Clunky Flow

Digital Business: Redux of a special report with the FT. 

I enjoyed this supplement from the FT because it is peppered with expert recognition that technology needs to be aligned with our hard-wired social processes if we are to leverage it to social ends.  My sctick is that social software sucks as it exists today.  There are fundamental hard problems of identity, reputation and trust engrained into the social software we use.  We need a new approach. And to give a rough approximation of a quote attributed to Einstein “We cannot hope to solve the problems we are confronted with today by using the same thinking that created these problems in the first place”

• Crispin O’Brien of KPMG “The more you can network people in an informal way, the more value a company can create.â€?He also argues that computers have to behave more like humans and that the next phase of workplace IT could be as influenced by social anthropology as by writers of computer code.
• John Gage, chief researcher for Sun Microsystems points out that, in his view, the big issue is the conjunction of the identity of people, objects, programs and data with location.

• It is official: we cannot cope with information overload – apparently, we are not designed to analyse large amounts of data and draw irrefutable conclusions.

• Technology is not anathema to intuition – in fact, it can augment it. Tools are becoming available that allow unstructured information captured in the form of transactions, interactions, e-mail, text and a panoply of other media to be analysed and brought to bear on a wide range of decisions – more decisions than human intuition alone can hope to address.

 

• For now, the critical question for such a framework is how to apply tools and methods to tease out what is really used in decision-making – to extract the process from the mystery.

 

• In particular, this research can guide us on the social aspects of decision-making and how humans respond to an ever-changing world in real time – and this must also produce insights into how a business can respond to a chaotic world

 

• It will be a world in which business intelligence drives and informs action in a work environment; less about spreadsheets and more about allowing humans to work in the way that 300m years of evolution have prepared them for.

 

• Too often technologists are in love with what’s technically possible but forget to make it approachable for the user….If you really want to get something done where there is trust on both sides, voice communication is critical. So I try to meet everyone I’m doing business with in person. E-mail, in many ways, has made things more impersonal according to Jason Goldberg, chief executive of Jobster.

 

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