Cognitive Surplus

For all the talk of disruptive technology in the publishing and media worlds, it isn’t easy to be an optimist these days. But it’s hard not to notice that Clay Shirky, one of the digital age’s most original, engaged thinkers, is remarkably sanguine about the prospects of new media-especially for a man so immersed in discussing its problems.

Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

For Shirky, the gin craze of 18^th-century London is an example of what happens when societies undergo abrupt changes, such as the shift from rural agriculture to urban factories. Life becomes a bewildering struggle, and so we self-medicate the struggle away. But Shirky isn’t a historian, and this isn’t a history book. Instead, he’s trying to grapple with our future. As he notes, the second half of the 20th century has been defined by a similarly difficult social transition, as we move into a post-industrialized world characterized by the incessant flow of information.

So what has been our gin? Shirky’s answer is simple, perhaps too simple. He argues that the television sitcom-those comic soap operas that saturated the airwaves for decades-was the alcohol of post-war societies, “absorbing the lion’s share of the free time available to the developed world.”

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration - and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower - will change the way society works.

Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

They’re online, prowling the world wide web. Shirky describes this shift in media consumption as a net “cognitive surplus,” since our brain is no longer mesmerized by the boob tube. Needless to say, he describes this surplus as a wonderful opportunity, a chance to get back some of the productive social interactions that were lost when we all decided to watch TV alone. And when this new pool of free time is combined with the internet-a tool that enables strangers all across the world to connect with each other-the end result is a potentially vast new source of productivity. “The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource,” Shirky writes. Furthermore, the web allows people to “design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.”

In 2000, following “an intuition that the internet was turning social“, Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking - an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to become the web’s primary purpose for billions of people all over the world.

Internet enthusiasts come in two flavors: utopians and populists. The rhetoric of both camps is revolutionary, but the revolutions are different.

Utopians believe that the Internet provides promising new solutions to our most intractable problems. With enough tweets, all global bugs-war, poverty, illiteracy, fascism-can be quashed.

Populists promise no such lofty goals. They see the profound social confusion sown by the Internet as a historic opportunity to snatch power from elites and their institutions and redistribute it more evenly among netizens, the ordinary citizens who have been empowered by the Internet. Like the participatory democrats of earlier eras, the populists want a more direct democracy, and they think that most social institutions, from the traditional media to political organizations, are unnecessary ballast.

Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals’ new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned - and so it came to pass.

* NB: Lets watching PC-TV, the New era From TV to PC

The Evolving CIO

“About 15% of CIOs are working in highly effective enterprises,” says Richard Hunter, a Gartner fellow and vice president. “In 1975 if you were the head of data processing and you had an online transaction processing application, you were doing fine. In 1985 if you had good information management and data warehousing, you were doing fine. In 1995 if you had a global enterprise resource management operation up and running, you were doing fine. In 2005 you needed to be connected to every other enterprise on the planet in a meaningful way. The problem space just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

CIO Priority: Virtual Collaboration

The video conferencing market grew 30% last year as businesses continued to cut travel budgets for meetings. Gartner predicts that by 2012, video conferencing will replace 2.1 million airline seats per year.

Indeed CIOs are actively pursuing strategies to enable virtual collaboration.
Filippo Passerini, uses virtual reality to simulate product launches in supermarkets. Previously the product launches entailed physical mock-ups, and even incremental changes significantly increased costs. Virtual reality streamlines P&G’s product launch process, adding efficiency and velocity.

As I look at the tide washing over global business culture, I am delighted to see the success that virtual collaboration technologies are having at the moment. A full-blown telepresence suite costs $300,000, not something an SME or SOHO business can afford. I see a golden opportunity for those who can bring high-quality interactive rich media collaboration technologies to the SME and SOHO desktops.

CIO Priorities: Accenture

The ‘CIO Priorities’ series attempts to gain insights into one of the most serious, interesting, and challenging questions facing the technology industry, which, as you might have rightly guessed, is “What are the priorities of enterprise CIOs today?” I decided to start with technology-focused consulting companies, because it is through these companies that we can obtain insights into both the priorities of their internal IT as well as the priorities of their clients through each company’s consulting lens. In this article, I talk with Frank Modruson, the CIO of Accenture.

Frank categorizes his priorities into two camps: effectiveness and efficiency. Companies usually try to strive for efficiency at the start, and then get to effectiveness because the efficiency quest focuses directly on cost, and hence its impact on the bottom line is seen more quickly. The main priority that Frank named was collaboration and telepresence, which fed into both the effectiveness and the efficiency camps, given its game-changing nature and its direct contribution to bottom line savings through reduced travel costs. Accenture rolled out ‘Accenture Collaboration 2.0,’ its internal collaboration platform, last year. In addition to building telepresence capacity internally, Accenture is also federating its telepresence capacity. Federation refers to the concept of extending collaboration networks beyond the organization. Accenture now has now federated 31 companies and has close to 600 federated telepresence rooms, touching close to 2 million executives worldwide.

Other priorities on the effectiveness side have been ECDM (Engagement, Contract and Delivery Management Applications), and applications that help build strong pricing and forecasting capabilities. On the efficiency side, other priorities have been re-doing the entire communications network and focusing on the cloud. Focusing on the network, while contributing to “efficiency,” has also played on the “effectiveness” side by helping to build a robust network infrastructure to support the requirements of telepresence. On the cloud front, Frank believes that the focus on the cloud and SaaS applications is here to stay, because it is an efficiency play, enabling organizations and individuals to maintain a smaller infrastructure and fewer applications.

After discussing the nature of Accenture’s recent priorities, I asked Frank if these priorities were a result of a change in strategy due to the tough economy. That explains the focus on collaboration, ECDM, and other similar projects.Finally, I asked Frank what he felt was the next big technology wave.

Technology’s Language Barrier

A simple cultural and linguistic misunderstanding caused the confusion; in China, women don’t normally change their names when they get married.

Moreover, global popular culture is dominated by English-language television, music, film, print and social media.

English-speaking nations are much closer to the saturation point when it comes to Internet use, so non-English-speaking nations represent the bulk of future growth.

E-commerce hinges on language, too. To be sure, passing information through systems designed by people speaking different languages and using different writing systems can increase the level of vulnerability to translation errors.

Complicating matters further for Anglocentric systems, most characters in China and Japan have multiple pronunciations.

KFC’s slogan “finger-lickin’ good” was mistranslated into Chinese characters that meant “eat your fingers off.” But China was opening up to foreign companies, and The brand name Coca-Cola  in China was first translated as a phrase pronounced Ke-kou-ke-la.

Organizations need to create a seamless cross-language flow of information for gathering and managing crucial identifying data. To meet these challenges, information technologies must be smarter, beginning at the design of data intake processes and throughout record storage and linkage.

From the standpoint of the Asian users who will enter information, data entry must be clear and unambiguous, designed according to local understandings of names. At the same time, to compensate for the inevitable errors, retrieving the many possible variants of a single name requires sophisticated, culturally sensitive search and match techniques.

The modification of names is nothing new. As Asia flexes its growing economic muscle, smart companies must be prepared to handle the ensuing tsunami of cross-language data.