It's 2020. Trying times for the global economy and society, but we're still hanging in there.
Madison S. is an
information
professional with Omni Consultants, a big global consultancy that is
now focused (as are its competitors) on personal productivity
improvement, facilitation, cultural anthropology, and design and
communication skills development services for their clients. She has an
MIS degree and is one of the highest paid of Omni's employees, even
though she provides few services directly to Omni's clients.
She spends about 1/4 of her time producing business analyses based on
environmental scans for Omni's consultants. These analyses sort through
the firehose of information coming into the organization and distill
out
'What It Means' summaries -- five-page point-form reports
suggesting important trends, alarming developments, new opportunities,
insights and implications for business, the economy and the society as
a whole, rich in visualizations, with supporting data appended. These
serve as powerful Talking Points Memos for Omni's consultants to use in
conversations with and proposals to clients.
Another 1/4 of Madison's time is spent producing 'What Might Come Next'
analyses. These are a combination of forecasts about the future of
businesses and industries, based on her team's research, and
provocative proposals for action to capitalize on or mitigate these
forecast events. These analyses are framed as future state stories,
scenarios, showing how the suggested actions would lead to optimal
outcomes. Omni's consultants 'tell' these stories to their clients'
executives and project teams to help them visualize their future and
develop and refine strategies to exploit or adapt to the changes
forecast. Omni's senior management, likewise, uses these scenario-based analyses in
its own, internal strategy and risk management development.
This activity represents a dramatic change from the activities
'information professionals' had performed in the past. Omni's managers
came
to realize that research is best done by experts in research, not by
everyone in the organization, and that good IPs are able to add
enormous value to the information they locate and distil, if given the
opportunity, provided they are knowledgeable about the business and how
it uses information.
Another 1/4 of Madison's time is spent supporting collaboration and
innovation teams in real time consulting assignments with Omni's
clients, and in real time internal project work. Her role in such
projects is two-fold: To provide insightful synopses of relevant
information prior to the start of the collaboration and innovation
sessions, and to retrieve relevant information immediately that has
been identified as essential to moving forward by the collaboration and
innovation teams.
The rest of her time is spent in face-to-face 'cultural anthropology'
sessions with Omni's people, during which she observes them
doing their jobs, identifies and suggests ways in which they could use
information and technology to do these jobs better, and brings back to
senior management reports on systemic 'information problems' that need
organization-wide process changes or new technologies before they can be resolved.
Andrew R. is one of Omni's consultants. Like most of his peers, he
maintains a weblog of what he has learned and discovered, which many
people inside and outside the company subscribe to. He also
participates in community weblogs for six self-established,
self-managed 'communities of passion' he belongs to. His 'home page'
consists of:
- a directory of all the people in his networks
(showing their current
online status, and real-time multimedia virtual presence contact
information for them),
- a list of the RSS feeds to which he
subscribes (mostly blogs of other
community members, plus the publications of Madison's team),
and
- his calendar.
He can access this 'home page' from any
computer or portable device.
He has no e-mail or voice-mail and does not use 'groupware' or other
asynchronous technologies. He can almost always be reached by Instant
Messaging, and his calendar of times when he is available for
conversations and meetings is open for anyone to book. As such, most of
his day is spent in physical or virtual real-time conversations and
other collaborative activities
focused on some specific objective.
The hard drive of Andrew's computer is
virtually empty -- when he needs information, he gets it 'just in time'
from the people in his networks via IM, by searching his RSS feeds, or
by request from someone in Madison's group. Mostly, his networks feed
him just the information he needs each day, so he rarely needs to ask.
Andrew earns his money substantially by observing and listening to
clients and telling stories that are relevant to their needs, drawing
on his experience with other clients, his imagination, and the
information from Madison's group. He also earns money by facilitating
his clients and networks to co-design and co-innovate solutions to
their
own problems collaboratively by sharing ideas, knowledge and insights,
peer-to-peer, using Open Space and similar complex-problem methodologies .
Omni has no formal 'website' -- just its collection of blogs and its
interactive directory of people with their contact information. Since
they started these and abandoned the traditional website, readership
of their pages, and follow-up work, have soared.
Their big KM project for this year is Reinventing the Water Cooler,
designed to find a way to replicate the opportunity for serendipitous,
unscheduled conversation that the old water coolers once enabled.
This is all well and good for businesses like Omni that have the
resources to distill and analyze information. For smaller organizations
and individual citizens it's a tougher challenge.
Kim
L. is a partner in a small entrepreneurial venture called MacClothes,
that produces portable sewing and embroidering machines that can be
operated by the (now-ubiquitous) Macintosh 20/20 computers to allow
users to create their own custom made-to-measure clothing. Until
recently they did their own business research, or did without. But
recently they've struck a deal to 'subscribe' by RSS to some of Omni's
research for a very low price, after a 90-day embargo period.
Individuals
in 2020 generally use RSS subscription to craft their own personalized
real-time 'newspaper' consisting of feeds from any of thousands of
specialized and community-based e-newsletters and millions of blogs,
plus filtered 'Best Of Blogs' feeds ("BOBLs") on any of 7000 subjects
maintained by information professionals as hobbies. The most successful
of these BOBLs have millions of subscribers, including corporate
subscribers who underwrite some of the maintenance costs. These
'premier' BOBLs maintain linkable archives of related stories to each
story they feature, plus a 'What It Means' analysis and a 'Possible
Actions' list that tells readers what they could/should do to act on
the information in the story. Some BOBLs have become so popular that
they have full-time paid specialist researchers and reporters on staff
producing their own articles.
The main complaint from
businesspeople and the public about information in 2020? This hasn't
changed since 2008 -- it's still information overload. But at least in
2020 the value of information intermediaries has been rediscovered --
people who are skilled at (and have time to) 'make sense' of the raw
information coming at us in unmanageable amounts. And as a result a
little more attention is paid to the meaning, implications and possible
actions that stem from all this information.
And, since all this
information is viewable on highly legible, portable display devices, no
more trees need to be killed to disseminate and use it.
(Thanks to my KM colleagues Down Under for inspiring this post, especially Shawn Callahan, one of the brightest and most insightful people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.)
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