Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	August 5, 2008

12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs I'm preparing for a discussion forum on Friday in Quebec City, and one of the topics we'll be discussing is how the "information behaviours" of Generation Millennium differ from those of previous generations, and what that means for the tools they (and the rest of us -- they outnumber even the boomers) will and won't be using in the future. Out of my research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts of my generation that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which my generation thought were the last word in music storage, are disappearing even faster. Here's the list: Hard Drives: The price of bandwidth, and the price of storage space in cyberspace, have both dropped precipitously. Expect them to drop further. We may even get to the point where companies will pay us to host our content, even if it's confidential, just so that their clients can find out what we care about and can ask for a bit of our targeted attention. At the same time, Homeland Security is going to be scanning our laptops every time we cross borders, and delaying or charging us if they deem the content to be uh... unpatriotic. So why keep anything on a hard drive anymore? Let the storage and processing all be done in cyberplaces with lots of space and processing power and just stream the results to us, so our machines can be light, pocket-sized, always-connected, pure communication devices.  "Wall of Text" Reports & Documents: Generation Millennium is returning to an oral/visual real-time culture, where blocks of text are used only when visualizations don't convey what's happening better and more succinctly, and where written language is used only when spoken language is unavailable (and with communication becoming more and more instant and real-time, that's not often). This is not to dispute the elegance of well-crafted prose, stories and exposition, just to say it will be conveyed orally, not in written form. Iterative real-time conversation, visualizations, body language and voice inflection simply convey much more than the written word. Ultimately, good communication is more about context than content. "Best Practices": It's natural that people want to hear what the leading companies and individuals in any area of business endeavour are doing, but the sad truth is that most "best practices" are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don't tell, and discuss, don't proclaim, are the information behaviours of the future. Less efficient, perhaps (stories take a while to tell, and voice is harder to browse through for fast learning), but much more effective. Email and Groupware: I've written enough recently about the coming death of e-mail so suffice it to say it will be replaced by simple real-time face-to-face, voice-to-voice and IM technologies. Groupware has been dying for a decade: it's overengineered, asynchronous, complicated and unintuitive more-is-less technology, and will be replaced by its opposite. Corporate Websites: I recently co-judged a competition of nominated best-of-class business websites, and I was aghast at how unnavigable and useless most of them were. My own research has indicated that most people who visit these sites are job-seekers, the media, and competitors. A combination of marketing/PR hype, just-in-case recycled internal junk, and self-congratulation, most corporate websites are devoid of useful content, and those that do have useful stuff have it buried where it can't be found. You just can't put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it. And your relationship isn't with Company X, it's with Individual Y at that company. Individual Y's blog, with lots of contact info, timely, casual-style articles and useful links, and instant connectivity options, is to the corporate website what your personal company rep is to walking into the company cold and asking for help. Next-gen blogs by individual employees -- personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer -- will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water. Corporate Intranets: Same rationale as #5. The main way knowledge is, was, and always will be exchanged in organizations is person-to-person in real time. Rich context, iterative, personal, demonstrative, have-it-your-way information, conveyed through conversation. Accept no substitute.  Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content: The only people who really care about taxonomy and boolean search are librarians, and unfortunately they usually don't know enough about their employer's business to know what to do with the esoterica that requires such tools anyway. With luck, they'll learn the employer's business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won't need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer. "Information is always trying to be free", as Marshall McLuhan said a half-century ago. And they won't sell their research and analysis either: They'll give it to colleagues to use first, and later they'll give it away to clients to show how smart they (and their employers) are. Cell Phones: Now let me get this straight: On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you're going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I'm going to put up with this why? Classrooms: There is really nothing that can be done in a classroom that can't be done using desktop videoconferencing with screensharing, for free. No travel costs/time/pollution. No bums on chairs. Unlimited multi-tasking without nasty looks from the instructor. And with YouTube, SlideShare/SlideCast and other tools, you have access to the best presenters in the world on virtually any subject imaginable. Meetings: Same rationale as #9. With simple virtual presence tools you can actually exercise the Law of Two Feet without getting off your ass. Job Titles: Generation Millennium members expect to have 12 jobs in their lives on average, and to work on varied projects with cross-disciplinary teams rather than in a defined role. Companies are outsourcing, offshoring, fragmenting, moving to Peer Production. What value or meaning do titles have in such an environment? (If titles are still a useful status symbol, companies could simply follow the example of the banks and make everyone a Vice-President.) Offices: When I started working, executive offices had heavy dark wood paneling, fireplaces, and liquor cabinets. Now they're 10x10, utilitarian, sometimes shared, often empty, and sometimes without walls. Meanwhile the pay for executives has soared. People would rather have the money than the real estate, and as the cost of space, and travel to and from it, rises, the cost/benefit of offices worsens all the time. The next generation works anywhere, anytime, anyway -- home, car, coffee shop, and there is "virtually" no reason to go into an office to talk on the phone and work on the PC. As soon as simple virtual presence tools become second nature to the senior people in organizations (twenty years or so from now) the office will vanish. I was tempted to add "keyboards" the this list but I'm not sure. Why is voice recognition and transcription improving so slowly? Even translation software is improving by leaps and bounds. I was also tempted to add "everything made by Microsoft" -- but that would be too obvious. Anything I've missed? Category: Technology and Society 11:33:57 PM  trackback []  comment []

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