial services organizations. The approach, as implemented in a number of organizations, focuses on the simplification and adaptation of product line techniques without compromising the essentials associated with successful product line institutionalization and operation.
Some ramblings (not rumblings) about protection and freedom
Posted by jay in 06 Age of Access on April 8, 2008
Would the free culture movement change the intellectual property landscape? Are we killing creativity by over-protecting our creations, by not allowing people to alter, enhance and use our creative works? Are we creating an overly complex maize of interrelated, and incomprehensible laws, business systems and networks; forcing innovation to slow down?
Even the development of the “Peer to Patentâ€: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform community project. People are working on a reform process that unlock more value for the masses of people that are excluded from various forms of creative activity. Look at unhappy birthday where communities like these are trying to make people aware of some facts that are not known to the general public.
Creative commons is very active in the copy left environment, where people can specify their own rules of copy protection. And, where it’s all done on-line.
Check this video explaining the Creative Commons concept:
Even a community like downhillbattle is working on “ending the major music monopoly” in a number of ways. Much of this was fueled by the challenges raised by Grey Tuesday events; also look at the Wikipedia entry on The Grey Album: “Grey Tuesday” was a day of coordinated electronic civil disobedience on February 24, 2004. Led by Downhill Battle, an activist group seeking to restructure the music industry..
I guess that we are in an era where legal reform is fought by two major groups; firstly the people that make money now, and secondly the people that want to make money from new innovations.
Virtuality and the need for a NOMAD culture
Posted by jay in 05 Ecogenetic Changes, 06 Age of Access on December 8, 2007
It’s official I’ve moved to “address unknownâ€, well its been going for a while, but here’s the synopsis. Google (and Google Corporate) has become the new platform for the nimble minded and flexible. E-mail is now all on-line and uses the Google spam filtering system (that works much better than any desktop products) and no more Outlook. So, all my systemiclogic, reframingbusiness etc e-mail accounts are now consolidated on a single platform with 5Gb of storage for free. Planning my diary has always been a nightmare, for me and my assistants. Well, my calendar is on Google and I sync it to my mobile through the Apple iCal product (no more MS Exchange…). It also gets sync’ed with my Thunderbird desktop app (to make me feel that there is at least something left on my machine to run).
You also get 1Gb of disk for pictures when using Picasa, check out my public photo collection at Jay’s Photo’s. Some of my digital pics that might be interesting to a wider audience are all on there. Check out Epic 2015, it will give you a glimpse of the automated “white collar synthetic worker” and human dilemma; in a world where so much is virtual.
There are certain documents, for example our business plans, budgets, and other company information that needs to be shared internationally. Google documents does the job pretty well for basic document storage and sharing. I still use NeoOffice on my Apple for the formatting of documents, spreadsheets and presentations and for the sake of bandwidth starved South Africa. There are many lessons in Apple’s design, Google’s simplicity and Amazon’s functionality…and Epic 2015 gives an interesting angle.
Our CRM is also finally on the web; clients, opportunities, campaigns, contacts, target markets, etc; the whole lot. We use SugarCRM as the Open Source platform and host the application at our service provider in the USA. Now all our partners around the world can share client information, proposals, e-mails, and marketing campaigns. Our project management is making its way on-line as I write this (a confession; this is the second attempt to virtualise all of our planning capability). All projects that have been initiated through the CRM system are now being tracked, costed and resourced through an on-line project management system (I’m vague about this, as we are still testing some options ;-).
There are a couple of items left to move into the global grid – but that is for another time. Keep an eye out for Android, the mobile initiative by Google. This is the next frontier of radical change… Also have a look at Omnidrive where you get 1Gig of on-line storage for your documents and files for free and then you can purchase space as needed. These are only a few scraplets of information about the ability to move your life into the virtual space (have a look at del.icio.us) where your internet bookmarks are all on-line – for some this is old news, but for others the ability to live as a true intellectual NOMAD is becoming a productive reality.
Just imagine the day where you don’t have to worry about the “desktop”, the “licensed” product, the “computer asset”, but only the basic device that gives you access to the network.
Jeremy’s Age of Access
Posted by jay in 06 Age of Access on July 4, 2007
Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Age of Access in 2000. He could be seen as a radical in some circles, but the clarity of his reasoning about the world as we think we know it, makes his viewpoint worth understanding. There is a question each generation asks: Are we de-humanizing all of modern experience?
I’ve read this book a few years ago, and used it in teaching a few times – and still find that the differences between social structures are vastly misunderstood. The human race has many obsessions in the area of de-materialization. Some of the concepts he discusses are starting to make an impact. Look at Google – they have the most valuable brand (or have they?), knocking Microsoft off its top spot. Coca-Cola in still seen as the valuable brand by other researchers, but my bet is on Google. In the Age of Access, the company that controls access to the worlds information has a good chance of setting the pace of change in the next major innovation cycle.
Here is a company that doesn’t make anything physical, does not distribute anything, has no branches, limited or no physical customer contact, provides a platform for customers to do their own thing, etc and its the world’s most valuable brand? Check out the Millward Brown report.
Do you have a handle on your value in the abstract world? Do people recognize your brand aura and relate to it in a positive way?