The Hyper World Journal is for those in business responsible for understanding the long term -- and close at hand -- impact of Web technologies on fundamental business processes and practices.
Meta Data
| Vol/Issue:
v97 #1 (October 18, 1997)
Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: Doctor says jogging not responsible for leg hair loss. Last excuse gone. Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
| 2nd in Series of Historic Collectors Issues
Welcome to the second beta issue of The Hyper World Journal. We think you'll find this latest attempt new and improved. For example, we've added a new secret ingredient that we like to call Webonality. (We'd have our Chief Scientist explain it to you, but it's far too technical.)
I remain intensely interested in receiving your comments about the HWJ. That's what a beta is all about, isn't it -- well, back before the days when beta became a way to maintain a market edge by shipping sub-standard software. So,
let me know what, if anything, I
could do to make the HWJ more valuable, something you'll actually take the time to
read.
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Note: I've recorded a version of this article for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." It may air anytime in the next few weeks. Autographed copies of the radio presentation will be available for a nominal fee.
Of course it's not literally true that The Web Changes Everything (the mantra of Webheads everywhere), but it's the right mistake to make. It keeps us on our toes so we aren't blindsided by the correct version of the mantra: The Web Changes More than We Expect. (That's not nearly as good a bumpersticker. That's the problem with truth.)
But all of these changes can be traced back to a five-word description of the Web: Many Small Pieces Loosely Joined.
Yes, of course it's obvious once you think about it that way. But obviousness is usually a good sign since most true things aren't radically different from what we already know. (That's why my consulting company is called "Evident Marketing," by the way.)
Think of it as The Web Effect. The Web takes just about anything it touches and smashes it into small pieces, and then lets the pieces re-join themselves in loose, unpredictable ways.
That's exactly what it's done to documents, for example. Authors of documents work hard at providing a strong hierarchical structure -- which readers recognize as the document's outline. This structure provides the context for any particular piece of the content, and it's a very big part of the value that authors provide.
The Web Effect on hierarchical document structure? Boom, gone! Web pages are rarely arranged hierarchically. Instead, the author puts in hyperlinks so the reader can jump all over the place. It's like ripping the cover off the book and throwing the pages up in the air. Whoopee! Documents unbound!
So, a book goes from being a carefully structured, long document with lots of assumed context, read in a sequence dictated by the author to being a loose collection of short pages read in any sequence that interests the user. Many small pieces loosely joined.
If you take a diagram of an outline and rotate it 90 degrees, you get an org chart. The Web is doing to business organizations precisely what it's done to documents.
Thanks to intranets, people discover that they can "hyperlink" themselves into virtual teams to address short term objectives without having to bother going through the traditional hierarchical business structure.
Here at the HWJ we call this "The Hyperlinked Organization."
A hyperlinked organization is much more responsive to customers and to shifts in the market because the people closest to the customer and to the market are able to aggressively target emerging pigeons and problems (whoops, I meant "opportunities and challenges" -- time to go back to Marketing Slime school).
On the other hand, with all these teams organizing themselves and scurrying around, the corporation can easily lose control of its overall direction. Managing hyperlinked teams is a real challenge.
Deriving the New World Order from 5 Words
You can derive all the characteristics of a hyperlinked organization straight from our five magic words:
And to think all of these changes are because the Web consists of (c'mon, sing along with me now!) many small pieces loosely joined.
Gray Matter
The Hyperlinking of AT&T WirelessAT&T Wireless produces masive amounts of documentation, typically a centrally controlled activity. But the company realized that in fact their employees are a distributed group of entrepreneurial workers who need to collaborate in a variety of ways, from loose brain storming to highly structured, regulated project development. So, AT&T Wireless built a new SOLAR system -- an intranet infrastructure that lets them benefit from the new connectedness intranets bring. Steve McDermott, Director of Technical Information and the visionary behind SOLAR, put together a team that built an advanced intranet, using Open Text Livelink as a base. The intranet provides document management, workflow, searching and project collaboration tools. From the start it was important that the system reflect the way people work, rather than forcing new ways of working from some centralized authority. Steve says: "A rigid process, where an author can't do anything without getting permission from someone in document control first, was never going to fly in our company -- it doesn't fit the way people like, or need, to work. Projects and informal groups form and disband as needed to speed project development. We had to support that entrepreneurial model." The entrepreneurial project teams benefit from knowing what other teams are doing. Says Steve: "People will say: 'I often didn't find out that a project was in the works until I was being dinged for missing some deadline I didn't even know about.' Not anymore. Now every project is visible to everyone on the technology team as soon as the project is kicked off. We use the workflow engine to send out project kickoff notifications and things take off from there. Now all the project work we're doing is visible." The intranet not only increases access to information, it also changes the nature of the communication process. Suzette Ramey, Documentation Lead, Advanced Network Services says, "A lot of time when we put things on paper we feel like things have to be perfect, even the first draft. When it's on-line we get a much more relaxed feeling, that this is a draft soliciting information. We're sharing information so we don't worry about every little point and every little detail being absolutely perfect; we can get it out there for the purpose we need and really speed up the whole editing/publishing process. AT&T Wireless is great evidence that the best way to make teams effective is to give them the right combination of tools and trust ... and watch while they hyperlink their way to success. |
Buzz Soup: Aurora and RDF
Netscape's announcement of Aurora (at the newly resuscitated Seybold conference), is truly interesting. Netscape is positioning Aurora as its answer to Microsoft's Active Desktop which lets your Windows desktop be your primary interface not only to your own hard drive but to the entire World Wide Web. With Aurora, your Netscape browser in effect becomes your new desktop. So, with Microsoft your desktop can be your browser and with Netscape your browser can be your desktop. If you find this distinction to be more confusing than worthwhile, you're right. Putting aside all the many important issues of comparative functionality and stability, your decision about which way to go (and the integration of desktops and the Web is just about inevitable) will have a lot to do with how widely a new standard -- RDF -- is accepted.
RDF (Resource Description Framework) is based on XML -- eXtended Markup Language -- a very important standard we'll discuss in a future issue. RDF lets an organization assign metadata to information. Metadata is information about information. For example, a card in a library card catalogue contain metadata about the book: who wrote it, when it was published, where it's filed, etc. Metadata is a crucial information enabler.
By providing a mainstream tool that can make sense of RDF, Aurora will encourage document authors to add metadata to their Web pages, which will provide the critical mass required for other applications besides Aurora to make use of that metadata. That's the hope, anyway. (Click here for a Netscape page listing RDF resources.)
Middle World ResourcesA BiWeekly Compendium of Resources |
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| Walking
the Walk
From Eric Severson, of IBM Global Services: You may be pleased to know that I have been personally inspired by your concept of a "hyperlinked organization" and have been touting this idea within IBM. I have in fact constructed a web of "technical competency leaders" within my immediate group who en masse cover the spectrum of converging industry areas (document management, workflow, imaging, SGML/XML, web, groupware, electronic publishing, knowledge management), technical disciplines (OO, VB, database, etc.), and specific products (Documentum, Open Text, ArborText, etc.). This sort of "thousand points of light" is on the face of it entirely unmanageable until you look at it not as a traditional hierarchy but instead as a set of hyperlinks. More concretely, it doesn't really matter who reports to whom, what matters is whether you know who to go see to chase a particular issue, and who else should be brought in since they deal with a closely related area. Simply following these natural hyperlinks turns out to be an extremely powerful way of looking at the organization. It's also a wonderful metaphor for seeing how to leverage each individual's thin bandwidth into a much more powerful whole: like the web itself, each individual site is relatively "thin" but taken as whole with all the links, the net result is awesome. |
Cool Tool
For the Hyperlinked Organization Email is a real enabler for hyperlinked organizations, but if you want to take it to the next step, then hie on over to www.mirabilis.com where you can download ICQ ("I Seek You"). This piece of shareware provides a wealth of functionality all focused on delivering messages faster, better and more interactively than email. With it you can send a message to any other registered user and will pop up immediately on her desktop (if she's turned ICQ on during that session). Coolest of all, you can easily initiated a real time chat, so the two of you can watch each other type (typos and all) in a split screen window. You can invite others on board, transfer files, and save the text that's been transmitted. This is a great tool for distributed groups trying to collaborate in real time, as well as for people on the front line of business (like customer support) who could benefit from being able to give the local genius a dingle when a question needs to be answered pronto. ICQ in no way replaces email. It adds a new way to collaborate and stay responsive -- and potentially to wear our nerve endings down to the very nubs. |
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Netrivia
InformationWeek (Oct. 6) reports that there are over 140 vendors providing tools for searching text. (This figure comes from Collaborative Strategies.) Meanwhile, Delphi Consulting Group says that revenue growth will slow to 5% this year, down from 21% last year. But Dataquest says that businesses will spend $4.5 billion on knowledge management products and services by 1999.
Hmm, put them together and what do you have? A search market that's been commoditized and is ready for consolidation. But if search products are going to play such a small part in KM, where's all that KM money going? Maybe into studies expanding the definition of KM so that it gets gerrymandered into containing $4.5B worth of stuff...
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Well, let's get out the old calculator. One document every four seconds means 15 per minute, 900 per hour, 21,600 per day,or 7,884,000 per year. Not bloody likely. There are more Pam Anderson nudies than that added per day (and that's not counting the skimpy bathing suit shots).
In fact, we can use this figure to do a type of carbon dating of the Web. If the rate of document additions is one per four seconds, then if we say there are 100 million documents on the Web (a conservative estimate), then the Web is 12.68 years old. But, given that the growth of the Web has been at least geometric, then the Web must in fact be at least 33.27 years old. This places its birth date at November 22, 1963 ... precisely the time that JFK was shot.
Coincidence? I think not ...
In response to last issue's comparison of Knowledge Management (KM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) on the question of top-down vs. bottoms-up changes, Amie White of International Data Corporation writes:
it is nice to see someone else compare and contrast [KM] to BPR. However, another major difference between BPR and Knowledge management is that BPR tried to streamline the intellectual capital within the organization (I am not sure what happened to it after its streamlining) and KM tries to collect any and all information regardless of where it is coming from. And then KM infrastructures attempt to sift through this information and index it according to a pre-defined taxonomy. However, it seems to encourage the information glut rather than streamlining intellectual capital.
Oh yeah? Says you!
Sorry. I was just trying out a feisty Web attitude. What do you think? Did it work for you?
Unfortunately, I agree with you, Amie. Ultimately, the test of a KM system will be not how much money you have in your intellectual bank account but how much of it is put into circulation. The last thing a corporation needs is another high-maintenance repository of information gathering dust. Unlike money, information that sits untouched in a repository precisely doesn't gather interest.
In the previous issue of the HWJ, I was trying to confine the comparison of BPR and KM to just a single issue. And my only real reason for bringing it up was to get to use the phrase Business Process Deengineering.
We all know the standard drill when you get asked during a job interview "Tell me what your greatest weakness is." You do not respond:
I embezzle compulsively
I can never admit I'm wrong. I blame others instead.
I bully the weak
I mentally undress everyone I meet. Even you. Now. Whoa, momma!
Instead you struggle to come up with something like: "I work too hard," or "When I see something that needs to be done, I just can't stop until I've accomplished my goal," or "I take on too much responsibility." (This is proof that humans can be defined as The Animals that Suck Up.)
So what are you going to say when your senior manager listens to your plans for providing enterprise-wide access to the World Wide Web from every desktop and says, "Yeah, yeah, but nothing's perfect. What's it's greatest weakness? What keeps you up at night?" What are the worst answers you can give?
For example:
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And by the way, you suck.
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Enter once, enter often. But remember, if you don't enter, you can't win. And, conversely, if you do enter, you do win. That's how we play the game here at the HWJ.
(In any case, don't forget to write. At this early stage, I really want your frankest criticisms and suggestions. Later on, I'll only want to hear nice things, so this is your chance...)
The following information was found trapped at the top of my washing machine when I ran some issues of the HWJ through it.
The HWJ is written and produced by David Weinberger. He denies responsibility for any errors or problems. If you write him with corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.
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Dr. Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes fair warning.
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Regrebniew. (The HWJ corn dog attack vehicle with lifelike action figures
is no longer available, and will return once we fix the eject button and
pending the outcome of the lawsuit.)
"The Hyperlinked Organization" is trademarked by Open Text Corp. The HWJ gratefully acknowledges Open Text's kind permission to use this felicitous phrase.
Hyper World Journal and Buzz Soup are trademarks of Evident Marketing, Inc.