The Emerging Battle in Meta-Data

One of the problems with consulting is that I often have to miss really interesting conferences in order to be responsive to my clients. Of course, my clients are pretty interesting as well – my problem really is that I want to be in too many places at once – which is probably a good segue to the topic at hand.

If you work in the world of ideas or information, one of the biggest challenges is how to organize those ideas or information.  Ideas and information rarely fit into neat categories, yet we have long favored trees and branches as a way to classify and organize ideas and information.

David Weinberger, one of my favorite thinkers on the new worlds we are creating, has written a fascinating essay in the February 2005 issue of Release 1.0 on alternative ways of organizing ideas or information – it’s called "Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves".  Unfortunately, the full essay is only available here for sale, but David was able to get permission to produce an excerpt of the essay here for free.

In this essay, David focuses on the notion of tagging as a particularly promising alternative way of organizing ideas or information. A variety of interesting new businesses are emerging on the Web using tags as a key way to add value for users – see, for example del.icio.us for organizing bookmarks and Flickr for organizing photos. David is especially interested in the opportunity to create self-organizing taxonomies through tagging – these new forms of taxonomies have been described as folksonomies. Although tagging can have enormous individual value, the real power and opportunity may come from the use of tagging in a social context to help each other find ideas or information more easily.

Which brings me back to missing conferences – specifically, O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference in San Diego last week where Clay Shirky, another favorite of mine, spoke on "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata" and David led an informal evening discussion on "From Trees to Tags".

I am particularly interested in this topic both because of the interplay between the individual and the social and because I see it as one more manifestation of a much broader trend playing out in multiple domains – the shift from push to pull mechanisms in organizing and mobilizing resources.  Traditional taxonomies are designed in advance by experts and work best when there is a lot of material that is relatively unchanging and that has clearly defined edges.  The material itself may be pulled by the user when needed, but the taxonomy is pushed from above.  Tagging operates differently – it enables an emergent taxonomy, developed by users themselves at the time of use, it tolerates enormous ambiguity, accommodates rapid change and provides much more flexible ways of sorting on demand.  In other words, users can "pull" taxonomies – create and modify them on the fly to serve their unique needs, but enhanced and amplified by the efforts of others.

As tagging moves from a purely individual way of organizing meta-data to a more social phenomenon, power becomes a more central issue.  Traditional taxonomies like trees clearly embody power relationships, as eloquently discussed in Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Starr’s book, Sorting Things Out. Matt Locke has a great post extending this notion of power relationships in traditional taxonomies to emergent folksonomies. I have an intuition that the key to scaling folksonomies and making them useful to a much broader set of users will hinge upon sorting through these power issues. I also have an intuition that there are some business opportunities here in providing mediation services . . .

Fortunately, I am in Scottsdale, Arizona and looking forward to PC Forum, where I will hopefully have a chance to pursue some of these topics with David Weinberger.  At least this is one conference I get to go to . . . since I am speaking there, I have a good reason to hold off client meetings until after the conference is over.

Power of (Mis)Perception

At a conference yesterday, I finally got to watch a really great video that I had often heard about but never seen. I was pleased to find out that it is actually on the Web (isn’t everything?).  Go here and click on the "View the ‘basketball’ video" link – it may take time to load – it’s about 7.5 MB – but, trust me, it’s worth the wait, even if you’re not that much into basketball.  Be sure to follow the instructions in terms of what to look out for in the video.

Once you’ve looked at the video, then go here and look at some of the resources to learn some of the lessons of the video.  It’s a great example of "the more we focus, the less we see".  Unfortunately, I can’t say too much more about it or else I will spoil the experience.

Outsourcing Innovation

The cover story of the current issue of Business Week is on "Outsourcing Innovation".  It’s generally a pretty good report on the rise of Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) in Asia and the growing trend to outsource product innovation.  The stats on the role of ODMs are impressive – they supply the designs for 65% of the world’s notebook PC’s, 70% of the world’s PDA’s, 65% of the MP3 players, 30% of digital cameras and 20% of mobile phones.  And that’s just the beginning – their growth rates show little sign of slowing down and they are expanding their activities into other product categories like networking equipment. So much for the notion that offshoring just involves low skill manufacturing operations.

But the article is frustrating on a number of levels.  First, it reflects the Western bias by talking about innovation only in terms of product innovation.  In fact, some of the most impressive achievements of offshoring operations involve process innovations, rather than product innovations. These process innovations often provide a foundation for interesting product innovations. When Western companies outsource product design to ODMs, they are in fact outsourcing the process of product design.  The ODMs configure and manage this product design process in very different ways relative to Western companies.  In many respects,the process innovations are the really interesting story, but largely missing in this article.

Second, the article tends to talk about outsourcing in zero sum terms. That is, if you outsource, you lose that activity.  It misses entirely the positive sum relationships that a few companies are establishing – by outsourcing to highly specialized and aggressive companies, companies can build relationships that help them to get better faster in the activities that they retain while at the same time creating opportunities for their outsourcing partners to get better faster as well. 

Third, the article tends to generalize too much.  For example, it asserts that "ownership of design strikes close to the heart of a corporation’s intrinsic value." Well, maybe.  I have argued in an HBR article on "Unbundling the Corporation" (sorry, it’s only available on the Web for purchase from HBR) that most companies are an unnatural bundle of three very different businesses – customer relationship businesses, infrastructure management businesses and product innovation and commercialization businesses.  Offshoring and outsourcing are manifestations of more fundamental trends that are forcing companies to make strategic choices about what business they are really in.  If you choose to be in product innovation and commercialization, then design is central to your company’s value.  But if you focus on one of the other two businesses, then you will end up shedding design.  The problem is that few companies are making this strategic choice explicitly – it is being made on a de facto basis by incrementally slicing out design activities in the quest for near-term operating savings. That can get you into trouble.

Finally, the article gives very little sense of the trajectory and pace of capability building.  The real story about offshoring is not a snapshot of activity or relative skills at any one point in time.  It is about the extraordinary speed with which offshoring service providers are building capability through rapid incremental product and process innovations.  Look at where many of these ODMs were just three years ago versus today and then listen to them talk about their investments for capability building over the next three years.

Oh, and then there’s the Western arrogance talking about a new division of labor between left brain routine tasks that will get farmed out to offshore locations and right brain "creative" tasks that will stay onshore.  This kind of complacency could get us into real trouble.

PS – the BW article talks about Apple’s iPod as an example of in-house product design. That’s not entirely true – Apple orchestrated a very interesting design process network to mobilize a variety of third party players, most notably PortalPlayer, in designing the guts of the iPod.

Podcast economic models

Doc Searls has a nice posting on the potential economic models for podcasting, challenging us to think beyond the models that worked for traditional media.  My question would be whether technology alone can support this economic model or whether there would be a need for a new form of intermediary to harness this technology and act as an agent on behalf of the customer. Years ago, I described an infomediary business model in Net Worth that becomes much more feasible with the technology that Doc describes.

Relationship Revolution

Jerry Michalski recently did a great service by re-posting a really nice essay called "The Relationship Revolution" by Michael Schrage. It originally appeared in 1997 but  has not been available on the Web for a while. Michael’s essay took head-on the widespread view that digital technologies were driving us into an "Information Age". Instead, it argued persuasively that the real importance of these technologies has been to bring about a "Relationship Revolution". Michael concluded the essay by observing:

Ultimately, the issue boils down to value: How do organizations, markets and individuals create and manage value? The fact is, people — not information — create the value that matters, and information is merely one of many ingredients that people use. Consequently, the real future of digital technologies and networks rests with the architects of great relationships — not just the architects for timely bits and bytes of information. People who believe in the hype of the Information Age are — pun intended — badly misinformed.

It frustrates me that, eight years later, many still need to learn this vital lesson.

Long Tails and Software

One of the most powerful memes making the rounds these days is "The Long Tail", popularized by Chris Anderson at Wired. As Chris describes it, the Long Tail refers to a new economic model enabled by the Internet that makes it profitable to connect niche content with consumers seeking that content. Chris is writing a book on this topic and he’s sharing his ongoing thinking on this topic at his excellent blog The Long Tail.

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite, has picked up on the theme of the Long Tail and applied it to software in his own blog. Joe’s got more than a passing interest in this – his new company Jotspot is developing a wiki-like platform to address the Long Tail opportunity in software. (A good review of Jotspot by a beta tester is available here) It’s an interesting notion, although I think his focus on business processes is missing the boat.  The real opportunity for Jotspot and other software platforms like it is to address exception-handling, those events that business process rules and procedures can’t support. To do this effectively, Jotspot will need to become an open platform supporting a broad range of third party software, an interesting evolution of the wiki concept. JSB and I talk about the significant business impact of exception-handling in our new book, The Only Sustainable Edge.

Btw, Joe uses the Long Tail to call into question the 80/20 rule in business, something Chris tends to do as well.  I am more skeptical about this, but I’ll have to save it for another posting.

Transitions – II

The news reports are focusing on another transition – the designation of Howard Stringer, the Welsh-born American executive in charge of Sony’s U.S. operations, as the new chief exec of Sony. Gary McWilliams had a particularly good front page story on this in the March 10th issue of the Wall Street Journal (available online to subscribers only).  Some key points:

• American companies are using the transition to digital technology in consumer electronics to reassert position in this industry, especially relative to the Japanese
• One key weapon in this transition is the greater willingness of US companies to outsource significant business operations relative to Japanese companies

The article does a great job of discussing broader trends in the consumer electronics industry but then doesn’t circle back to the appointment of Stringer. Why Stringer?  He’s a content guy but, as the article suggests, content is not where Sony’s problems are – they need to fix the device business and, in the process, break some deeply embedded mindsets and practices.  Two possible answers. One, Sony is going to move further into content to escape the intensifying competition in devices.  Or, more likely, two, Stringer is going to have some real challenges in moving beyond his comfort zone to turn Sony’s device business upside down. There’s a third scenario – Sony tries to fix its ailing device business by coupling devices with distinctive content. Let’s hope this is not the path Stringer chooses to follow – it’s a losing strategy. As they say, film at 11 . . .

For further perspective on the battle being played out, check out two essays in a book published in 2000 – International Production Networks in Asia by Michael Borrus, Dieter Ernst and Stephan Haggard:

• The intro essay – "Cross-Border Production Networks and the Industrial Integration of the Asia-Pacific region"
• The essay by Michael Borrus, "The Resurgence of US Electronics: Asian Production Networks and the Rise of Wintelism"

For a really current perspective, of course, you’ll have to check out The Only Sustainable Edge, the new book that John Seely Brown (hereinafter forever referred to as JSB) will be publishing in a few short weeks – pre-orders are being taken at Amazon – it not only discusses the challenges that companies like Sony are facing, but outlines the approach they will need to take to rebuild competitive advantage.

Transitions – I

This first posting at Edge Perspectives represents a transition for me.  After more than two years of posting items on my web site, I am finally taking the plunge into true blogdom.  My web site postings were much too long and too infrequent to be true to blog culture.  They also didn’t leverage blog technology like RSS. I’ll continue to use my web site for longer postings, but I am looking forward to the opportunity to do more frequent postings to share interesting news items, discussions and thoughts. My challenge will be to keep things short and resist my natural tendency to dive too deeply into the topic at hand.