Here's the fifth in the series of videos provided by IBM on the future of 'Social Business'. I'm delighted that this time around they've included at least some reference to OPEN business and to my role not only as a 'thought leader' (ie blogger) but also as a practitioner (Co-Founder of the Ninety10 Group)
Just to reiterate - I'm very keen on making the distinction betweeen 'Social' Business and 'Open' Business for positive reasons. This from a previous post on the subject:
"There's little wrong with social business and much that is good. But it
rarely inspires business leaders. In fact I know a very senior business
journalist who has never even heard the term.
And when I was invited in to IBM to talk about Social Business in London... I made the point that few CEOs will feel comfortable with
turning their business into a social one. The term creates unhelpful
mental blocks. IBM folk reported similar concerns.
Why make life more difficult when what we all want is change for the better?
"So what's the difference between Social and Open Business?
Here's three distinctions I see:
1. It's not about the tools - it is about Behaviours:
Often social business conversations focus on implementing software. Open
Business urges you to think Behaviours first. What are people doing,
what can and will they do? If you are starting with tools you'll likely
starting in the wrong place.
2. Think less about messages and more about products. Open Business
urges you to consider ways of making things with the people for whom
they are intended; for the best possible fit with real need; for
efficiency; for results people care about. Messages are an outcome of
this process - not its purpose. Talk 'social' and all roads will lead
you back to messages.
3. Ditch the customer.
No, really. Stop thinking about customers. Customers are people you
intend to do things to. Open Business urges you to think about the
long-suffering customer as partners to work with instead. It pushes
those people deep into the production process - right to the start, to
join with and be supported by the org in delivering the things all
parties want - all partners want.
I've learned over the (many) years not to take predictions too seriously. Or lists. So here's mine for Christmas 2011. I offer them if only to help you learn not to take predictions, or lists, too seriously.
10 ‘trend type things’ you really won’t care about by the end of 2012
1. FourSquare
Seriously. I’ve just spent a week using it in a half-hearted manner and find myself close to the top of ‘my friends’ leader board. Checked in at London’s Kings Cross station the other night. Just me! Not saying location based won’t matter. Am saying FourSquare won’t. 2. News breaking first on Twitter.
Come on – it’s commonplace now, the battle is over. Which gives traditional media a clue about what it should do next. (Hint, relevance = news) 3. The number of voice minutes in your mobile phone package.
Bet you already have loads more than you actually use. 4. Google+:
There, I said it. I know lots have people have ‘joined it’ by how often do you actually go there? Add a year and think how it’ll look from there. (Buzz, Wave...Plus) 5. Big Data:
Because we’ll have started to figure out the important bit – getting the insight out. 6. Influence:
At least as a static 'you’re influential for one, you’re influential for all,' thing. Folk might finally work out that what they actually mean by that is: ‘famous’. Peer to peer distribution of trust on a moment-by-moment, context-by-context basis will become more valuable – and finally seen as such. The flock rocks. So... 7. Klout.
I’ve stopped caring already. So have you. Haven’t you? 8. Text to vote.
Who needs it? I Always said the X-Factor should be decided by who gets the most down-loads anyway. 9. Using digital as a channel to manage costs
(we’ll be participating in social to create value instead). 10. Social Business (I hope).
I hope we can talk more about Open Business instead. And if you want to know why – click here.
I know. I'm meant to review the last decade or predict what'll happen in the next year around this time.
Thing is, I'm not going to follow the rules, because for the years following 2009 it simply wouldn't be appropriate to follow rules which may have applied up to this point.
We're in for a big change: Where the noughties were a decade of discovery, the teens will be a decade of realisation. And not discovery of new tech. The future isn't digital; it is self-organised.
The noughties were when we discovered our self-organising power - little by little. And new models started to emerge.
But we are embarking on 10 years in which people all over the globe will realise the self-organising power now at their fingertips - and start turning that realisation into the world they want; niche by niche.
Which means everything you know is up for grabs. Everything.
Everything that is organised or mediated can and will be disrupted by this.
That's pretty much every aspect of society, then. (image courtesy Life Archive on google)
As the realisation dawns, you can be certain no one will be talking about 'social media' anymore. They will just get on with using the best ever set of tools and platforms to communicate: With each other, find each other, form groups, act.
They won't wait to be directed. They will simply come together and debug their world. Niche by niche. The edge in action.
Which is bad news for those who would organise and those who would mediate.
It's not just traditional media, advertising, marketing etc that's going to be replaced. Even the 'new media' stuff that relies on central organisation is threatened. Traditional search (for example) is already being replaced for many by collaborative filtering.
Ubiquitous, always-on computing will arrive as the enabler. Digital social tools which allow us to express meta data beyond silos (including language) will emerge to enable all of us to find all of us when we need each other most. Those tools and platforms which fulfil those roles most successfully will be those with the best chance of commercial success.
And by 2020 we will have the tech and the will to make communities of purpose the primary form of organisation: adhoc self-forming groups brought together to collaborate - driven by common purpose.
The self-organised future will begin taking shape, new structures for education, law, government - all the aparatus of the state - will emerge. And as they do the state itself, as a formalised centrally-controlled collective based on geography, will submerge.
Lowest common denominator models will disappear wherever communities of purpose can self-organise (which is pretty much everywhere and anytime).
One example? Mass party politics will decline. New democracy will formulate in open systems - with collaboration delivering a better fit, niche by niche,
In repeatedly failing to understand the cross-border collaboration of 'their' people, our national leaders remind us of the failure of lowest common denominator politics and broad and assumed national interests.
The issue of global warming may prove a key catalyst. We gave our leaders the chance to sort things out with their big, broad, one-size fits all policies (they found that none did).
In a decade of realisation we move beyond being passive consumers in all aspects of our lives - government policy included.
We won't sit back and wait for the centre's solution. Instead we quietly and determinedly get on with wikifixing our world - collaborating across borders, ignoring the fictional silos the nation state has imagined and attempted to impose.
The impact of the edge on the centre has the potential to be cataclysmic. If change from without happens faster than change from within, something will tear. Fundamental organisational change is hard to imagine as a gentle process.
Judging when to cede control will be a key skill for leaders of all organisations in the coming years. Protecting the vulnerable, another.
My daughter has just finished her first term of traditional schooling. I have to wonder if she will complete her education (what a curious pre-network phrase...) within a similar lowest-common-denominator structure. And if she doesn't - then how does the morph from old to new happen? With a meeting of a parents collective and nods of assent - or with teachers manning the barricades?
There is much to consider; much I (and we) could strive to predict.
Stumbled on this while scouting for images... Claims to be how scientists at RAND in 1954 predicted home computers might look in the year 2004. UPDATE: But it is (I'm informed in the comments below) a fake. Despite (pity!) I'll still leave the final question. See end of this post!
The text is a little hard to make out. It reads: "Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not-yet invented technology to actually work. But 50 years from now scientific progress is expected t solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use."
Anyone fancy lashing up a model of the equivalent 50 years from now?
So now it looks like Google is going to make another of my 2007 predictions come true - making two from the list within a couple of days (following hard on the heels of emap's announcement about a shot-on-mobile UGC TV show)! At the end of last year I guessed that in 2007: "4) Microsoft/Google/Yahoo (one or all) will launch a mobile phone." Yesterday, this emerged indicating that the myth of the google 'switch' phone was becoming reality.
"The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. "Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone," Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish news Web site Noticias.com."
Google in the US of course is saying nothing right now.
So I'm not going to tick number four off the list just yet - 'some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing'... almost anything you can think of. That's the beauty of google.
Another of my predictions for 2007 gets to be ticked off (well, very nearly). And no, I had no idea this was in the pipeline when I wrote this 'A citizen-journalism TV channel made up entirely of video shot on and uploaded from mobile phones will launch.' (click for 2007 predictions in full.)
I'm pleased to say it's emap (the company I work for) which is delivering this one.
FLASHBOX is a 100% user generated programme which will be aired on TV channel The Box.
Nowt particularly unusual about that (hello Current TV). Where it ticks my 2007 predictions' box is in being created almost entirely of video shot on and sent from mobile.
From the release: "viewers (can) upload personalised video clips via sms (really?), mms and online and will be shown around the music video playlist. This is a natural step for The Box, the first UK music channel totally dependent on consumer interaction."
It will be screened daily from March 19 at 4pm for 1 hour.
Emap programme Controller, Phil Poole said: "We all recognise the change in consumers media consumption habits and our programming needs to reflect that. We are excited by the new format and hope that our viewers are too!"
I'm interested to hear whether or not there's a revenue share for our new content providers? And can the show also be viewed on mobile - that would close the circle beautifully for me.
The news that Microsoft is throwing its support behind the Open ID scheme is a very significant moment. It means there will be a very simple way for users to own their ID data and to control how much or how little they wish to share with you. And that data remains held by them - not you.
From the BBC report: "The Open ID scheme uses web addresses that people already own to help authenticate their identity... "Microsoft has got involved to supply a technology it is developing called InfoCards to add more flexibility to the scheme. "The InfoCard program gives users a way to identify themselves with varying degrees of detail depending on who is asking for information about them. Each InfoCard acts like a virtual index card that can store different sorts of ID information for different purposes.
I'll make some assumptions here. When a user can store their own identity and share only those elements they prefer - aren't they going to demand that this data is only available when they want it to be available to you, too? ie while they are logged in on your website - and removed the moment they leave.
The drive will be for them to demand you do not store those details in any form. New Data Protection Act anyone?
This all has huge impact for those who make their money from personal data - and should sound an alarm for those building business models around the ownership of personal data.
There is a ray of sunshine. People like how useful cookies are to them. Unless the Open ID system can resolve a way of taking your history for each site with you back to your own stored ID location, it might not quite spell the end of data acquisition.
But I suspect a solution to that will come. The real answer is not to rely on owning a relationship (by virtue of keeping someone else's data under lock and key) but in sharing an ongoing and persistent relationship - by continuing to deliver what that user finds valuable to their life and by encouraging a regular and enduring two-way flow of communication.
The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=100bf378-c93c-479e-bdda-640d4b2fd6ba)
