Before we get all science fiction infected, I will simply address the question in the title, “what would the Internet be like if it was a person?”  As I wrote this blog, it struck me that the Internet is the way it is because we are constructing it to be exactly the way we want it.  Maybe not the way each one of us wants it, but certainly the way the majority desires.  It represents us collectively – probably the most democratic thing ever invented, so none of its human characteristics should surprise us. When I  personalize the Web (hereafter referred to Netsy) I don’t really imagine it as a male or female, just a unisex human being that has billions of friends.

Netsy wants to be friends with everyone on the earth.  No one should be left out – the more connections the better.  Everything is better with a Web based crowd that includes every human being, and Netsy wants to be VERY close friends with all of us.  The more known about us the better because how can we be good friends without understanding each others likes, dislikes, locations, preferences, and conversations (we will hit privacy later.) Part of being a great friend is being available 24/7 for each other, and Netsy sure works hard to be always available, and really wants you to be available 24/7 as well.  After all, what are friends for…

You must be impressed with Netsy’s memory because very little is ever forgotten. Outside of a serious data storage disaster, almost everything you have ever said, done, or shared with Netsy is stored in the memory banks.  Even things you ask to be deleted are actually just hidden from your view.  Netsy finds it valuable to remember everything because if could be important later, maybe not to you, but surely to someone.  In fact, lots of organizations will pay her/him for access to the huge memory store Netsy nurtures so carefully.  Long after you have forgotten details of purchases you made together, conversations you have had, pictures you have shared, etc., your good friend will be able to pull them back for you – or someone else.

The reality is friends don’t always see eye to eye, and one thing that Netsy does that many people do not appreciate is the lack of an ability to keep things secret.  Netsy really does not believe in privacy.  Oh, promises will be made of security and privacy, but depending on who asks, or who is paying, Netsy cannot really resist giving up your most personal information.  I love Netsy as much as the next person, but we have to be realistic, nothing is safe, and likely never will be as long as governments and profit making companies control the Net. But, hey, privacy is over rated right?  Who cares if people know what I look at on the Web, where I am, who I talk to, what I buy, or what I read.

As friendly and easygoing as Netsy is, there is no question that he/she wants more power, speed and functionality.  Being a teenager (basically) Netsy craves growth and is frankly addicted to adding power and functionality daily.  Where it will stop, no one knows, yet we can be assured that Netsy has no intention of cooling of the growth. For my part, I have prospered just from being friends with Netsy and the closer I get, the more shared power I tap into just from the intimacy of our relationship. I look at it a bit like being friends with Brad Pitt.  I hope he just keeps getting bigger and more powerful because that just helps me (disclaimer, that is just a metaphor, I don’t know Brad Pitt.)  I guess the blessing in all of this is that Netsy rarely forces anything on me, he/she just seeks to be a really powerful friend with benefits and I can self-select all I can handle.

One thing that scares me a little about Netsy is her/his desire for more autonomy and automation. Netsy is constantly offering, or just plain forcing, an integration of her skills into our relationship, and ergo, into my life. This includes making decisions for me that hopefully free me from thinking about little details he/she can really handle on my behalf.  Netsy filters search results I get automatically, and helps me discover things at my physical location because he/she knows where I am and tries to be helpful by providing location information for me – including telling my friends (and others) where I am – automatically. In fact Netsy helps me out in so many automated ways I am never really sure when that help is being provided. I guess we just have to trust that Netsy has our best interests in mind. Yet, what do we do if we do want all that automated “help?”

Just a couple of weeks ago I saw an impressive thing.  Netsy stood up the government when they wanted to enact legislation aimed at the issue of copyright violation.  Netsy has some friends that don’t always follow the rules, and the government thought they should decide who Netsy befriends, and who gets shunned.  Netsy freaked at the thought and the government blinked and backed down.  The same way they back down when they talk about taxing Netsy.  Seriously, should someone as powerful as Netsy really have to pay taxes? Some governments even try to tell Netsy who to communicate with and on what subjects, but many of Netsy’s friends have learned how to meet with him/her on the sly.  Netsy really is not impressed with governments and I kind of like that.

I have to admit, Netsy is a pretty powerful buddy to have, and like all powerful people, there are plusses and minuses to the relationship.  This I know, I first met Netsy in the mid 90’s when he/she was just a babe.  It is scary, yet intriguing, to think what the relationship will look like in another fifteen years!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The fact that the Internet connects people instantly, and for free, across the globe, improved the potential of the word collaboration.  Yet in many ways, potential is where we still sit. I think we collaborate every day without really trying in that we search the Web for information provided by others who seek to help by providing something to the collective.  In that way, we are collaborating on a grand and effective scale.  Crowdsourcing is more progressive example of active collaboration in that people choose to chase bounties, or simply help an anonymous user to complete some task like creating a logo, or doing research, or solving a business problem.  Yet there is still so much more potential for reaching out to others using the Web to help us with all the many tasks we have in our lives.

Organizations are especially backwards when it comes to collaboration.  They are for the most part stuck in an old paradigm where employees must only collaborate with each other, and in most cases, only with those who can be face to face.  They talk of virtual teams yet have not developed any processes for assembling them effectively, nor managing them in any way differently than “in person” teams.  Think about the progress that could be made with project management if organizations would learn to effectively use the Tuckman model of team development (forming, storming, norming, performing, reforming) and apply it to forming teams of experts regardless of their current employment with the company, or their geography.

We have the technology tools all around us.  There are online project management systems, whiteboarding platforms, shared idea harvesting mind maps, etc.  The problem is not a lack of tools and capabilities.  It is simply a difficulty we have with breaking old paradigms.  We still seek to collaborate with those in our clique, or those chosen for us, instead of collaborating with the best options on the Web.  We put more weight on current relationships than on skills.  We have all the ability to leverage crowd accelerated innovation now, yet we still try to be creative on our own.  Worse than this, we have the potential to have crowd accelerated performance levels in the tasks we do, yet most people are not even aware of the exploding amount of high quality crowdsourcing sites available to us.

Think of this… Fiber optics – light through tubes, connects us all on the infrastructure that is the Internet. Much like the paths that neurons take in our own brains, fiber optics connect two billion minds, and the data they have archived, around the world.  Think of the distance ideas go on the Web versus the inches they go across your brain.  I can search for a piece of the information puzzle I am trying to solve and instantly find it in China.  I can ask for help with designing a new graphic and instantly have hundreds of designers from around the world begin helping on the project.  When thought of this way, it is hard not admit that we are a few steps down the road in creating the human Hive Mind – the uber version of collaboration.  It is a whole additional blog post to kick around whether the Hive Mind will be good or bad for the human race, but the fact is we are headed toward it.

The intriguing thing to me is that our ability to create the infrastructure to support the Hive Mind is clearly in front of most peoples awareness as to reality that we have the beginnings of it now.  And those of us that exploit the potential early will be able to prosper from it.  As I write my latest book Did God Invent the Internet, I can’t help wonder if this all part of a much bigger plan to bring us together – to collaborate – an a scale we don’t really see at the moment…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

There are really only three timeframes any of us can spend time contemplating– the present, the future or the past. All of us tend to be stronger in one of these than another. Where a leader spends time will be critical to their ability to lead successfully. I believe there is a perfect recipe for this investment of mindshare where each of the three timeframes gets the perfect amount of attention. I also believe that the further from this recipe a leader gets, the more dangerous they become. Let’s look at some extreme examples before we got to that recipe.

1. If a leader only focuses on the present, they will not have learned any lessons from the past, nor have any vision of where things might go on the future.They will be a fantastic listener because they are always “in the moment.”They will also be very tuned in to what they can do today to make things better – today. They will also likely lead their team right off a cliff at some point.

2. If a leader focuses only on the past, they will be well schooled in what has been tried before and how it worked out. They will constantly be driving thecar by looking at the rear view mirror. This is possible, but can be fraught with danger when a new situation occurs that they have never seen before in the past. It brings to mind the engineers that plan for a 10-inch maximum amount of rain in a 24 hour period because that is the most they have seen in their lifetime. They do zero planning for the fact that a 15-inch rain ispossible so when it comes (and it eventually will) their town is destroyed.

3. If the leader focuses only in the future, they will have learned nothing from prior events and will ignore the present where they could be impacting people that need help now. They will simply lack a foundation to ground inreality the future vision they so desperately seek to refine. This results in either a flawed vision of the future, or little ability to accurately time when the correct picture they have in their heads might actually come to fruition.

Based on this line of thinking, there must be an optimum recipe for how leadersinvest their brainpower. Yet, I suspect it gets more complicated from here because the recipe would need to change based on the industry the leader works in and the specific position they hold. The faster changes are coming in a specific industry, the more a leader would need to focus on the future because the a high volume ofchange translates into opportunity/danger. The position in the company wouldchange the formula in that a CFO legitimately should spend a little more time beingforensic in their viewpoint than a CEO. With this in mind, I am going to generalize amodel that I believe is best for leaders with the understanding that it should change somewhat depending on these two factors.

After much thought on the matter, I have come down to the following formula:

Study of the past: 15%
Living in the present: 60%
Envisioning the future: 25%

So back to Newt Gingrich… I love that he is knowledgeable and a student of thepast. I worry that he has not expressed an exciting vision of the future. Too oftenin the political world we hear lots of promises about the future actions candidates PROMISE to take. We hear very little about what they think the future will be likefor us. We also hear lots of rhetoric about everything that is wrong with today. Wein the USA will certainly have to feel the pain of some changes because we cannot continue to run up the national debt, or continue to see 15% increases in healthcare costs every year. Either we accept that we will not be able to fund everything that any small block of citizen wants funded, or we will implode financially from the interest on our debt. Or we will simply default on the debt and will then face decades of forced living within our means. I yearn for the day that a candidate comes along who is willing to mix the experiences of our past with a lucid vision of where we must go in the future (and what it will be like for us to get there.)

It is the same with our business leaders. We need leaders who can paint clear and accurate pictures as to where the organization must head. And, have the courage to make the changes and investments to get there. In the end, looking backwards and commenting on what should have been done, is a heck of a lot easier than looking forward and accurately knowing what needs to be done in a world we have yet tolive in. Maybe we should amend the old saw, “hindsight is 20/20” by also pointing out that foresight can be quite fuzzy. A shame because it would make charging forward with velocity so much easier!

How do you feel about the formula I presented? Would it work for you?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I am busy working on my latest book, Did God Invent the Internet that is all about whether technology will ultimately be good or bad for humanity.  The great thing about writing a book is it forces me to think about the world in a different way. I find myself using the word discretion more lately and slowed down long enough to evaluate why.

I could give you the Webster’s version of the meaning of the word discretion, but what fun is that.  Here is mine: Discretion is making a positive choice between two or more options.  The key points being making a positive choice, and between options.  As in, she had the discretion not to wear the tube top to the job interview.  As the title of the blog states, discretion is becoming a pretty critical tool in our ability to be good human beings.  Oh, I know, it always has.  We have always had to have the good discretion to know who to hang out with and who to stay away from.  Or to back away from peer pressure when it would lead us astray.  To wear sunblock on summer days, and to not where Speedo’s if your fat percentage is in the double digits.

Consider for a minute a couple of the dynamics Web 2.0 brought us, frictionless communication, and instant access to any piece of information, picture, or video from any device 24/7.  With all of this opportunity, comes an increase in the need for responsibility, and ergo discretion.  I guess that is why some people have to turn on the drunk text capability so they don’t reach out to people and say what they normally would not say sober.  Which reminds me, I am very glad that I did not have texting or Skype when I was a randy 16-year-old boy, or a heavy drinking 20 year old.  I got in enough trouble without being device augmented.  I still remember being a kid, with a kid’s lack of discretion.  So I am not surprised at what kids are now doing with mobile devices and social tools.

The difference now is the number of choices we have has exploded and we now have the option of instant action on those choices.  Increase the volume of options and the corresponding consequences of the choices, and the importance of discretion increases dimensionally.  For example, when I can search for a picture of any sex act known to man, I have to apply the discretion of knowing that just because I could find those graphics, they are not really good to burn into the sensitive emulsion of my mind.  That requires a conscious intellectual choice to cancel out potential animalistic desires.  When I am angry at someone, I have to apply a conscious choice to not lash out online, or instantly through texting, instead of what everything in my being screams to do. Ergo, having discretion in both cases. Easy to say as a 49 year-old, much harder to do as a teenager.

No this is not going to turn into a blog about the dangers of sexting because that activity is just a symptom of the problem, and the problem would be lack of discretion (or morals for that matter.)  When we provide a device and social technologies to young people, and frankly, many older people, we give them access to billions of other people – instantly.  We give them access to billions of pages of content on every subject – instantly, and every video uploaded to YouTube, and there are millions of them.  With all these choices, and the consequences that come with them, we better learn the art of discretion, and figure out how to teach it to young people.  Fail that, and we will reap a generation that will be scarred by a billion cuts of bad technology augmented decisions…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

People pay me a lot of money to help them learn to use technology tools in ways that will give them an advantage in the market.  And the truth is I love the work.  I also realize that I am losing patience with a large segment of people I interface with.  The other day someone asked me what I say to people that don’t really believe that social technologies are an important tool.  I said, “I don’t say anything to them because I don’t have time to waste on people that have such little vision.”  I care less and less about trying to convert people into understanding that technology will forever change humanity, and the organizations that serve it.  There is a digital divide in this world and you either value technology as tool, and are willing to invest in it, or you don’t.  I make no value judgment on those that don’t get it, I just don’t have the patience to waste time convincing them of something so patently obvious.  Watch this video for 60 seconds and if you can’t see a bit of the future, quit reading this blog.

For those of you that are digitally converted and understand the power of the tech toolbox, please pick up your game.  I might be more frustrated with people that understand it but make excuses as to why they are not better at leveraging it than the people that are just plain ignorant on the subject.  There is nothing worse than a half converted semi believer who says all the right things, carries an iPhone but is clueless how to really load apps on it that might actually improve their life.  At lunch today a 61 year old CEO told me he would send his kids to one of our bootcamps because he wanted them to learn, but he wasn’t coming because he is too far gone – and he is… because he believes that.  If I hear one more person tell me:

“I don’t have time to learn about this new stuff”

“I can’t keep up with all the change”

“I get it, I just don’t like to use it personally”

I am going to ditch being polite and tell them the truth, “Your a self selected dinosaur.”

Dinosaurs were big and powerful in their day, but the environment changed and they were killed off.  The environment has changed my friends and it is decidedly more technology augmented.  Natural selection will now bump off leaders who think they can get away with being ignorant of technology – be it personal use, or corporate digital plumbing.

By the way, some of the worst examples of this are people I meet that work in the technology industry and cant fight their way out of an iPad or Windows problem to save their life.  You know who you are – admit it, you are a walking Oxymoron – confession is good for your soul.

Do you need technology to be happy?  No.  Do you need technology in order to be a good human being? No.  It is just a tool after all, and you can paint, create music, love people, and connect with others, and think great thoughts without technology.  Of course you can do all of those things even better with technology.

Let me draw an analogy… Can you play golf with an old wood driver, a blade 5 iron, and an old putter?  Sure you can.  Will you score as well as you would with a GPS rangefinder, a full set of the latest clubs, and a mobile app that describes each hole?  Of course not.  Don’t think this applies to you?  Do you use a 3 year old laptop your company supplies that is locked down so tightly you can’t add the apps you would love to run?  Have you moved to an iPad and mobile phone that are synced with your laptop and automatically backed up in the cloud?  Do you have a full suite of applications that help you do just about any task in life?  Have you built a powerful social networking presence?  Do you use the Internet crowd to help you with tasks? Can you search for any piece of information and find it in seconds from any device 24/7?  These things are just the standard price of admission today.

People often tell me that I am too harsh, and that the only reason I am good at technology is I work in the field.  Not true.  The reason I am good is because it is a powerful toolbox and I love the power. I see clearly how the mastery of these tools has allowed me to operate at a level of creativity and efficiency that was not even close to possible in the 80’s and 90’s.  Scott Klososky + Technology = a powerful force.  Scott Klososky on my own is just average in many ways.  Lots of you are choosing to be average because of stupid excuses like “you don’t have time to learn to use new tools.” In other words, you don’t have time to learn to win – so you will just be average.

You could multiply your gifts in the world – if you would just invest the time and energy to learn how technology would augment their delivery.  The choice is yours.  I would love to see you quit wasting the opportunity…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

In an effort to actually be helpful, and not just a critic, I submit to you the following list of mistakes that I see people make.  And, on the other side of the mistakes, some advice on how to improve the situation…

1 – Failing to invest time learning – An older gentleman asked me a really simple question the other day, he said “is it hard to learn how to use Facebook and Twitter?” It stopped me for a second because I have never really given it much thought.  I shared with him that I think they are both pretty simple to learn, you just have to dive in and use them for a while, and choose the right tools along the way to help you use them wisely.  In truth, technologists have been working for a couple of decades to make technology easier to use, and I think they are making great progress.  The fact that millions of people can pick up and iPhone and figure it out in a few days is witness to that. Or, that millions can use Facebook or Twitter each day without any kind of tech support.  Although it is really not difficult to learn how to use new technologies in most cases, it does take time and that is something you must be willing to invest.  It is an investment after all, and you should expect a return.  Be honest with yourself, do you invest an appropriate amount of time learning how to use new technology tools?

2 – Failing to upgrade often enough – In this case, I am referring to both hardware and software.  I regularly see people who are very dependent on a laptop using something that must have been discontinued during the Clinton years.  I see people using software versions that are 2 or 3 releases behind. If your phone does not do email, you need to upgrade.  I am not suggesting that everyone stand in line at the Apple store so they can get the next iAddictiveToy, but operating with gear that is lacking in features or performance is like hammering nails with brick.  It can get the job done, but not very efficiently.  If you buy a hammer it might be productive for your lifetime.  When you buy technology, it has a shelf life that expires at the point where a newer version would provide benefits that provide a clear return on the upgrade investment.

3 – Fearing experimentation – This is an insidious crippler.  When you fear experimenting with new tools, you dramatically cut down the ability to find elegant solutions to problems, or features that could really help your performance.  Fear stops you for taking steps forward, and in this case, it is often the fear of failure, fear of complexity, fear of embarrassment, or just plain old fear of the unknown.  I understand the concept of these fears.  I also know that the price you will pay for succumbing to them is high.  As with anything else in life, fear is a self made barrier that rarely serves a good purpose.  In this case, it will stop you from prospering at times.

4 – Choosing blind ignorance as a path – This one plain frustrates me.  Some people just turn a blind eye to technology tools much like the ostrich sticks its head in the sand (if they really do that.) The fact is, just about anything in life can be done without the aid of technology, and many people have been doing things that way for decades.  So it is convenient to simply go on operating without change.  The upside being that you don’t have to think hard, or risk change.  They live their lives with a vague sense that the rest of the world is using technology, but they stridently refuse to ask themselves why, nor seek to even learn enough to understand what the tools actually do.  Ignorance is not really bliss – it is just lazy.

5 – Believing that technology is the only solution – Just to keep this balanced, the last crippler is believing that technology is the best tool for everything.  It is not.  Technology is a great augmenting factor in lots of things, but there are other ways to do many of the things technology does, and in some cases, much better.  For example, technology facilitates conversations – in fantastic ways at this point.  But, there are times when talking to people face to face is the most effective way to communicate, and I mean sitting across the table from each other, not on the screen.  There are times when creating our own unique content is a better idea than harvesting content from the Web.  And there are times when just trying something out for ourselves, instead of basing a decision on a social rating site, is the best path.

There is a widening gap in the capabilities, value, and quality of life between those that are good with technology tools and those that lag.  As humanity progresses, this breach will grow further.  Too many people live their lives unconsciously when it comes to the technology they could be using.  Don’t be one of them…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The top of the pyramid is the concept of matching technology to the business needs of an organization.  So how will do the investments in technology support the company in reaching its goals.  This sounds simple but we often have to grade clients low because they invest in what seems like good technology when the truth is they are implementing things that have much less value than other options they leave on the shelf.  This happens because they lack technology strategic planning, and they invest tech dollars based on who screams the loudest, or has the largest budget – not what would benefit the bottom line the most.

The next layer is a series of technology basics that every organization must be able to do well:

• Normalizing data
• Flowing data
• Storing data
• Analyzing data
• Process improvement
• Process automation
• Device quality
• Training

In each case, we can grade the organizations ability to do this list of foundational activities.  Stand back from which software applications you run, and just consider the general performance in these areas.

The next layer is staffing.  What is the level of technology expertise in the organization?  This includes the IT department, and the user base.  We must measure not only ability of the staff to build, implement, and use tech tools, but also the willingness to adopt and pioneer new technologies.  You can invest in technology forever and if people will not use it wisely, you have wasted your money.

Then we move to the layer of technology strategy processes.  What are the methods by which we do IT budgeting, IT strategic thinking, planning, priority setting, etc.? There are a number of processes at this level that dictate whether an organization is efficiently aiming the resources in the right direction at the right time.

The foundational layer of the pyramid is the operational IT processes.  Things like how you make build versus buy decisions, disaster recovery plans, vendor selection rules, implementation processes, IT hiring processes, etc.  A low grade here means you will not be able to execute on your planning in an efficient way.

By grading each of these layers, an organization will get a clear picture as to the overall health of how they do IT.  Everywhere that anything below an “A” is earned, there is room for improvement.  Added together, this is a scorecard that can help the C-suite work with IT people to improve the holistic application of technology.  The result will be stellar digital plumbing that will result in an organization having a clear path to prosperity.  Fail to improve this scorecard, and an organization is in danger of falling on the rocks of irrelevance over time…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

There is not a generally accepted grading system to measure how well companies utilize technology. Organizations can point to gains, but they would have a hard time measuring what the delta is between their current state and the perfect state. For this reason, I have been spending a lot of time lately building a holistic model for measuring IT effectiveness, and assembling a model of best practices to apply that measurement system against. People get excited about various things in life, and I get jazzed when I can figure out how to bring definition and structure to something that is undefined and unstructured for the most part – such as grading the effectiveness of digital plumbing.
Allow me to share some early foundations of the work we are doing. Imagine a model for organizing and measuring technology effectiveness as a pyramid, and let’s start at the top. The first thing we need to be concerned about is how well the digital plumbing supports the business strategy of the organization. This is the seminal question because the more technology enables and facilitates reaching the business goals, the higher the ROI will be – ergo, the more successful it is as a tool. Scoring how well technology is supporting the business is not easy because leaders often have little reference as to how good it could be – they just know what they have. They convince themselves that it would be too expensive to have better digital plumbing or that what they have is good enough. Every executive team should now learn how to answer this question; what is the delta between how well technology supports my business goals, and what we currently have in place. If that delta is large, you have lots of upside potential. This is great news – and lots of work.

Once the connection between business needs and technology solutions is scored, you can move onto the next level of the pyramid – grading how an organization deals with a handful of core aspects of IT. We have created a list of all the major areas of IT that must be done well. For example, you must be able to automate transactions, store data, move data, analyze data, normalize data. If you struggle with any of these, it shows up in your IT’s value to the organization (and possibly wasted expense.) This is easier to score because it is less subjective in many ways. Still, someone that has a great vision of how technology should be done in the best case must do the grading, or the grade will be incorrectly high in most cases. The great thing about grading out technology implementation in this way is the bringing together of leaders in an organization to a like minded viewpoint of what is done well, and what needs to be improved. This is far better than what we have in most cases today, which is a vague feeling by many that IT is not being done well, or as well as it could be.

For too long, the application of technology in organizations has been a black hole. The business side of the house does not understand how it gets built, when it will be done, or how to get functionality that would seem to make sense into their hands quickly. They often look at technologists with hope and disdain. Instead of being like mythical elves that build the digital plumbing at night when no one is looking, technology people must have structure, accountability, and reward systems so that they architect digital plumbing that has a huge positive impact on the organization reaching it’s business goals. Instead of just keeping the servers up and running and helping to implement whatever software they grudgingly accept to install or build.

I will finish the overview of the pyramid and grading system in the next blog.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

A constant piece of the consulting work I do is helping companies with their general IT needs. At an increasing rate, technology is making an impact on whether an organization prospers – or flounders.  This is causing many executives who did not grow up steeped in tech to call for help from someone that has both business and technology acumen.  The cool thing about them calling me is that I get to see the pain they are in over and over across different industries, and sizes of operation.  After the 10^th client or so, I would have had to be an idiot not to notice the patterns.  After the 20^th, I have been able to build processes and systems to rectify many of the issues.  At this point, I am deep into applying these models over and over in order to help clients smooth things out.  At this point, I am really excited about the fact that I can help them to step forward into a whole new way of viewing how technology gets done in order to set them up to win for years to come.  With that said, let me share the problems with you that need to be universally addressed:

1.     The users of technology do not understand the big picture of the overall organizational digital plumbing – so they make bad decisions on software buys, the tools they use, and how they use them.   This is generally caused by the fact that technologists in the organization have not architected the overall picture well, and rarely communicate it to the field. The result is that data and information does not flow well.

2.     IT departments are often stuck in triage mode where they spend 96% of their time struggling to do break fix, help desk, or keep their heads above water on new software projects.  Because of this, they are reduced to being tactical and not strategic in nature.  They literally cannot “stop mopping long enough to turn off the spigot” so to speak. Because of this they do not spend time architecting the digital plumbing holistically, nor are they given enough control over the standards.  The result is a mish mash of software applications and horrible data flow

3.     The leaders of the organization do not understand technology architecture, design, or standards so they are no help in guiding the company towards robust and effective plumbing.  They outsource all decisions to IT staff and vendors with generally average to poor results.

There are other problems of course, but let’s stop with those three big ones for a moment, and begin to address some ideas for fixing these…

Let’s start with the top of the pyramid of solutions and over the next couple of blogs we will work our way from the big picture to the more detailed.  The first thing that needs to happen in an organization that is going to re-engineer how they do technology is to have the executive team study and grade the organizations ability to match technology to the business side needs. Technology is just a tool and the better we can apply this tool to the business needs, the more successful we will be.  In addition, the leaders must get clear on how technology can be applied to give the organization a distinct advantage in their market – and focus on this.  Technology is not just plumbing, it can also be a weapon to use to beat the competition in the market. To accomplish this, I have leaders answer the following three questions:

1.     On a scale of 1-10, how well do you think the company leverages technology as a tool.  Not compared to competitors mind you, but if 10 was the perfect use of tech, where do they stand now.

2.     What 5 areas of technology can the company not afford to lose at against the competition?  For example, we must have the best customers data, we must have the best ability to analyze trends, or we must have the best uses of technology to facilitate transactions.

3.     What 5 aspects of technology are unique to us that our competition does not have? These of course must be used in the market to gain an advantage, and must be protected.  If you don’t have any, you are in danger.

Answering these three questions will begin to set the framework for how an organizations digital plumbing should be re-constructed.  It will also begin to close the gap between the business side leaders and the IT people that build and support this plumbing.

Our next blog will cover the areas of technology that a company must be proficient in and how to score those so you have a metric for improvement…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

One of the foundational aspects of social technologies I talk about is the ability for a person, or an organization to use new tools to harvest huge amounts of information from the Websphere and pack it into our brains. I often regale people on the concept that it is a knowledge economy and the smart people will win. When I say smart by the way, I do not mean just the high IQ people, I also mean those that are best informed on what is happening in their industries. After all, it takes both an ability to process data and find the useful analytics, combined with a huge amount of relevant data to do magic things. One without the other is useless. So in a practical world, a smart person without access to new and complete data has a quickly declining value. A person with terabytes of powerful data is worthless if they cannot process it and draw correlations. The world is full of people at both these extremes.

Last week I moved to a new house and my paper newspaper was not delivered to the new house. So I went online and downloaded the iPad app for my local newspaper. That was the last paper based information source I still relaxed with on the couch at night. Now I use my iPad as the delivery source for all my information on the couch. I use Flipboard to digest everything on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, etc. I read the current news on MSN.com, and have a few other dashboard sources built so I can bury my brain in a flow of information in 45 minutes a night and assure that I see most everything that might be important to me. I have become an information digestion bigot. I say this because I get annoyed if it takes me 3 minutes longer than necessary to get the information I want into my brain. Maybe it would be better to say I am an information snob. I want it all, I want it now, and I want it into my brain with the least work possible.

I was technically on vacation last week, but I found myself feeling naked without harvesting my normal reams (just a metaphor now) of information and digesting it. I had this sneaking suspicion there would be a hole in my knowledgebase if I ignored the flow all week. So from time to time I found myself drinking from the flow little bits at a time just so did not miss anything critical. Am I addicted to the river of information? Maybe… Actually I think I am addicted to having answers to the questions people ask me. I am addicted to being current with my knowledge – and by current I mean up to the minute, not the week. Have I mentioned that it is a knowledge economy and the smart people win?

We have a lot of tools at this point to harvest information on any subject and get it into our brains. The tools will also get better. They will help us filter more concisely, and will aggregate the right kinds of information to the proper places for us automatically. They will alert us to specific pieces of information that might be critical to us. Even though we have a growing toolbox to do this, most people are still stuck in the rut of digesting tiny amounts information at a slow pace. Stanford did a study that said that we now consume 3 times the information as we did in 1960. I have to believe that the curve is speeding up, and that in 5 years we will be digesting 3 times what we are today. The toolbox we have been given (and will be given) allows for this. The question is are you ready? Your brain has capacity from what I hear, so will you use it? It is a knowledge economy and the smart people win – and being a “smart people” is a choice…

P.S. For those of you that like to make excuses for continuing to digest information at the slow pace that used to be acceptable, here is the top five so you don’t waste brain cells convincing yourself…

1. I don’t have time to digest more information. (Really? Don’t have time to get smarter?)
2. I am overwhelmed with the information that is out there. (Really? That is what all the new aggregation and filtering tools are for.)
3. I don’t know where to start. (Email me and I will send you a document that teaches you how to do this
4. I already learn about my industry from magazines, meetings and trade shows. (And how stale is that information?)
5. I already know everything there is to know about my industry, or I don’t need to know much about my industry because I am in the middle to lower part of the org chart. (In both cases you are deluded and will not prosper with this viewpoint. I say that as a friend that would like you to reexamine…)

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

1. Identify a person that will own this responsibility. Who this person is depends heavily on whether this will be a full time position, or a part of their current job. That call is dependent on how large the organization is. This person must have a curious nature, an ability to digest large amounts of information, a love of technology, and enough knowledge of the business to be able to match new technologies with organizational needs. In other words, this is not an easy job. There is a bit of an art to it.
2. Once the person that will have this position is onboarded, you must create a list of areas where technology is most needed – so they have at least some boundaries for what they are looking for. Then our researcher can begin to build a river of information on new technologies so they can stand in the river each day and see what new things are coming on the market.
3. As the researcher finds possible new technologies that can be valuable, they create a slide in a PowerPoint presentation that explains the technology and the reasons why they think the organization should invest the resources to integrate it. The PowerPoint will be critical because it will be presented once a month and is the main link between the river of all the possible new technologies, and the few that should be used.
4. The researcher presents the latest version of the PowerPoint to the technology team (a team of people from across the organization.) This team may already exist in some form, and if it does not, should be formed. Each new prospective technology should be reviewed and the return on investment discussed. Then the team should make the call on whether to accept the technology into the overall digital plumbing or not.
5. Once technologies are approved, they are turned over to the business units to deploy. The researcher has the responsibility to follow up on the approved technologies so they can take an inventory of their overall success rate.

The goal is to create a more robust flow of new ideas and concepts into the organization so the rate of adopting new technologies is sped up. The faster an organization can leverage beneficial technologies, the more they will prosper in the market. This could be the result of everything from lowering costs to improving the topline revenue. Don’t take this process lightly. An enlightened leader knows when to use new tools to make improvements. In order to even have a shot, you must have a good flow of possibilities coming in the door. Organizations can no longer just depend on vendors, or employees to play the role of researchers and developers. It must be organized into a system that creates innovation velocity, which then translates into winning in the market.

Do it not, and you will learn every lesson from a competitor and that will cast you dearly.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Technology as a set of tools continues to explode in the number of new options available, and in many cases, these new tools are inexpensive or free. The pace of innovation and production is continuing to speed up – ergo the toolbox grows. Since the caveman days, the species with the best use of tools has dominated. Many centuries ago technology (starting with the development of metals and gun powder) changed the political fortunes of the countries, or despots that wielded them. In the business world for the past 50 years, companies that adopted new technologies before their competitors prospered. As the toolbox grows, the opportunity for the innovative use of these tools also expands. As more companies use more tools, those that do not, will be punished at a more painful rate.

Take social technologies for example. This is a much broader and more powerful set of tools than most leaders realize. They will change dramatically large swaths of how we operate in society and in organizations. As with any powerful tool, the faster an organization can learn to use it effectively, the more benefit they will gain over competitors. Today, while some companies are still trying to figure out Facebook and Twitter, others are on to Online Reputation Management, Social CRM, Crowdsourcing, and building Rivers of Information. I still run into organizations and leaders who believe that social tech is a fad, and that we will go back to traditional ways of interacting. That is about as smart as believing that pneumatic nail guns are a fad and we will go back to hammers.

The same could be said for cloud computing, augmented reality or mobile applications. These are all just tools, and too many organizations are failing to pull out value from the toolbox and reap the rewards. It used to be possible to sit back and believe that you could learn all the best practices from your competitors. That letting the market define the path forward was a safe play – especially if you were a large organization that was risk averse. The problem now is that in the time it takes you to be taught by others, you might have lost a painful amount of market share to those that are using tools before you.

In short, I find this to be a huge failure of leadership in most cases – literally ignoring the fact that the toolbox is exploding with possibility because they think success is a birthright and it will go on forever. For this reason, I suggest that every organization put in a formal tR&D process so they can quickly and maturely have a way to discover new viable technologies and processes and apply them early when they will have a magnified value. This process will reap huge return on investment and may just protect some companies from starvation (extinction.)

In my next blog, I will review the steps in the tR&D process…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I normally get up on stage and berate the leaders in the audience to wake up and get the picture that technology strategy is now a critical piece of their organization, and an element they cannot just outsource to others. I harangue them about the fact they often are very slow to use new technologies with their own hands, and that they rarely understand the value of concepts like cloud computing, mobile, or social tech. My intentions are good, but I think I am offending many leaders and I don’t really mean to do that. So instead of berating, I am going to work on motivating from this day forward. Instead of telling them they are failing to do a critical element of their job, I am going to point out the great opportunity they have to make a difference…

In fact, this might be a time in history that leaders have the greatest opportunity to reach into a magical toolbox and do creative and innovative things to prosper. Never before has there been a toolbox full of free tools, inexpensive tools, and extremely powerful tools, with more tools coming every day. The marketplace provides a worldwide piece of property and people provide the raw materials. We are seeing growth and innovation like we have never seen before in the economy. It is not just the explosive growth of companies like Google or Facebook, it is also the examples of small companies that now use Internet technologies to expand their customer base around the world. Or, to leverage workers from around the world to help them produce products or services for less money and with more creativity.

It is tragic that with this magical toolbox of social, mobile, cloud, integrated, virtualized, and intelligent technology, many leaders focus more on details that provide less value. I have come to observe that there are three reasons why they fail to take action:

1. They don’t see the value so do not feel there is a good return on investment for them to spend any time understanding new technologies. Of course, how would they ever equate value if they won’t invest a little time to learn how a new concept even works. You can never actually be wrong if you just remain ignorant I suppose.
2. They are comfortable with the way things are going now, and they believe that their current success will go on forever. Intellectually they will agree that dynamics change, but in their behavior, they do not seek to invest any energy in changing their current methods unless they are forced to through negative consequences. For example, they won’t do anything new unless they start losing money, then they thrash around trying to find new ways to operate. As opposed to finding new ways to operate BEFORE they are forced into it.
3. They feel it is someone else’s job to figure out how to apply new technologies. They have convinced themselves that they have outsourced these decisions to other leaders, or vendors, and if there was something important enough to change in the organization, someone will bring it up. Of course this defeats much of the purpose of a leader being a leader. The very definition of the word leader means that you have a point of view on where to go and you are leading others.

So I will be on a mission from this point forward to motivate leaders to be willing to take personal responsibility to open up the technology toolbox and drive change into the organization where change might have value. I want them to know that they have the opportunity to do great things if they will just invest a little mindshare into learning about the new tools. Extinction is a painful consequence for the failure to open the toolbox…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Let’s start with a big one first – the Microsoft purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion. I have already perused a number of pundits talking about whether it makes sense or not. It seems pretty obvious to me it makes lots of sense. Now, they seem to have overpaid, but that always proves out in the long run. As to the strategic side of things, Microsoft has lots of cash – more than most small countries. They have to spend it on something. If you don’t buy someone, you either have to hire lots of people and spend it on new products, or give it back to shareholders, and very few boards are excited about handing lots of profits back to shareholders. So when you have to spend a few billion to buy something, why not buy a company that has lots of upside potential, already is the leader in their space, and brings a set of technologies that can be integrated into your other products to make them better. It makes a lot more sense for Microsoft to buy Skype than it did when eBay bought them. Besides, their core markets are starting to age, and weaken. Plus, they have been bleeding cash in the attempt to make money in the online services space. Adding a crown jewel like Skype just good optics if nothing else.

So what did it mean when Salesforce.com bought Radian6? This also makes a ton of sense. Salesforce sees the writing on the wall as to the merging of CRM and social technologies as a sales tool. Radian6 has good capabilities for mining social conversations and reporting on what it finds. Salesforce can use that mining capability by merging it with the contacts in their customer’s databases so they can listen to customers online conversations and mine them for buying signals. What we now call social CRM, will just be CRM in a few years so they jumpstarted their foray into that world by acquiring one of the largest players. Again, at a purchase price north of $300 million, they probably overpaid. There seems to be a trend with that these days.

Twitter bought TweetDeck for around $30 Million (although I also heard $40 million.) This makes sense as well because it allows Twitter to start consolidating some of the tools that are used to actually use Twitter in the real world. The raw Twitter Website is great for joining the real time news service river, but it was miserable at giving us tools to manage that river. Tweetdeck solves that. I also think Twitter over paid for Tweetdeck, but not for the reason some people say. I think what it shows is that Twitter as a company has little ability to build their own applications, or they would have simply spent much less and built their own application. The bad news about this is that Twitter is likely spending more time and energy figuring out how to maximize their revenue potential, than actually building new technology that would expand usage.

In all three cases, I give credit to the leaders for adding important new pieces. They get minus points for the price paid, but again, you only know what kind of deal you got after a few years. I don’t expect the acquisitions to stop on the tech space, and I fact expect them to speed up. As the large cash generating companies get larger and richer, they will more aggressively mine the startup and young company space for accretive technologies, and missing pieces. As their cash cows begin to lose their luster, they will grab companies on the rise to offset the downward trends they invariably run into. This is actually a pretty healthy system for our economy, and it is always fascinating to see who is adding what pieces and why…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Robot Twendy One (c) PA Pics, via Ananova

For decades many organizations and professionals have done business with nameless customers. I was just struck by this fact while working with a new client that “sells” to millions of customers a year – including me – and they have no database of these constituents. When two ideas collide in your brain, insights can happen. I have been doing a lot of work around the concept of social CRM, and the capability of an organization to harvest large amounts of information on customers by mining their social profiles. Mix that with the fact that today, restaurants, movie theatres, department stores, grocery stores, and gas stations do business with millions of customers who are completely anonymous for all practical purposes. They provide services – in many cases over and over – to customers yet know nothing about them. They do not even know if the customers have frequented them many times. I suppose that is why some of them will try to use loyalty cards, or punch cards in order to track visits at least.

Doctors, lawyers, CPA’s and other professionals know little more than the most basic information about their patients and clients. They get the names, billing addresses and maybe their insurance providers and that is it. So we trust our health, our wealth, and the fairness in our life to people who know our names, and maybe a few facts about our finances or physical status. For such important roles that they play in our lives, that is very little insight into who we are.
Half of you may be thinking that this is exactly how it should be – mostly because you are privacy bigots. The other half of you may be like me, and you are thinking that it is a shame that I spend lots of money with organizations that have no idea who I am, or what I am about. If you are a privacy nut, you might as well stop reading now because there will not be anything you will care about from here on out. If you think that the world would be a better place if organizations and professionals knew more about me, then read on. Or, if you are unconvinced either way, allow me to provide an example or two…

I get gas at a local convenience store most of the time. Every now and then I have to get it somewhere else, but if I pass the brand of convenience store I use at home I will pick that one on the road. Unless I am on vacation and on the highway where I will always go to a Loves Store. Both of these are large companies with lots of locations and neither one ever communicates with me, nor do they seem to know I exist. I spend literally thousands of dollars with companies like this each year by the way. I also spend thousands of dollars at a couple of grocery stores, and they do not seem to know me either. Nor do any of these seem to appreciate that I am a customer, because they have no ability to communicate with me. If I stopped using them today, none of them would get in touch and try to win me back. They simply open their doors every day and hope people show up, and by the way, they have no idea who the people are that show up, or how loyal they are.

By comparison, I spend much less money with Southwest Airlines and I got a birthday card from them the other day. Amazon reaches out to me regularly and I only spend a couple of hundred bucks a year with them. My doctor never gets in touch to check on me. I only interface with him when I am sick and go see him. Other than that, I don’t really exist to them. My dentist does actually check in online from time to time and I can only put that off to the fact that they know it will increase the amount of visits for cleanings.

With that background, I just wanted to point out that this concept of service providers who do not know their customers is crude, very crude from a marketing standpoint. It will also change. I look forward to the day when the places I get gas, and groceries connect to me online and thank me for filling up, and maybe give me a coupon that will be enabled if I check in on Facebook Places, or Foursquare the next time I am in. Or maybe they start sending notices of pricing changes so I know whether to fill up today, or wait a few days. Maybe even build a relationship with me by providing interesting content and information online.

I don’t care if they learn about me from my social profiles. I only care that they realize I am a good customer, thank me, and reward me for spending my money with them. I care that they communicate things that I might uniquely want to know about. They could learn these things from my social profiles. And if they did, restaurants would know that I don’t eat red meat, and they would only market fish and chicken dishes to me. Would that be so bad?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

This application has the tightest integration of social tools that I have seen, and in ways that makes sense I might add. You can add clients and prospects to the CRM system and it creates a monitoring window so you can see in real time what your contacts are discussing. You can also set alerts on keywords so if they happen to mention that they are “looking” for something, you will get notified immediately. You can even break your contacts down by distance from a lat/long address so you can make the tracking geographic. If you are interested in CRM systems, check it out.

I then had a discussion with a client who has a SAAS software platform they license. We were brainstorming how social tools and concepts could be imbedded in their application, and a thought dawned on me. Nearly every piece of software must be rearchitected to add social concepts. I am not talking about the basics of adding the ability to chat with other people who are using the application but the more advanced concepts. In fact there should be a checklist of sorts that software designers should be able to ask themselves to make it easier. The ideas below are an example of what I mean…

1. The capability to forward content or information directly from the application to any contact on any social service
2. The capability to see other co-workers that are using the application at the same time and send them a pop-up 140 character message.
3. An ability to have a user profile on the system so when a user shares information, the receiver can click to see who sent it
4. The ability to link content from social media sites with content inside the application
5. The ability to connect a persons records within an application to the things they publish on social networking sites
6. The ability to create custom flows of information (delivered as RSS feeds) so that users can add windows or headings to NetVibes, or Google Reader in order to monitor information coming into the application.

Before anyone says this to me, I understand that security issues need to be taken into consideration depending on what the application is doing. Connecting people is not always possible in high security apps. For the rest of the world, there is a lot that can be gained by socializing current software apps.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

They may not think of it as such, but in reality it is offloading many of the bits of data they used to memorize. It provides an alternate method for finding information and solving problems when their brains are not up to the task. It notifies them of appointments and tasks, and provides the connection with their network of friends so they can always be connected. A level of connection that is being imbedded into their psyche to such a degree that the absence of the outboard brain causes abject panic. Pity the poor kids whose parents will not let them use these devices, or cannot afford to supply them with this intelligence augmentation. I am sure that there are a few of you at this moment who really want to rage against the concept that we need an outboard brain. I get it, you have lived a lot of your life without the need. The problem is we have them now, and we are quickly raising a generation that is integrating with these devices, and the massive information source that is the Internet that comes along with them. Game over.

This of course causes issues in the education system because they have been geared for hundreds of years to teach just one brain. Now they have to figure out how to integrate the outboard brain into the equation. Luckily there are a handful of schools that are pioneering this concept, for example, the American School in Bombay, and the International School in Zurich.

But this is really not about kids, it is about me. I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I carry a laptop, iPhone and an iPad. I use them extensively in my career. In fact, a large part of the success I have had in the last five years has come from the ability to work from wherever I am, handle lots of conversations in a day, access powerful rivers of information in an instant, and store lots of information I could never memorize. I just left Germany and for some reason my iPhone would not find a carrier. When I connected to the clients wireless, it blocked one of my email accounts. And I had to pay for my Internet connection at the hotel. I would not say that I was crippled, but I was really annoyed. I was somehow less of a force without my tools. There were moments when I would have reached out to the Web from my iPhone for information and it was not available to me. I was left intellectually neutered temporarily.

Could I perform the work I do today without my outboard brain? The reality is not very well. I would not make nearly the money I now get paid. I would not have the number of clients I now have. I would not have the knowledge level I now enjoy. I would not have the ability to solve problems with the speed and alacrity I can now. Maybe it is a blessing that I lived 40 some odd years without really have an outboard brain at my side. It gives me the ability to appreciate what it is doing for me today. Instead of raging against the time it takes for me to learn how to use the new tools that come along with it every day, I embrace the fact that companies are constantly giving me new capabilities and streamlining my ability to communicate, do research, digest knowledge, and problem solve. In the 80’s, I did not have this kind of informational fire power – not even close.

Now I want more. I want a brain computer interface so I don’t need to type and can work at the speed of thought. I want the screen projected on my retina so I do not have to carry around 15” devices just to gain information. I want to build rules based rivers of information that flow to me automatically when I need them. I want my outboard brain to offload everything that is not uniquely human so I can spend my brainpower on building good relationships, creativity and innovation. I want to focus more on the spiritual side of life, and the family and friends around me. Instead of dragging me away from them, I want it to be sophisticated enough that it frees me from many of the tasks I do today that take up time. I am sure this will happen and I am impatiently waiting.

For now I would happy if my outboard brains were always connected and never blocked…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Along came social technologies and the whole concept of a reputation and the speed at which it is created or altered, has been transformed. At least in high school a reputation was formed through a few people passing opinions by word of mouth. This meant that their opinions could fade into history pretty quickly. In our now technology augmented social structure, a persons opinion is posted online, searchable, and may hang around for 100 years or so on some server. Our reputation will be constructed out of thousands of bits of information that use our name in positive, negative, or neutral tones. I have mentioned in the past that ratings sites will certainly be one driver of building our reputations, and there are many other interesting ways coming. Check out http://watercooler.honestly.com This new site by Honestly.com provides and interesting way of gathering peoples opinions of each other.

Our future online reputations will be an admixture of our personal and professional interactions and we will have zero control over what people say about us. So if you think you can avoid this whole subject by opting out, think again. People will randomly mention seeing you at and event, or review a discussion they had with you. They will post pictures they have taken of you. They will upload video’s that include you. That will be the tame part. Make someone angry with you and there will be a post that describes in detail what you did and why it was uncool. How different it will be than the world now where people can pretty effectively separate their personal and professional lives.

In the end, you will either have a good, bad or invisible reputation and two of those are bad. We will have no option but to pay attention to what people say about us, or our work. We will have to run listening services on our own names so that we are at least aware of what others are saying. And don’t think that having a common name will help you hide. People will easily be able to refine their searches with a few additional search terms and get right to the correct John Smith.

The shocking aspect of online reputations may not be the fact that they will exist, but the permanence that will come along with them. I will be lucky enough that the first half of my life will go pretty much uncommented on. My kids will not be so lucky. From a young age, their names will be indexed on a number of sites – as will their conversations and comments. The Internet has a funny way of leaving content in play for a long time. I count myself as very lucky that many of my early lapses in judgment will never be commented on by the angry people that would have had every right to slam me online!

Our desire to remediate our reputations will spawn and entire industry of cleaners. People will pay lots of money to mitigate the damage of the flotsam and jetsam that will be floating around social technology land. Companies will pay even more to clean their reputations. Quietly, technology will change a critical dynamic in our lives – how people judge us… When I tell young people that I spent the first 40 years of my life not worrying about such things, it will sound like when my grandmother used to tell me she milked the cows in the morning, and rung chickens necks for dinner

Don’t get me wrong that I have any issue with online reputations. I actually think they will improve humanity in huge ways. Bad service providers will be punished – as they should be. Professionals that are abusive to patients or clients will be found out and forced to change their ways – as it should be. Companies that screw over customers will be hammered online and it will drive down their sales – as it should be. On the other hand there will be people that say very unfair things online. And we all know humans seem to take action much more when they are angry than when they are happy.

I run listening programs on my name of course, and today I found a blog post from a guy that reviewed one of my books. It was a very positive review and I was intrigued by the ideas he had pulled out to comment on. The strange thing is I have never met him, he does not know me at all, and everything he wrote is now attached to my name for as long as he leaves that blog post alive. Thank God he liked what he read…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

First, we got PC’s and computing power was put in the hands of the people. Then we got the Internet so we had a transport system to connect with each other. Now we have built communities, and systems to facilitate instant information and communication flow. Every step of the way too many people objected, sneered, and rationalized that the old way was better. Well… until they were assimilated into the reality that technology can improve quality of life, and the ability to prosper. The resistance to the unceasing march forward still goes on today with millions of people that are too obstinate, worn out, ignorant or just plain unmotivated to learn another new tool or process. Got some bad news for you, we are not done yet.

The next step will be even more divisive because it will relate to how we interface with all the devices that will be Internet connected in a pervasive computing world. This is the logical next step, that we will work on improving our ability to interface with all this technology. The success of the Microsoft Xbox360 Kinect system is an obvious sign that people are hungry for interface methods like gesture control. If you think it was painful to see the young generation, and the good and bad aspects of how they can now relate to each other over the wire, just wait until they integrate their very bodies with the technology. Really, the social tech revolution is already over and won. It is like cell phones were in the late 90’s, you could easily see that everyone would have one at some point. It is just a matter of time until everyone will have to participate in some form of social technology just to be considered normal.

By the way, that reminds me of a guy I ran into the other day at a conference. He sat next to me and asked what I did for a living. I told him and he promptly told me that he was very proud of the fact that he did not own a cell phone and never intended to. He was about mid to late 40’s and he is an expert in the “experience economy.” I had to hold my tongue because he was very sure he had some mystical insight into life – I was very sure that he is soon to be an outcast. Later I ran into some people that had worked with him and no one was very impressed with his shtick.

Very soon, he will look around and people will be gaining skills with new interface devices and systems so that they integrate technology connection with their brains, eyes, voices, etc. This will create yet another surge forward in technology evolution, and once again, there will be those that will resist, sneer, and rationalize that humans were never meant to be connected (augmented) by machines. The seeds of these interface devices are already planted so it is not like I am guessing at this. It is just a matter of a few years now.

I respect that guys right to shun technology. I do not respect his argument that technology is lowers our quality of life, or our ability to have great experiences. I will forever have room in my life for people that simply want to keep things simple, as they have grown up doing. I will not have room for people that judge others as “wrong” for wanting to be on the forefront of technology innovation. So back to my original question, do you believe yet?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Much like a child that is taught to cry for attention, consumers will learn the art of badvocacy and there really is nothing companies can do to stop this tsunami. If they ignore people saying negative things online, they will be embarrassed just like a parent at a grocery store with a screaming child. At least the parent can take the child out of the store to the car and let them scream their heads off. Companies will be faced with hundreds or thousands of screaming customers shortly because everyone that perceives they have been wronged will state it online. Will this be “fair?” Of course it is more complicated than just a simple answer might provide…

I have long said that the wonderful thing about social tools and company performance is that we finally have a very public way to share opinions about service so that consumers can do a simple online search and learn something valuable about the past performance of a company or professional person right from the source. The reality has been that many professionals, and companies could hide poor service, or even criminal behavior, because people did not have a way to tell their stories to other clients or customers. This is how we have had doctors that would abuse many female patients without the next one knowing the danger. This is how we had plumbers that provided terrible service that simply waited for the next call to come in from the next victim. Or, how about the car repair people that rip off every woman that brings a car in with a problem because they believe they can. Online rating systems and keyword searching will help put an end to much of this and I for one and glad that there is finally a solution.

On the other side of the wonderful new dynamic will be the fact that human beings have a propensity to say negative things in higher volumes than positive things. They are also moved to action more by negative emotions than positive ones. In other words, we will blog or tweet more about the poor service we have received than the good. Some people think we will eventually just tune out the negative mentions because we will realize this. Uhhhh, no. We will not tune them out, and we are already seeing that things like restaurant reviews on Yelp are driving revenue away from locations with poor food and service to the ones that actually perform at a high level. I am afraid that badvocacy is going to work, and we will pay attention to it.

Look for a ten-year curve with this one. I think it will take that long for us to all get used to using this new capability, for companies to figure out how to deal with it, and for us to find ways to sort through the unwarranted negatives in order to get a true picture before we make a buying decision. We will learn to somehow rate advocates, and badvocates so that we know if they are positive plants, or negative crybabies. We will sort it all out and when the smoke clears, we will have invented a crowd based way to force service and product providers to perform at high levels and I suspect will look back on the times previous to this as being like the dark ages when people bought products and services completely blind…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

App Epidemic

When there is an app for everything, and many of them are free, we overindulge at times. Depending on how old you are, you might remember (as I do) the old days when there were very few software applications for our personal use, and each one of them was expensive. Borland Software came out with a model where applications that were previously hundreds of dollars, were then $30 to $50 and we thought that was stellar. Today as I mentioned many of the apps we use are free, and a large chunk are now somewhere between $.99 and $10. I used to have apps just on my laptop or desktop, and now I have them on a mobile device, an iPad and my laptop, and I need them to be synced in real time. I used to spend 90% of my time using Microsoft Office, and email client, and a browser. Times have changed.

I also used to dread loading and unloading applications on my Windows based system because it invariably cluttered the OS and I had to blow away the whole system and reinstall periodically just to keep it running OK. Now I have a Mac, iPhone, and iPad and can install, and delete with the click of a button without damaging the performance at all. In other words, there is no practical reason, nor financial barrier, between me and the installation of five apps a day just to see which ones might provide value. Add to this all the cloud based hosted applications I can now just run over a browser without any installation, and you have a recipe for a few new dynamics that are intriguing…

The first is that we now have the ability to build a tool box full of applications that help us have a better quality of life, and perform at much more productive levels in our career. A massive toolbox for some of us – oh and we are still in the early days of Web-based tool development. The toolbox we each build will have an increasing impact on our ability to succeed. This toolbox will define how we network, how we subsume information and learn, and how productive we are when we perform a task. I already judge young potential employees by their ability to use the tools they have assembled. I have no patience for someone that is behind the curve with their hardware, or software. It seems crude to me that someone would play the game without the best equipment – kind of like a golfer that shows up at the course with boots on, and six clubs in a ratty bag.

The second dynamic I find interesting is the difference with the young generation versus the old in how willing they are to use new tools. I worry about anyone over 40 years old that has any resistance to using the latest gear and experimenting with new apps. I am getting weary of older people telling me all the reasons why young people overdo their technology addiction when the truth is a younger person with a great tech toolbox is becoming more valuable that an older person with experience and weak tools.

Which leads me to the next dynamic, the interesting situation that occurs when someone falls behind in using the latest tools. Today, if you take a year off from upgrading your hardware and software, you will lose touch with the shared tools that many people will pick up. Not being able to use shared and collaboration tools when needed decimates your value because no one cares how smart you are if you cannot share it. Once upon a time, I would not hire someone that did not know how to use MS Office tools. Today the list is much longer. For example if I ask you to Skype me and you tilt your head at me like my confused Labrador, we have problems. Same thing if I tell you to add your idea to Basecamp, or to setup a new column in Tweetdeck.

I guess you can look at the world as a place where you are overwhelmed with the options we have for applications, or you can revel in the fact that we live in a time with an explosion of tools. One thing for sure, the quantity of tools, and the sophistication level is not going to drop any time soon. I suggest we all build personal strategies for keeping up on the latest, and most beneficial new tools coming out and invest the time to relevant. The alternative is a man/woman child will blow by us.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

New technology concepts are changing that model in ways that we need to consciously leverage as parents. More than that, it would be nice if the education system clued into this fact faster than they are today. We now have a worldwide source of knowledge sharing that allows for an archive of a massive scale, and a transport mechanism to share real time information and knowledge. We call this the Internet. Consider for a moment that this is a new jug of information that can be poured into our mugs on a constant basis each day, and this jug is every growing, and will never max out as to it’s ability to add new content. The ability to purposely tap into this source of knowledge is something I call building a river of information. Let me stop here and deal with the arguments naysayers want to throw at me…

1 – All the information on the Internet is not “correct.” Yes I get that and that is why we need to teach kids the ability to have discretionary thinking capabilities. By the way, all the information that teachers used to transfer in the old days was not correct either. People do need to develop a filter to gauge credible sources from non-credible.

2 – The Internet cannot teach people how to learn and teachers and schools have that as one of their main purposes. To teach kids to learn. I actually believe that the skill of learning is something that most people pick up naturally as they struggle to survive in this world. I believe it is innate for people that want to prosper – this skill of learning. The Internet has the ability to facilitate this skill pretty well on its own. Besides, what some schools think of as teaching kids to learn is really teaching them to memorize and that is not the same thing.

3 – The Internet cannot replace the social experiences of group learning in schools. OK, I give you that, however, I have noticed my daughter using Skype to do study sessions with her friends. That is an interesting use of the Web to facilitate group learning.

OK, back to rivers of information and harvesting knowledge. If you are a parent, I strongly suggest that you consider helping your kids learn to see the Internet as both a massive archive of information, and a river of content that can be tapped into many times a day. The next generation needs separate itself from the world I grew up in where the vast amount of knowledge transfer was from teacher to student. They need to know that for the rest of their lives, the vast amount of knowledge transfer will come from the Internet to their brains. In effect, they can now stand on the shoulders of millions of people around the world, instead of a handful in school. Now, do I want my kids to stop going to school? No. Schools have lots of social and learning aspects that are valuable. We leave schools in our early twenties however, and the formal learning process stops. We can help young people by integrating them with their own skills of tapping the river of information from a young age so that they continue for the rest of their lives. In this way they will learn to harvest knowledge from the largest knowledgebase humanity has ever known.

By the way, it is not too late for you. I now connect my twitter stream, Facebook profile, and Google Reader sources to Flipboard on my iPad and tap into my river of information in a rapidly digestible way. Try it sometime…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

People throw around the word transparency a lot.  As in, the more transparent someone is, the more we know about him or her.  In a business sense, we have for all of mankind picked professionals and service providers from the Yellow Pages, or a recommendation.  The problem with this is that there was very little way to get any transparency into what the service might be like after we bought it.  If you really step back, that is a pretty crude way to operate.  My guess is we have not had much of an option because it would have been too much trouble to call five references on a plumber, car repair shop, heat and air operation, or a doctor.  Plus, we know they would only give us references that would be good so it would be a waste of time.  In other words, we hire people with zero transparency into how well they perform.  This is great for the service providers – especially the ones that suck.  They have the ability to perform poor service, and simply get five new, and naïve, customers the next day.

Ratings site completely change the game.  In fact, they create a game with a new set of rules that both sides will have to sort out.  Now that we all will have the ability to rate every service provider in a few seconds from our mobile device, which will give us transparency because we can check their customer history before we do business with them.  From the customer side, problem solved – we should never have to deal with buyer beware again.  Well, that is if the ratings are righteous, and if the service provider has not stuffed the ratings box with friends and relatives reviews.

From the service provider’s viewpoint, they will now live in fear of the negative ratings that could decimate their career – and this will happen.  And when it happens, many of them will be surprised that a little thing like Angies list will have that power.  Welcome to the social tech age my friends.  So the only dilemma here is that people tend to be more vocal about negative ratings than positive so the odds are service providers will collect more haters than evangelist.  Uh Oh…

The bottom line is the game is going to change dramatically over the next five year.  If you are a service provider, you better get an online management strategy in place.  If you don’t, you better hope you never make a mistake with a tech savvy customer…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I love this statement.  I have had a growing frustration with all the people that write articles about how technologies are going to stunt the growth of the next generations.  Let’s see, I have heard:

• They will not be a social because they do not relate face to face as much any more
• They will be dumber because they will rely on the Internet for all their answers
• They will lose their memorization abilities because they have outboard brains and do not need to memorize things any more
• They will be fat because they will sit inside and play games and be on Facebook all day
• They will not be creative anymore because the technology does whatever they tell it so they do not need to use their imagination any more
• They will be such multi-taskers they will not be able to concentrate on any one thing to do it well
• They will all have a complete moral breakdown because they can see pictures of naked people at a young age
• They will sprout little tails, and then implant horns, and become vampires from watching all the shows about the children of Dracula

OK, maybe I went over the edge with the last one…  Why is it that we have such trouble looking back into the past and seeing the patterns that have never proven to be true, and relating them to the future?  Every generation has worried about the efficacy of the next.  Every generation has lived under a unique set of influences, and in every case, the generation has made huge progress in the world.  The drugged out sex crazed hippies grew up and became a powerful generation that is still running the world today.  I predict Generation M will do unbelievable things to move humanity forward.

Why do I say that? Because they will have at their disposal a cadre of powerful technology tools.  They will stand on the shoulders of our generation and will take the knowledge we upload to the Web, and they will extend it.  Because they will learn from the mistakes of the Gen X and Gen Y generations and will use that knowledge to go further faster than any generation before.  It is historically naïve and narrow minded to believe anything else.

I just had two 7-year-old neighbor boys walk through my house to use our trampoline.  They came back in and asked if they could have something to drink.  I make them say please.  They chose a beverage, and then asked me if I would please open them.  They are not my sons, but I love them both because they represent such amazing potential.  I hope I live long enough to see this Generation M and their supercommunicators….

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

• Can’t this become a huge time waster?
• Isn’t it dangerous for people to be able to write about their company and post it to millions with a click of a button?
• Isn’t it an issue that companies cannot control how people use social tools?

As I answered I found myself going back in history over and over because I heard all of these things twice before.  When PC’s first came out, we asked almost the exact same questions.  When the Internet hit organizations, we heard the same thing.  In other words, every time we get a new technology tool that enables us in some way, many people in organizations fear the potential negatives, more than they seek to leverage the positives!  I guess another thing that happens when you get older is you get grumpier because I am pretty tired of dealing with people that focus more on stemming the tide, then in simply managing the negatives so they are under control.

Social technologies and Web 2.0 applications are going to change us more than we realize.  I don’t think it has really set in that any one human being can now communicate with 2 billion people for free and in an instant.  We have not really grasped what that will mean to society.  I don’t thing we really understand how many walls get broken down with communities can form with no regard to geography, language, or politics.  The geopolitical implications of this are massive.  The fact that our online reputations will have a massive impact on our ability to be successful has not set it.  People really do not understand that transparency happens when everyone around you tells stories about you, rates your skills, and uploads information about you – whether you like it or not.

It does not end there… People really have little foresight into how the world will change now that we have a way to harvest massive amounts of information EVERY DAY and dump it into our minds.  This ability to do continuous learning is dramatically larger than what we had even five years ago.  Even the most basic tenet of social networking, the ability to connect with thousands of people from our past that we would have never connected with again is changing lives every hour.  And as with any tool, it is used for the positive and the negative.  For all the people that are uplifted by connected to friends from the past, there are people that are getting divorced over spouses trying to relive their past relationships.

Television changed the world in massive ways that we probably do not fully understand today.  PC’s changed the world as well when computing power was handed to the individual.  The Internet connected us all and again, is supporting massive changes.  Now social technologies comes along and once again, just like its predecessors, we have the unenlightened standing on the corners shouting that we should block it, control it, or burn it at the stake.  Give me a break… When are we going to learn that new technology paradigms will come in waves, and they are just tools that can be used for good or for bad.  It is the human that controls them and makes that decision – think fire and guns…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I have been noticing for the last couple of years that more appliance, consumer electronics, car, and device manufacturers have been building in the ability for the device to be controlled from an Internet connection. At the same time, we have an explosion of mobile devices going on. That means we have the handheld ability to use the Internet, and many devices that will be controlled over the Internet. In other words, we have two of the major pieces for pervasive computing. All we really lack is a worldwide standard device operating system that will bridge every device to a Internet controlling front end. There are starting to be early standards in that game like Z-Wave. While all of this is quietly going on in geekdom, regular people probably don’t really understand how close we are to having computerized (24/7) control over every device in our world.

Let’s look at some basic examples of what could be done today with just a little extra work:

• Pull your car into the garage and it automatically connects to your home wifi so that the computer in your engine can upload the current status of the entire car and alert you to any problems that need to be resolved.
• Allow you to turn on your sprinkler system at any moment from any where in the world. Or, turn it off if you hear that it is going to rain in your city while you are away
• Turn on the heater to your swimming pool from anywhere in the world, monitor the temperature, or be alerted if the pump is not operating in the right way and needs to be turned off so it does not burn up.
• Monitor the alarm system in your house so you know anytime a door is opened, or if a motion detector goes off in any room. All from anyplace you happen to be in the world.
• Have complete control over every light in your house so you can turn them all off with a press of a button, or turn on whichever ones you might need on while you are away from the house.

All of this from your mobile phone, or the computer at work. The examples are just about endless and the impact on our quality of life will be profound. To be honest, I am surprised it is taking manufacturers so long to get this capability into the hands of the public. The next generation coming up now will expect for capabilities like this to exist and will be annoyed when they don’t have instant control of a device, vehicle, or appliance from anywhere.

In fact, I feel a bit like I am living in the Stone Age now!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

1 part ability to retain information

1 part ability to recognize patterns

2 parts ability to digest large amounts of information quickly and make sense of it

2 parts ability to prioritize what is relevant

5 parts the river of information you have created to feed the above skills

Having a large river of information myself, I learned a lot of other things this year, and I have the advantage over most people in that I get to speak to, and consult for, lots of organizations so I get to see patterns many people would never have the chance to see. Here are some bullet points I learned from observing, and reading about, leaders and the institutions they run:

• Leaders are struggling with the changing dynamics in society and the marketplace and it is clearly pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. This dynamic is testing what it means to be a good leader.
• Most organizations are under increasing pressure to improve in order to survive, yet most feel they lack the time to do the R&D work necessary to really find new ways to succeed. Either they commit to breaking through, or they will run on an ever-increasing treadmill that will kill them off.
• Technology continues to drive changes in customer and employee behavior and organizations are routinely slow to figure this out. They either take the risks to make innovations, or they wait for competitors to teach them the way – which is dangerous.
• In times of disruption there is tremendous opportunity, and we live in one of the most disrupted times there has been in a while. There are fantastic opportunities for those willing to risk breaking out of patterns their industries established decades ago.

I have also learned that the next generation of young people coming up may do more to change the world than any of the generations I have experienced. I am tired of people bashing the Gen Y and next crowd because they are different in how they operate, and their love of technology. Mark my words, they will use technology tools, and their hearts for a better world to do awesome things.

I learned that writing three books in one year is a difficult thing to do. I am clearer than ever that people die (because a number of friends did.) The fact that I had to get glasses for the first time this made it clear that I am getting older and really cannot stop that trend.

Maybe above all of this, I learned this year that the world is full of really good people, and that is easy to forget because the bad people get all the press for some reason. When I really focused on doing the math (as I did this year) it became clear to me that most of us are just hard working people that want the world to be a better place, and we are trying in our own ways to get it there. There are some slackers, and downright evil people, yet on the whole, we are headed in the right direction – despite what any political party that is not in power will say.

I go into next year ready to do great things – I hope you are as well…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Seriously, my daughter just texted me, I have a client emailing me, and a speakers bureau is asking me for information for a speaking prospect they are working with. Money never sleeps baby, money never sleeps. One of my books just went live in the iBooks store and I loaded it on my iPad. I also emailed it a client and he loaded it on his iPad as well. I can send a link out on Twitter if I want and thousands of people will have the ability to download it in a few clicks – that will cost me nothing to do as well. They could have the book and be reading it within minutes of me thinking to send the link. Apple will not pay me instantly though, they will wait and send a statement sometime much later. Some things get faster, but getting paid never seems to. I guess that is not really a technology problem.

I am listening to digital music on expensive noise cancelling headphones and it sounds great – I cannot hear anyone else around me. I love it. I am accessing the Internet through a USB AT&T device because I don’t want to pay for the daily fee at the airport. I have my iPhone, and iPad sitting right next to my MacBook Pro as I write this. Both of them are connected to the Internet as well in case I need to know who or what is near me. My phone is tracking my flight, which is late, so I know when to head to the gate. If I happen to hear a song I like on Internet radio – which allows me to listen to music from all over the world, I can download it in an instant as well. Hang on, I just had to answer a client question about a date for a webinar next week. OK, good to go now…

I am plugged in, hooked up, connected, directed, and productive. I have the power to do magic things, things that could not be done ten years ago. I can mainline all this technology at will and orchestrate my career, my life, my fun. I have the power of technology and it is not enough. I want more, I want it faster, I want it cheaper. I see the vision now. Real time gratification, always-on business, instant information and power exploding through my mind and my fingers. I need more, and I need it now. Who cares if the flight is late, I can get more things done. I can communicate with more people, accomplish a few more things, and hear a few more tunes. I have the power sitting right here – I am wired.

Do you understand what is at our disposal? The devices, the software, the cloud, and the connected people. We have the power that we never had before and it is intoxicating. Money never sleeps my friends…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

It is clear to me that there are now three legs to the online digital marketing stool – Web properties, social technologies and mobile applications. It is not critical for organizations to have solid strategies in each of these to build relationships with their constituents. At the same time, the strategies must call for heavy integration between each of these three. Think of it as creating a net into which a constituent falls and then can be connected with in whatever ways best serve them (and you.) Since each of these properties has very different strengths and weaknesses, it is important to think of them this way:

• Web properties are a DESTINATION that is best for facilitating transactions and archiving information.
• Social technologies are a CONVERSATION that are best for building a tight ongoing relationship with constituents. They also provide a means for a valuable stream of information to be delivered.
• Mobile applications are all about LOCATION. They provide a deeply imbedded relationship to happen from anywhere and at any time. They also allow for location based marketing concepts.

Once you understand all of this, you are on your way to knowing HOW to build a one 2 one relationship with your customers/clients/members. The next question would be WHY do you want to do this? That is where the one 2 one concept starts to take hold. With the ability to create this online three-legged marketing stool, you must have a philosophy as to why you would want to. It is too easy to say that you want to sell more. There are many organizations that are not really “selling” anything. What you really want is influence over your constituents. That is the why you want to be good with this concept. With influence, you can drive behavior. To get influence, you not only want to be effective in delivering online tools, you also want to be great at building a tight one 2 one relationship with every constituent so that they ALLOW you to have that influence over them.

The reason I think the one 2 one aspect is important is because it means that we are using the digital tools to have a unique relationship with each constituent. We are talking to them with tools that they prefer and choose. We are talking in a tone of voice that they prefer. We are delivering information that they prefer. In short, we are customizing an online relationship with them that they choose to have with us. The more one 2 one it is, the more we have earned the right to have influence over how they think.

The moment we mapped this out on the board, I knew it pulled together some pieces I have been struggling to assemble…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

“New technology is common, new thinking is rare.”
‐ Sir Peter Blake

Hence the quote from Sir Peter Blake… New technology is becoming common. Finding new ways to apply it is much more rare. There seems to be a lesson here for leaders because technology continues to be more important every day to an organizations success. It does not matter what your industry might be, technology can give you an edge on the competition. At the same time, technology is not the single magic bullet. You still have to perform your basic industry tasks with aplomb. The thing is, there are always creative ways to reach into the new grab bags of technology tools raining down on us and figure out how to use something. Unless… you suffer from being overwhelmed and have just given up.

That is the real issue, is it not? The explosion of technology tools dropping on the world is creating a situation where many leaders (and people in general) are just giving up. We pick out a few new things that fly by us (iPad’s, Foursquare, or Windows 7 for example) and let the rest fall on the floor. There just is not time in the day to stay up on every new thing announced. Believe me, I get it. I have to live in this tech world and give advice to people, so I have to study it for a living! Time was I prided myself on the fact that whenever I did Q&A I could answer any question about a new application because I knew something about all of them. Today, people asking me what I think if this one or that, regularly stump me. Sad really…

The problem with giving up is that using the best technology tools for the situation really does make a difference. Opting out of doing research and development in the online application space means that you are opting out of improving your business processes. Therefore, opting out for too long means you will be at a big disadvantage in the market. That means you personally, or the organizations you work for. Like it or not, we must find ways to stay up on the most current tools being offered. My solution to this is that everyone must invest a little time each week in technology tool R&D. Even if this is just 30 minutes a week, it must be done. For organizations, there must be a formal process in place with someone that owns the responsibility for this same type of R&D.

Companies that build powerful and effective R&D processes now, will win tomorrow. This must be formalized, it must be measured, and it will be a differentiator as time goes on.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I speak a lot about the concept of building Rivers of Information using social tools. This is simply using tools like Google Reader, email, and mobile devices to harness streams of information on your field of work so it becomes possible to increase your visibility from 3% to 25% of what could be important each day. The reality is that we have an exploding amount of information on just about every area imaginable yet we are doing very little to be strategic and disciplined in creating rivers of information into our brains so that we can leverage that flow of information to provide a continuous learning system.

I think it is pretty obvious that we live in a knowledge economy and as such, the smarter a person is, the more he or she will excel. It is not only important to gather as much information as possible into our brains, it is also critical to gain that information faster than our competitors. There is an advantage to being able to react to new information faster than others. Twitter provides immediate information streams for example, yet many people still act as if they have no idea how Twitter can be valuable. It is the fastest source of news – on just about anything. That is if you follow the right sources, and that seems to be the rub for many. With all the index systems out there for Twitter, you would think people could figure out whom to follow – other than their family and friends.

If a company is worried about how to get value from social tools, I suggest institutionalizing the process of building rivers of information for their employees. Develop lists of the top 40 or 50 sources of online information streams in your industry and pass it out to everyone. Whenever you onboard a new employee, give them the list so they know who and what to follow to get up to speed on the industry quickly. When you do employee reviews on people ask them to describe the river of information they have built and check out how diligently they consume it. Help people learn to be filters of critical bits of information and have the discretion filter to know what should be passed on to others so everyone is aware of critical new developments. There is a multiplying factor if a large team is digesting powerful streams of information because they can act as amplifiers to each other and pass along the powerful bits.

Too many organizations look at social tools as simply the path to more top line revenue and ignore the more subtle ways these new tools can be utilized. The irony of it all is that building improved rivers of information costs nothing other than a little time, and pays back in ways that can make all the difference in the world…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

For most people, names like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos symbolize examples of heads of the technology state.  Biz Stone is certainly in that group in that Twitter is on an inexorable path to being as widely used as any other Web application.  I was thinking about the fact that I was talking to audiences about Twitter when it had 100,000 users – now it has 175 million registered users and is growing quickly.  Biz mentioned that this number does not really reflect the true reach of Twitter because people can use Twitter without actually tweeting, or having an account, so that actual number of users daily is as hard to judge as the average number of Google users a day.

In person, Biz is clearly young, intelligent, and artistic.  In fact, he was a graphic artist before he became a technology leader.  He started in the blogging field, and then by accident (his words) ended up riding the Twitter explosion.  His goal was to solve specific problem he has which was the desire to blog simple comments or observations without feeling like he had to write paragraphs of text.  He also wanted these thoughts to be able to be delivered to any device instantly.  He and Evan built the capability, and it exploded.  Everything else that Twitter can now do has been an unplanned byproduct of the original problem they wanted to solve.  Funny how that happens in the technology space.

Biz is also a person that seems to really care about people, especially his users, and employees.  I was impressed that he is a good example of the leadership style we are likely to see out of the Gen Y generation.  The hallmarks being a high call for social responsibility, creativity, fairness, and democracy of ideas.  He refreshingly lacks hubris, the standard trappings of a CEO, or greed.  His belief is that he must create value before profit.  Meeting him gave me hope that the next generation will pull the world in a very positive direction.  One example of that is how little he seems to worry about how corporations will use Twitter, or maybe it would be more true to say, that he does not view businesses as a bank to be robbed.

That leads me to Twitter and the enterprise.  So I was facilitating a meeting of CIO’s and before Biz came into the meeting, a few of them expressed that they still did not see why Twitter mattered.  They could not see any reason why people would share information with each other in a forum like this.  I was a little taken aback that this opinion still persisted among technology leaders, but alas it does.  When Biz was asked how Twitter could be used by large organizations, he focused on three areas:

1 – Companies can use Twitter search to find what people are saying about products, executives, or competitors.

2 – Companies can use it to see what the zeitgeist is of employees by following their discussions and seeing what they are talking about at this moment

3 – Companies can use the new sponsored tweets and topics to promote products

He also mentioned that his definition of Twitter is that it is an real time news and information network.  Highlight on real time.  That means that organizations can use Twitter to monitor what people are saying feeling, or sharing right now at this moment, and that is a new dynamic.

I would add my own spin on that and say that it should be incredibly clear to organizations that Twitter provides the potential for a huge river of real time information on every element of an industry.  If you never used it to send even one tweet, you could simply use it for market intelligence.  The fact that large companies don’t understand this simple model boggles the mind.

How about you?  Still wondering how to get value from Twitter?  Seriously?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Am I the only one that sees that technology is growing in its influence on profits and success? This holds true for just about any kind of organization so don’t waste my time explaining to me that funeral homes and yoga centers still don’t need it. The fact is that every other entity benefits, and those benefits are swelling every day. When banks have to lock their doors when the power goes off, and the most well thought of companies in the economy are all technology plays, I think it should be clear. We are mainlining digital tools and this addiction is not going to go away – ever.

To be fair, I run into a few leaders of more traditional businesses every now and then that get it. However, for the most part, I meet, read about, and get impacted by loads of leaders that still don’t get it. They think customer service is strictly hand-to-hand combat and ignore the fact that customers now post comments in a public forum that includes 1.8 billion people. They go blind to the fact that business intelligence can give them insights in to trends and anomalies that could improve performance dramatically. I’m not asking them to learn how to program routers or design federated security models. I am just asking for the to invest some time learning about the general concepts that would help them make good decisions where a little technology insight would be helpful. Back to cloud computing…

In some cases, the last people who will suggest a cloud migration program will be the IT department. In all fairness, would you volunteer a solution that might cut your staffing levels in half? If you have a team of .Net programmers, do you think they would ever suggest a different platform for development? Do you think your network security guy is going volunteer the information that he has about 40% of the knowledge that you really need to be safe? Sure, large companies might have a CTO who will be brave and deal with situations like this, but medium sized companies are now floundering with 50 and 60 year old C-suite execs that are really struggling to make good decisions. Hence, they are lagging. They learn most of their lessons from competitors. They are leaving critical tools on the shelf because they lack the knowledge that they even exist, or have little faith the organization could get them implemented. Lagging behind with technology should not be worn as a badge of honor. It does not mean that you are artfully avoiding the bleeding edge. It means you lack the courage, work ethic, and vision to learn how to use a new set of tools to your advantage. And there really is no excuse for this…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The problem at the moment is that most people figure out pretty quickly that a people rating site can be manipulated by having all our friends and family go write positive reviews. And at the other end of the spectrum, this is a honey pot for attracting bitter ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, ex-employees, or ex-friends that want to trash your reputation. With these two doors open, it makes it hard to filter down to the real reviews and ratings that give a fair glimpse into a person. The good news is that ratings sites are starting to put in filters to weed out the astroturfing (artificial good reviews) and the bitter attack reviews. The bad news is I fear it will take some years before we really get a filtering system that gives us a relatively clean view of a person. With this said, I think the concept of a people rating system is solid, useful and going to happen.

What about privacy you say? What about the lack of control over ones reputation when others are creating it online with their comments? Is it really fair to have forced transparency? This may sound heretical to some of you, but I am perfectly fine with people rating me. I actually think it is a bit crude in humanity that when I meet someone new, I have no easy way to verify what they are like to do business with. Hiring people has long been a crap shoot because you really have no way of knowing much about them even when you check on their packaged references. We hire critical services like doctors, lawyers and CPA’s without the slightest clue as to what their success rates are, or how their bedside manner shows up after a few transactions. We enter into complicated business deals with people that we really have little insight about, mostly because the deal looks good on paper without factoring in the human equation. Sadly, at the point we learn that the human equation is a problem; it is too late to get out of the deal.

Do I worry that someone will give me a bad rating and that will hang around for a few years and give people concern? Sure. Do I worry that I might even pick up a few negative ratings that are really not deserved? Absolutely. On the other hand, I am pretty confident that most people would say positive things and I am willing for the world to see me as truthfully as others see me. Especially if the trade off is I will have a way to check the voracity of all the people I hire, or go to work for professionally.

Check out the site when you get a chance and just think for a few moments how the world would be a different place with something like this running rampant across the world. What if anyone you wanted to check on had thirty or forty ratings? I suspect it will not be long before that is what we see…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Having skills with the use of personal technology tools makes too much difference at this point. There is no option for simply opting out of learning to use them. Aids like mobile devices, social networking, information management, communication software, and collaboration systems are today what staplers, “while you were out” tablets, and rolodexes were twenty years ago. Yet many reasonably smart career people are choosing to be too lazy, or just plain resistant to force themselves to make the time and energy investment necessary. Intellectually, I understand the issue. Even I get burned out on trying new software applications and setting up new hardware devices. Just to prove that I understand the people that do not want to subject themselves to the pain of learning, here is what I see…

People that have no picture in their minds as to what life could be like with heavy integration of tech. I am pretty sure that if people were able to see what their life would be like after a technology makeover, they would be excited to get to that state. Much like a physical makeover, if you show someone how they would look in a perfect state, they become willing to work hard to get there. The picture becomes clear to them – and attractive. The dynamic would be the same with a technology makeover. The bottom line is, many people are ignorant of the return they would receive for the efforts of learning.

For others, there is a fear of failure, or a fear of looking stupid. I have known really high IQ people that quake at the thought of having to setup an iPhone. In order to avoid the possible self-realization that they are clueless about tech, they just stick with old school methods for doing everything, and rationalize it to people around them as their love of being retro. My observation is that retro works as a design concept, but sucks as a philosophy for personal productivity tools.

Still others just have a mistaken set of priorities. These folks normally signal themselves clearly when their first excuse to me is that they do not have time to invest in learning new tech tools. That makes about as much sense as saying you do not have time to take an antibiotic when you have a bad infection. Technology is not the cure for everything. It is clearly a valuable solution for helping people be more productive and to have a higher quality of life.

There is one last excuse that I get from time to time and that is from the person who is just on overwhelm and simply cannot find the mindshare or energy to invest in learning something new. We live in a fast paced world and situations can arise where someone has way too much on their plate to regard learning new tech tools as a priority. For most people in this situation, I can give them a pass. As long as it is temporary, and the overwhelm is not a self-inflicted state of life.

So now you know I understand your excuses if you are one that is avoiding the difficulty of making yourself learn. Don’t mistake my understanding for acceptance however. If you have been holding off learning that new application, or buying that new device, now is the time. Make the investment in your future…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Now, I am all about mashing up ideas and concepts into new unique forms.  I am also the first one to laugh at a good parody.  The problem I have is when people really just vampire others ideas because the original work is very clever, and the follow on people are just too lazy to innovate something on their own.  I guess you could debate that vampiring ideas is the sincerest form of flattery, or that it simply gives a boost to the original work.  Or, that any new adaption of the original has some level of creativity in it so could be honored for that.  I get all that.  Yet certainly there must be a line drawn where we say it is just plain thievery to leech onto the original work as a source of quick visibility.

I suspect that with the advent of social networking, and free tools to create artistic digital parodies in either video, or graphic forms, we will see a continued explosion of semi talented users finding ways to leverage an original work.  And maybe that is OK.  Maybe this is just a new societal way of leveraging good ideas into an explosion of variations that within that line of thinking can be as, or more, entertaining than the original.  Old Spice Guy is certainly spawning many different variations of the original concept, some funny, some amateurish, and some just plain stupid.  Maybe Old Spice is laughing all the way to the bank on this one.  Maybe they love all the attention.  Sales are certainly up from what the press says.  Yet I wonder if they realize that the fast diffusion of the concept by others has shortened the public’s attention span for this concept.  It will quickly be overhyped, and then fade rapidly as the cool factor gets sucked right out of it.

I love the concept of crowd accelerated innovation, yet I somehow worry that we might end up in a place where we have 99.95 percent of the world simply creating offshoots of the .05% of the world that actually works to create something new and clever.  This kind of math concerns me because it means we will be leaving a huge amount of innovation left undone because it is just too easy to suck the life out of someone else’s creativity.  Already, the researchers say that the number of people who actually create interesting content and upload it on the Web are a paltry 3% to 5% of the overall population.  That means that the vast majority are strictly consumers and not creators.  I guess what I am saying is that I hope the Internet eventually births a new concept – crowd EXPANDED innovation.  That more people upload completely new creative concepts instead of just retooling someone elses work…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Of course it is not just human beings that can be haunted online… There are a number of companies that are finding out that a few negative posts in the top page of a Google search can decimate a revenue stream.  As people increasingly reach out to the Internet Crowd for input and research, your past and present behavior will have more of an impact on whatever you are trying to accomplish.  Note that this does not always mean a negative outcome… There are also examples of positive comments being the trigger for new business or a new opportunity. The bottom line is that the world is becoming a lot more transparent and that is going to radically change certain aspects of our lives.  It also must force us to evaluate the impacts of moving from a world where privacy is the norm, to a world where transparency is forced on us in some cases.

Up until this point, it has been pretty easy to present only the information we want someone to know about us, or our organizations.  We valued privacy personally and corporately.  The problem with this is the dichotomy that people with nothing to hide normally do not worry so much about privacy, and people with lots of things to hide crave privacy.  Companies are the same of course – successful and well-run companies are glad to publish results and have audits.  Companies that bend the rules want to control what anyone can see about them (e.g. Enron, Worldcom.)  When audience members ask me what my feelings are about privacy and how much it is now invaded, I often think to myself that I am not concerned about it because I have nothing to hide.  Outside of not wanting people to know when I am away from the house, I really don’t care if the public know anything else about me.  Maybe I am just boring.  Then I have to resist the urge to ask the questioner what it is they feel they need to hide?  The truth for me is I am fine with transparency for myself, and every entity around me – it makes life easier to navigate because I don’t have to learn what was kept secret from me the hard way.

Regardless how you feel, transparency is going to be forced on us.  Part of the reason for this is that privacy and lack of information about people, service providers, companies, and politicians has proven to be dangerous.  In order to make informed decisions, we need data.  The Internet gives us a very powerful tool to publish information publically, and for the crowd to memorialize our experiences with people, services and products and this forces providers/vendors/retailers to behave.  The same holds true for people.  We are becoming less willing to trust a prospective employee, a new person in our personal life, or a new potential business partner without first knowing much more about their background from the people they have come in contact with.  And that does not mean checking on the few rigged references they have provided in the past.

But…. We cannot have people killing themselves because their private information is being published to 1.8 billion people on the Web.  So where will the new line be drawn?  What should be published so that we have transparency, and what should remain personal?  If we leave it up to personal choice then we are back into a situation where the devious will simply hide in the weeds and try to be invisible online.  The reality is we must create new social mores and boundaries for what goes online and what does not.  This will be a process that no government can legislate so we the people better start figuring out what is acceptable because we are the only ones that can solve this riddle…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

If you are still with me, let’s talk about TechCrunch selling to AOL. I have to admit, I am a bit shocked to see this happen. I am surprised that he would sell his company at all, and really surprised he sold it to AOL. I am not optimistic that we will ever hear the true motivation behind this sale, so just to speculate, I have a few questions that I would love to have the answers to…

Did he do it for the money? Putting myself in his shoes, I have to admit that $30million is a lot of money. Regardless of the cash flow he was making in advertising dollars or the profits from his various shows, getting a one-time cashier check for that kind of dough is compelling. I could see how he might look at that opportunity as a once in a lifetime way to cash out and never have to worry about money again. If he came out and admitted that he was selling out for the money and it was too good to pass up, even though he did not like the buyer, I would have to give him props for building a valuable property and exiting. I am betting that this was the main reason for the sale.

Did he do it for the backing of a bigger company? Was his motivation to line up a much larger inventory of resources that he could tap to grow his brand and empire? If he believes that AOL will survive its total makeover (still in doubt) then this is a reasonable move to make. The only issue I have is that there are much better companies he could have sold to in order to gather more resources. He could have gone with an old media company, or one of the technology giants. Shoot, it would have even made more sense to sell to Yahoo! I just find it hard to believe that this was a big reason to sell.

Did he do it because he believes AOL will succeed in their turn around? It is possible that Arrington is so in the know and visionary that he sees a future where AOL will once again be a market leader and he wanted to be part of this. This is a stretch for me because AOL has been slipping steadily south in revenues for years. They may be able to do a turn around, but there is lots of risk there and I cannot believe that Arrington would bet all the work he has done on AOL’s future. Either he has some kind of separation agreement that allows him to jettison from AOL if things do not work out, or we are back to question one – he did it for the money and does not care whether they make it or not.

Does it really matter why he did it? This might be the most important question. Arrington built a valuable and meaningful company from scratch in a very short amount of time. He has been a very important and influential voice in the tech industry for the last few years. He has handled himself ethically in the public eye, and has been a great example of a world-class blogger. In addition, he has been a tremendous friend to technology startups and has gone to great lengths to help them out without abusing them or extorting funds from the help he gives them with exposure. The online banking company that I started (now Alkami Technology) was chosen for the Techcrunch 50 a couple of years ago so we got to see first hand what he does for young companies. In view of these final thoughts, it really does not matter why he has chosen to sell Techcrunch. He deserves the winning lottery ticket he worked for and I am happy for him…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I recall clearly back in the late 90’s when ecommerce blossomed and we got a good glimpse into the many ways that selling goods and services over the Web could change the game. Mega sites like eBay and Amazon were young then, but it was clear that there were dynamics at play that we had never seen before. People from all over the world could find a supplier in a few seconds of searching, and place an order. Marketplaces like eBay and Craiglist flourished by providing an ability for users to self administrate their own sales and purchases. Any product supplier could offer access to their catalog to anyone right in their homes so that purchases could be made from the living room, and goods would be shipped in quickly. In short, consumers had a new way to shop, purchase, and interact with suppliers and they liked it. In a very short time, billions of dollars in transactions shifted to different suppliers, and a new sales medium.

The impact of this economic evolution was that consumers were given options that made life a little easier in some cases, and might save them money in others. In addition, they could find goods and services that might have been harder to track down pre 1995. Suppliers found a new way to reach markets that had evaded them in the past, and some traditional companies found a sales channel that drove strong ancillary revenue gains. We even got brand new companies that came into being that without Web 1.0, would have not existed, for example, Zappos. So money shifted between organizations, and consumer’s lives got a bit easier and more productive. I am not sure the ecommerce in and of itself actually created new revenues. Maybe people can find new things to spend money on through the Web, but they probably would have spent that money anyway on something – so little new revenue was really formed.

Web 2.0 began to blossom around 2007 and now is being leveraged by a large percentage of general Web users, B2C and B2B organizations. The terminology of Social media/networking/technology replaced the descriptor Web 2.0 over the last 12 months and in some ways, this is a shame because when we use the word social to describe this collection of new technologies, people get the impression that we are still referring to finding all your high school friends online. If you follow my writings, you know I specialize in enterprise technology so I only care about how organizations put social tools to work. In order to measure the value of social tech, I have to take into consideration the personal and the business usage of these tools. On that front, the impact is vast and deep. While ecommerce has reordered some of the players in the economy, and have given us a few new dynamics as to how commerce gets done, social tech is reordering society in general.

Consider this… What is the impact of people connecting to thousands of “friends” instead of just a couple of hundred. How do all of these new contacts influence each other? What does it mean that a large amount of couples are meeting each other online? How is citizen journalism and real time news changing what we know about the world? How is changing things that we are all building online reputations – whether we like it or not, and anyone will be able to search on our name and find our what many other people think about us? How is crowdsourcing going to change the economics globally for getting knowledge and creative work done? What does it mean that social tools give us the ability to build massive rivers of information into our minds so that we can add knowledge at astounding rates when compared with years past?

Add up the answers to these questions and it becomes quite clear that social technologies will have a much more far reaching impact on us than will ecommerce. In fact, I would say on the scale of ten to one if I had to guess. Part of the reason I have written this all down is because I like to memorialize predictions so that I can look back in ten years and see if I am a genius, or a blow hard. I would be curious to see what you think about my opinions expressed here. And, what is your take on Web 3.0? What do you think it will be and will it be even more influential on the human race than Web 2.0? Is that possible?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

The concept of crowd accelerated innovation works when any new idea inspires ones mind in a new direction, and then goes ballistic when it is more than one idea in a field that joins the idea recipe in quick succession. This blog is an example because I have been studying the field of crowd dynamics for a couple of years, and in quick succession I saw Chris’s TED video, and read a few articles about the wisdom of crowds, and the various outstanding results people are getting with crowsdsourcing work. I have been inspired! I have been inspired to create my own branded concepts around crowd dynamics. Possibly by reading these, you will be led to further innovations and we can be a good case study for Mr. Anderson. Hey, that reminds me a bit of a Matrix scene… Don’t worry if you don’t get that reference.

Crowd Inspired Mash-ups – A variation of the crowd accelerated innovation concept could be the Crowd Inspired Mashup. In this case, we throw a challenge out to the crowd and the solution could form in real time. Groups of people could add their own unique pieces to the solutions, or project and it literally forms a mash-up of ideas or results. This could be a story, a song, a business plan, or large problem. The core dynamic is that the crowd can add, subtract, or enhance pieces of the solution as opposed to producing the solution on their own. I suppose this is what I am trying to do with the Crowdscribed publishing label we are going to start to do crowdsourced books. This is also not a new concept in that many discussion groups play the role of a small crowd that mashes up ideas until they reach a conclusion. I just see if being able to be done on a much larger scale soon.

Crowd Driven Productivity – As companies move more towards using virtual teams and contractors to perform labor, the concept of Crowd Driven Productivity could become all the rage. Imagine if you will that organizations make the decision to outsource many functions that are not core to the business, but are still needed. Oh, we are already doing that… So then imagine that the outsource agent is the crowd itself. In other words, a company creates a portal that houses a collection of tasks that need to be done that day with bounties attached to each. Every day, a new list of tasks gets posted. On the other side of that there is a crowd of workers that monitors many organizations work portals looking for tasks that they are suited to perform. When they get a hit for their talents, they accept the project and do the work. The company only pays when the work is done to their satisfaction. The law of supply and demand would work here in spades because the more you offer in bounties, the more chance you will have that the work gets done fast and with high quality. The company always has a choice as to the risk level they want to take on performance versus the cost to get the work done. In some ways, this is what Amazon in doing today with their Mturk.com site.

Crowd Mandated Penalties – In the world of online reputation, it is becoming clear that the crowd will have the power to decimate the sales pipeline of company if they want to post enough negative ratings or comments. With the trend growing of rating sites for every profession and industry, it is clear that people will one day soon check online before hiring ANY type of service, professional or vendor (check out angieslist.com if you have not seen it yet.) Think about what systems like Yelp are already doing for restaurants. I have been flummoxed over the last few months as to how large organizations have had the ability to provide horrible customer service and still exist. I have also wondered how poor performing doctors and lawyers continue to find patients and clients. The reason is that there are always more people that have no idea what they are going to be getting from these providers. This will end soon, and it will end because the generation coming up will be so trained to check the Web to see what others think of any service provider, and when they see bad reviews, they will not do business with them. That simple. In other words, we will see Crowd Mandated Penalties for service providers that suck and abuse people – as it should be!! This is called performance transparency and the ultimate outcome will be better service for all and I love that thought.

The Wisdom of Crowds – This is not one of my concepts of course, but this blog is about crowd dynamics so I have to at least mention that we have seen that in many cases the crowd has collective wisdom and this can be tapped in order to get quick answers to questions. This only works when the crowd has access to the facts, or to the underlying knowledge somewhere alone the line. I have a strong suspicion that sites like Yahoo Answers was just the tip of the iceberg in this concept. Instead of asking the crowd to answer one question at a time for one person at a time, it will be interesting when we have the ability to ask a very large crowd pretty complex questions and get powerful and quick answers. For example, what if we could ask the crowd the following list of questions and let the crowd form answers through posting, editing, modifying, and reposting:

• How can we rebuild the education system in the U.S?
• How can we stop terrorism?
• How can the U.S. provide healthcare in a fair way?
• What are the best techniques for raising kids in a digital age?

Would there be a bloody battle of competing ideas to solve these tough issues? Sure. Would people passionately defend their beliefs? Yes. Could we actually get to better solutions than what our military, government, and the lobbyists might get to? Uh, I think so. The older I get, the more I marvel at what goes on with the politics behind improving questions like the ones above. The crowd has a unique perspective and ability to address questions like this without the same level of unhealthy influences that exist with policy makers today.

As mentioned earlier, this line of thinking is an example of crowd accelerated innovation because I am standing on the shoulders of other people who have published the foundation of ideas that started me down this road. Maybe the bottom line is that we have always stood on the shoulders of others as we learned from the people that documented knowledge for us to digest later. What is clearly different now is that we can digest information and new ideas at the speed of the Web and at our own tolerance level for shoving new content into our brains. This will indeed change the speed that humanity progresses, and that is a big deal!!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com