March 2008

Is it just me, or does glancing down the list of session titles for Supernova 2008 give you the sense that the interconnectivity and interconnectedness of the Web is weaving its way inexorably into the sociology and psychology of daily life (except where people cannot connect or cannot afford to).

The red asterisks denote sessions where I’ve previously opined on the subject and which I see as related to elements, dynamics or outcomes of an organizing principle I call  wirearchy.

I still believe strongly and clearly that there will come to be a basic understanding of the patterns of human life when humans get used to the flows of human communication … detritus, information, banalities, profound and enduring connections, the whole ball of wax … enabled by and enacted on the Web.  There will be an "archy" (yes, that’s a double entendre) grown out of living and working in an environment of wired interconnectedness.  That "archy" will come from the decisions that we make, as individuals and societies, about how we can use such a medium … to grow awareness and consciousness, to distract, delude, indulge and manipulate human attention, to commercialize interaction where value can be offered and obtained.  Along the way all those potential effects will be redefined substantially, I think. 

That’s why organizations like the EFF, the Creative Commons, the Sunlight Foundation, SavetheInternet.org and many others came into being and have such an important role.  That they exist is a clear signal as to the scope and potential and eventual impact of living in, on and of a an electronic web of image, text and audio communications.

Anyway, I’d love to go to Supernova 2008.

If anyone wants to hire me or sponsor me to go, I’m glad to talk about it.

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Supernova 2008 - because technology is everybody’s business

Opening Plenary: The Theory and Practice of Networks  *

Networks are everywhere. Yet, how much do we really understand about how they operate? From the infrastructure networks of broadband providers to the social networks of connected individuals, every aspect of today’s Internet economy is built on network-based behavior. While technology companies have been using networks, researchers have been studying their fundamental properties. This session will link their discoveries with business and social manifestations of network-based activity.

Does Broadband Have a Future?

Will broadband networks be able to keep up with the growth and development of the Internet? Network operators seek more managed networks to cope with traffic growth and economic pressures, while others see discriminatory network management itself as the threat to innovation. Are there any possible developments in broadband or spectrum policy that might end this impasse? How will the US Presidential election affect broadband, and what can the US learn from the rest of the world?

Networked Business Models   *

Traditional business strategy emphasizes scarcity and central control. The Network Age is all about abundance and distributed activity at the edges. Truly networked business models take advantage of openness and collective action to redefine markets. This session will challenge basic assumptions about strategy, and explore the opportunities for massive new value creation in the Network Age.

The Internet is People: What We Know, and What it Means   *

So much of today’s Internet economy revolves around users: the content they create, the communities they form, and the transactions they choose. Yet, few businesses study how people actually interact with the Net and online collaborative tools. This session will use case studies and research to illuminate user behavior on today’s participatory Internet.

The Internet’s Constitutional Moments

Moderated by the renowned Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

The Meaning of Openness   *

All major Internet players claim their platforms are open… yet, they take that to mean different things. In a world where users, content and data flow across many physical and virtual locations, and where monolithic applications are being atomized into widgets, Web services and syndicated information, the openness of interfaces is of crucial importance. What are the real dividing lines between true openness and proprietary lock-in, and which approaches produce the greatest value for all participants (including users)?

All the World’s a Game: What the Web can Learn from Virtual Worlds   *

To glimpse the future of the Internet, look no further than the burgeoning universe of massively multiplayer online games. In these virtual worlds, tens of millions of people worldwide spend countless hours, generate billions of dollars of economic activity, and build extraordinarily sophisticated distributed systems. What can they teach us about how to build interactive Web applications, facilitate online transactions, and enable new forms of business collaboration?

Liquid Conversations and Distributed Content   *

What are the barriers – technology, standards, business models, intellectual property rules, and more – to having content distributed across the Web and radically personalized, not tied to individual Web sites? And, what are the new intermediaries that will arise as such liquid conversations develop?

Harnessing Collective Intelligence   *

How can recommendations and user feedback promote transactions and better information flow? And, how do social feedback loops change the nature of the user experience? Truly harnessing collective intelligence involves complex network effects and many considerations about top-down direction vs. bottom-up emergence. The potential is enormous, but so are the risks in ceding control to users.

Going Green: Toward a More Sustainable Technology Industry

Cyberspace may be virtual, but the infrastructure that supports it is physical. The inconvenient truth is that all those servers and networks and offices and households consume huge amounts of energy, and generate huge amounts of waste. Fortunately, the industry is waking up to the challenge. This session will examine how the tech sector can become a solution rather than a problem for environmental sustainability.

Who is Driving Marketing Innovation?

Different sectors of the marketing industry continue to debate the drivers of “the new marketing” in The Network Age, using terminology such as transparency, engagement, relationship economy, conversational marketing, new metrics, etc. But, the industry continues to stall in terms of making significant strides in adopting these concepts. The question still remains, “where is the innovation?” We give a voice to the practitioners to discuss their requirements and requests for innovation with key industry pundits.

Monetization for Today’s Internet… and Tomorrow’s   *

It’s a big Internet out there. There are significant opportunities to build businesses around vertical markets, but only by understanding how to attract users and generate revenue. Those have always been key challenges for Internet-based services, but how do things change as the Net becomes more open, more participatory, and more complex? Will the largest portals and social networks absorb most of the value, or will more-focused players be able to thrive?

Privacy, Reputation, and Security in the Network Age  *

Are we entering an era where individuals gain new control over their public personas, and powerful means to leverage reputations? Or, will we be forced to abandon any hope of protecting our privacy and trusting what we encounter online? When is more information the solution… and when is it the problem?

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I went skiing yesterday and had a lovely day frolicking in the snow.

Here, for posterity, is a brief clip of me skiing down a slope on one of my favourite trails at Whistler Mountain, Ridge Run.

The clip was captured by my brother Dana.

I got up early this morning (5h15 am) so that I could go and frolic in that nice white fluffy powdery stuff called snow, falling down the steep sides of cliffs in a barely-controlled fashion.

I went for a walk today.

I’m not sure all that many people realize just how fragile the financial system ostensibly led by the United States is looking these days (warning and caveat … I am NOT a professional economist).

But the way I see it, this news of default (NY Times excerpt below) by Carlyle Capital , which by and large invests in government-backed mortgages, means that the lender of last reserve has quite a few faulty and relatively worthless assets upon which to rely / fall back when the shit really hits the fan (which IMO should have happened by now).

By "lender of last reserve" I basically mean the government of the USA, which is essentially the proprietor of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (there are important distinctions - the companies are owned by shareholders but operate under a government charter for the purpose of providing confidence and stability to credit markets).  When mortgages held by these agencies cannot back the leverage of large, high-profile funds like Carlyle Capital it means, I think, that more trouble is on the way.

It will also be criminal if eventually the government(s) act to bail out such funds or the wealthy reprobates which manage them.

UPDATE:  The USA Federal Reserve just lent $200 billion of taxpayers’ money to help prop up Bear Sterns.  Which bank will come close to failing next ?  Added bonus - Eliot Spitzer has been sidelined, just in the nick of time.

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Carlyle Fund Expects Assets Will Be Seized

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Carlyle Capital, an Amsterdam-listed affiliate of the Carlyle Group, the private equity fund, said it “has not been able to reach a mutually beneficial agreement to stabilize its financing.” Its shares fell more than 70 percent Thursday. They have fallen more than 90 percent since the company’s problems became public last week.

“It has become apparent to the company that the basis on which lenders are willing to provide financing against the company’s collateral has changed so substantially that a successful refinancing is not possible,” Carlyle Capital said in a statement late Wednesday.

Carlyle Capital invested in triple-A rated mortgage debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and like other investment vehicles it had leveraged its capital aggressively, borrowing $31 for every dollar of equity. As of February, it had $21.7 billion worth of assets in its investment portfolio. But as those investments lost value, creditors demanded that it put up more and more money in margin calls. A $150 million line of credit from its parent, the Carlyle Group, was not enough to keep it out of trouble as lenders demanded more collateral to back up their loans.

By Wednesday, it had already defaulted on about $16.6 billion of debt and some lenders started to liquidate assets. Talks to halt liquidations and revive the fund’s finances failed Wednesday night after the value of collateral declined further, prompting additional margin calls worth $97.5 million.

The announcement sent shudders through Asian and European markets as investors fear more funds, even those investing in highly-rated assets, could run into trouble. Banks are calling in loans or ask for more collateral as the value of assets backed by mortgage-securities continue to decline.

The collapse of talks between Carlyle Capital and some of its lenders, which include Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, shows that a plan earlier this week by the Federal Reserve to back some assets like private mortgage bonds has not stopped banks from demanding more collateral.

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In a recent keynote at SXSW, Charlene Li of Forrester Research predicted that social networking platforms will be "like air" … "They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."

More specifically, she broke down the use of such platforms into four components of utility and impact:

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• Profiles - universal identities
• Relationships - a single social graph
• Activities - a social context for activities
• Business Models - social influence as a key definer of marketing value

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Here’s an item from the NY Times about recent speculation that Yahoo may join OpenSocial, the Google-led social networking alliance that aims to bring significant degrees of openness to social networking platforms, thus (eventually) stimulating and enhancing ubiquity and pervasive use.

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Yahoo May Join Google-Led Social Networking Alliance

By Miguel Helft

Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial, a Google-led alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites, according to a person with direct knowledge of Yahoo’s plans.

Yahoo’s backing, which could be announced as early as this week, would bring a large base of users to the OpenSocial alliance, which is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers. The alliance, which was announced in the fall, already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.

Yahoo’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial,” said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research.

When asked about Yahoo’s OpenSocial plans, a company spokeswoman said: “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”

Yahoo has said it wants to speed up efforts to open its site to outside developers. Although it is not a social network, Yahoo could benefit from third party “social” applications that allow users to share, say, their favorite photos, music or movies with their friends.

Read the rest of the article here …

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I think that much of what is written here at the FASTForward blog by my colleagues also supports the distinct probability that the foundation is being created for the step-by-step (depending upon take-up and implementation) of collaboration and social computing platforms, tools and services which will redefine the dynamics of knowledge work and tie, tightly, into Charlene Li’s four key components of social networking platforms.

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I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.

Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread.

For those of you that thought I might have given up on the "back-into-the-pool-to-get-fit obsession" … nope !

I was dreadfully sick for about ten days.

Charlene Li just posted a "tweet" pointing those who follow her "tweeting" to a new post about "The Future of Social Networks" she just posted in the wake of her keynote at the Graphing Social Patterns West conference.

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The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air

Charlene Li

On Monday, I gave the kick off speech for the Graphing Social Patterns West conference on the topic, “The Future Of Social Networks” (slides are available on SlideShare, summaries available on News.com, ReadWriteWeb, and allfacebook.) Note that this is still ongoing research, so I welcome your comments.

I set my time frame for the long term – five, even ten years out. That’s because unless we know where we want to end up, how could we ever craft a strategy to get there? For inspiration, I thought about my grade-school kids, who in ten years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to “be social”.

Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.

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I have a lot of respect for Charlene Li … she was early as  a mainstream IT analyst to get into the issues of blogs, wikis, Enterprise 2.0, social networking and such … but really, isn’t what she’s just written above more than obvious ?

And yes, I do understand that for many people the Internetz is still browsing a few news sites and using email, but it’s also clear that "they" aren’t sending out construction crews to dismantle the Internet any time soon.  It’s way past time to acknowledge that there are vibrant and increasingly robust social ecosystems using the Web for virtually any area of human activity.

But I would say that, wouldn’t I ?  I believe that we will be living and working in "wirearchies", after all.

Come on, Charlene .. go deeper … you know you can. 

Actually, to be fair, she does in the rest of the post, and I would push back on the first commenter who takes exception to Charlene’s Point #4:

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Charlene:

4) A business model where social influence defines marketing value. Today’s advertising models don’t work on social networking sites – that’s because simply targeting better on profile or social graph details is still the same old media model of CPM and CPC pricing. What’s missing is marketing value based on how valuable I am in the context of my influence.

Commenter:

Everything you said seems more than reasonable, up until point 4.

I grant that i’m an outsider to marketing, but all this "influencer" talk (in every single blog talking about "social network/media") seems to me more related with some form of self-celebrity that is present in the blog-sphere. This everyday reality for bloggers is so absorbing that resembles hollywood stars and their self-centered lifes (absurd at times).

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The commenter makes a good point, a point which underscores how much drooling and slavering there is over how this medium is to be used all the time to manipulate, influence, make money, and so on .. but it is also the case that most of human communications(9at least in many parts of North America) is about influencing, manipulating, gaining advantage, making a point, selling something. 

This is the culture we live in today (I did not say I like it) and Charlene’s point #4 stands on its own, I think, with regards to social networking platforms and social networks being in daily use for a wide range of human purposeful activity known as business.

In case I might be accused of being snarky or arrogant, it’s a challenge (going deeper) I would issue to myself as often as not as well.  Yes, I have been known to be trite.

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Every week or two it seems that another example of ways that software, network dynamics, bidding and negotiation between sets of skills, collaboration, cooperation and similar activities are leading to an emerging synthesis of social networking, brainstorming, collaborative work, predictive markets, and peer-to-peer negotiations (see Michel Bauwen’s work on Peer-to-Peer Economies)

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"Knowledge workers own the means of production in a Knowledge Economy" - P. Drucker

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Kluster is a platform for crowdsourcing and then organizing and putting to use skills, energy and availability on projects and initiatives.

Regular readers of this blog (of which there are only a few) may remember that I have from time to time blogged about my long-held belief that the "gaming idiom" will increasingly find its way into workplace social computing applications.  I suspect that this is reasonably closely related to what Stowe Boyd terms "flow" as it relates to Enterprise 2.0 dynamics and the applications that will be used to work "in flow".

If I’ve got Stowe’s take more or less right, and if there’s something to my belief that gaming principles will figure more prominently in future workplace applications, then we’re in good company, namely Ray Kurzweil.

And I note here that David Weinberger recently noted during his FASTForward08 conference keynote speech that he thinks "Ray Kurzweil is insane" (seriously), with respect to Kurzweil’s strongly-asserted belief that humans will one day upload their brains and consciousness into computers. 

I agree with David … I think this notion is nuts, and that there are some fundamental aspects and elements to human consciousness that will forever evade computing capabilities (and no, I am not expert enough to articulate why I believe that or point to any science or deep philosophical constructs that will support clearly my beliefs).

However … aside from the incipient insanity, I think Ray Kurzweil is a very smart guy, and I am more than willing to consider his points about gaming and how the idiom (I can never think of a better word) will penetrate a wide range of human activities.

Via the Toronto Globe & Mail

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Kurzweil sees a future in games

BLAINE KYLLO

Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.

The 60-year-old futurist, best knows for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.

“Games are a harbinger of everything,” said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. “In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.”

Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.

Mr. Kurzweil is what you’d call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest – he has a bachelor of science from MIT – he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.

Through his numerous companies he’s invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He’s the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990’s The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world’s chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.

Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.

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In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the ‘70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore’s Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.

But what does all this have to do with video games?

Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we’ll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we’ll have the software to do the same.

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But we’re already seeing changes in the gaming industry, and Kurzweil suggested that the rate of change is such that anyone working on a project that will take more than six months needs to be aware of this fact. “Pong was crude,” he said. “That was 1972.”

By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. “They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,” he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects “full-immersion” games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don’t forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We’ll have to “enforce reality,” maybe “by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.”

A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called “an intimate merger.” Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having “complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.”

“A kid can become a virtual Ben Franklin,” said Kurzweil. “Everyone will be able to expand their intelligence by virtue of using such devices.”

In a backstage interview after his presentation, Kurzweil said he thinks the descriptor “video games” is limiting “because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life … But it’s been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity.”

“Play is how we principally learn and create,” said Kurzweil.

The continuing growth of computers is already leading to a democratization of gaming, he said. The price of gaming systems means that more people have them and they are more powerful than the supercomputers of the sixties. “The tools of production are also being democratized,” he said. Creating a new game that can be played by multiple players around the world can be done with a $1,000 laptop.

Massively multiplayer experiences, in games or in virtual worlds, harness the ability to interact. The “dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication” harnessed by the gaming industry will “create new, emerging forms of intelligence.”

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Tags: Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity, Stowe Boyd, flow, FASTForward08, video games, gaming, future work

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I’m pleased to be able to announce that the ARK Group (UK) has now published the book I worked on for many, many hours during the months of August - November 2007.

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Making Knowledge Work

Making Knowledge Work is a unique, uncompromising examination of the practical considerations that influence the success of knowledge management (KM) in a corporate context.

From exploring the various definitions of KM to understanding the arguments against KM programmes, Making Knowledge Work equips you with the knowledge and theories to effectively champion and implement KM at your organisation.

Whether you are introducing KM to your organisation for the first time, or understand the huge potential and growing importance of Enterprise 2.0 to your existing KM strategies, this report is essential research in helping you realise the massive benefits while avoiding expensive pitfalls.

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My statement about working on it for the period August - November 2007 is not really accurate … I’d argue that I’ve been working on for at least the last five years (if not longer), as I have been deepening my levels of understanding of knowledge management (KM), Web 2.0 (the use of wikis, blogs, RSS, widgets and other elements of the social software ecosystem), and making observations on the ongoing need for changes to work design and organizational structures.

At any rate … the book is now available.

(cross-posted a couple of days ago at Intuit’s TheAppGap blog)

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Much of what the average knowledge worker of today sees as "work"  is through the daily communion with the computer screen on her or his desk. They access the software with which they work and communicate with other employees through portals, on the company’s infrastructure of applications, or (increasingly) via the Web.

As we have learned more about how to integrate all growing software-based capability into our daily work lives, we have seen various forms of employee portals, partnership portals, project management portals and, more recently, comprehensive real-time enterprise computing applications take root and grow in many organizations. Organizations’ IT infrastructures, coupled with ongoing growth in the scope and use of smart software, will create a type of integrated nervous system, providing top management and workers with an improvement-and-learning focused feedback loop.

When software connects customers directly to business processes, and employees have "line-of-sight" responsibility for making a clear contribution or directly impacting business results – when most of an organization’s strategy and value proposition is directly coded into its CRM, ERM and B2B applications, will the types of supervision and management we learned in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s continue to be effective? There’s a very real issue here that is helping to create the emerging dynamics – the more that work activities are encoded and embedded into integrated systems, the more the human will and spirit needs to surface, assert itself.  This polarity is, I think, here to stay and is behind much of the ongoing discussion of conversation, collaboration and social computing.

The proliferation of information technology, business process re-engineering and wrenching changes to established business models created by the rapid development of the Internet are exerting significant pressure on long-standing business hierarchies. Top-down, command-and-control management structures and dynamics struggle to maintain effectiveness in the face of free-flowing streams of content-rich information, coming from all directions. The dynamics of how people relate – to work, to markets, to bosses and to each other – are changing. A new organizing principle posited on network dynamics - "wirearchy" - a dynamic flow of power and authority based on connections and conversations, may be emerging as a social dynamic for organized activities in  both business and society.

Wirearchy is an informal but pervasive emerging structure of governance, strategy, decision-making and control based on knowledge, trust, meaning and credibility. Things get done and results are achieved through the interplay of vision, values, connections and conversation. Wirearchy is generated by an open architecture of information, knowledge and focus, enabled by connected and converging technologies.  It suggests a fundamental change in the dynamics of human interaction in – and with – organizations of all sizes, shapes and purposes, and represents an evolution of hierarchy as an organizing principle and dynamic. Wirearchy will not render hierarchy obsolete, nor the need for direction and control; rather, it will render them more necessary. However, it will change the meaning of those terms and how they are used and experienced.

People won’t accept authority easily any more. While old-guard keepers-of-the- keys still cling to authority and power, the older models of how to lead and follow are unravelling. Organization charts are still useful, but only as they become more fluid. Certainly, they appear in a much wider range of shapes than before, and often convey new messages about power, status and control. "Organigraphs," or pictures of the ways organizations flow and operate, are clearly more pertinent, accurate and useful, according to strategy and organizational structure guru Henry Mintzberg.

How do today’s leaders and senior managers respond to these forces? Clues are evident in initiatives emerging in the fields of customer and employee relationship management, organizational development, human resources management and organizational change: The use of techniques such as scenario planning, dialogue, open space, 360 degree feedback, emotional intelligence, coaching and mentoring have all grown significantly over the past several years. Together, these soften the rigidity of outmoded structures, and help people respond and adapt.

Most organizations carry out ongoing initiatives to create, clarify and improve capabilities in each of these emerging areas. Indeed, a large percentage of the global consulting industry is focused on diagnosing, developing and implementing strategies for these goals. Wirearchy is significantly different in that it focuses on the structural and psychosocial dynamics generated by interconnectivity and access to knowledge. It begins not only with what’s happening at the top, but also what’s happening in the roots and branches of an organization. Where hierarchy created focus and meaning through the control of knowledge, wirearchy implies that the control and use of knowledge acknowledges and involves a much wider range of stakeholders..

Yesterday’s success factors involved secrecy and control, size, role clarity, functional specialization and power. Today’s emerging factors are openness, speed, flexibility, integration and innovation. The concept of wirearchy allows readers to develop a strategy for creating, implementing these factors in ways that respond with value to continuously changing conditions. Its core components are:

* a crystal clear vision and values
* a strategically designed and integrated technology infrastructure
* comprehensive, clear and completely open communications
* pertinent objectives and focused measurement
* characteristics of culture that create, support and enable responsiveness, adaptability and fluidity
* leadership that is clear, focused, open, authentic and shared

It will take time and experience in this new era to know what "success" and "effectiveness" mean and look like. In such an era,  where there is literal meaning in the phrase, "everything is connected to everything else," we will have to watch, learn and imagine how to lead and manage in ways that foster continuous developments in the effectiveness of individual workers, small working groups, the organizations with which they work and the societies in which we all live.

Clay Shirky is a well-know Internet / Web expert who has just published a new book titled "Here Comes Everybody".  While it does not focus exclusively on the workplace, it’s a decent bet that the concepts and dynamics Shirky addresses will have major impact on the future of work.  As the forces he describes continue to spread throughout society and grow in impact, this organizing principle – Wirearchy — is likely to impact the design of collaborative software and the architecture of workplaces, business, governments and societies in ways that we have never before encountered in human history.

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