Bruce MacVarish Notes

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

LoSoPhoMo and Mobile Enterprise Pure-Plays

Steve Rubel believes the next media disruptors are Mobile Pure-Plays.  I agree.  

From Steve's post:

"Now a new era is under way.

The next wave of media disruptors are laser focused on being tailored, rather than retrofitted, for mobile devices. They start out sometimes just as apps, creating a strong beachhead in your pocket. Then they use these platforms to springboard into other ancillary media ventures. This means they're cut from a different cloth than older stalwarts that often need to retrofit themselves for mobile.

With Internet consumption on mobile devices set to surpass the same on PCs next year, according to Morgan Stanley, and US smart phone penetration to hit 50%, Nielsen says, mobile is no longer the tail on the media dog. For the next wave of media upstarts, it's the dog and the rest is the tail.

We're at the very beginning of a new era in media; one where mobile is the primary distribution platform. What's more, we have a perfect storm of technologies coming together that combine local, social, photo and mobile (what we call "LoSoPhoMo") and this is sure to spur even more media companies that are pure-plays at least at the start."

Steve is focused on the next wave of media.  For me, the question is what does a disruptive mobile pure-play strategy look like for the enterprise when it takes advantage of the very same LoSoPhoMo - local, social, photo and mobile technologies Steve identifies as drivers for media disruption.

In many ways, the emergence and evolution of consumer focused Web 2.0 applications and strategy served as a proxy for key elements of Enterprise 2.0.  

So, it is not too far of a stretch that the emergence of Mobile Pure-Plays and their evolution along a new transmedia arc may provide insight into the evolution of the mobile enterprise.

For example, one strategy could be starting as a Mobile Enterprise Pure-Play and evolving to a --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Web App ---> 

    - Mobile Enterprise Cloud --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Device --->

    - Mobile Enterprise ?

The "Future State" of Work - Changes & Skills for next 10 years

GigaOm has an upcoming conference Net:Work that will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by a new culture of work and key tools and technologies for collaboration.

They put forward a report from Gartner that outlines 10 changes over the next 10 years that will impact how we work and collaborate in the future.

It is interesting to consider how Gartner's report compares to a similar report from The IFTF on key workplace skills for the future.

Gartner's view of how work changes includes:

1. “De-routinization” of work.

“Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.

 

2. Work swarms.

Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.

 

3. Weak links.

Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.

 

4. Working with the collective.

Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.

 

5. Work sketch-ups.

Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.

 

6. Spontaneous work.

Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.

 

7. Simulation and experimentation.

The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.

 

8. Pattern sensitivity.

Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.

 

9. Hyperconnected.

With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.

 

10. My place.

The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Influence and Strong Ties

Bernardo Huberman, Director of HPLabs, describes research on influence and passivity in social networks based on their analysis of Twitter.  Some key points:  

- popular doesn't mean influential

- average user only retweets 1 in 318 URLs

- the number of people discussing important matters with another person outside of the family (think strong ties) has dropped from 64% in 1985 to 45% in 2008

"Strong Ties" and the Design of Social Communication Apps

In my earlier posts, I've outlined an on-going project focused on improving our conversations and relationships with the people most important to us - the people we consider our "strong ties".    

I believe there are plenty of applications nurturing our connections with our "weak ties".  Increasingly, we will see new user value found in applications and devices that improve our connections with our "strong ties".   

As a result of the project, I'm continually looking for market validation of the strong ties concept.  Thanks to this FastCompany article by Addy Dugdale - I came across the ON Service developed by Orange Vallee (a subsidiary of the Orange Group).  

I found the TED Global 2010 presentation by Giles Corbett extremely helpful and reinforced my product hypothesis that "strong ties" will continue to emerge as a design focus for new social communication applications and devices.

We're seeing similar conceptual maps of "strong ties" emerge from the social research completed by Orange Vallee and Google's Paul Adams'  work on real life networks.

Here's how Orange maps out the strong ties concept:

and here's how Paul Adams at Google maps out his view of the relationship of our "strong ties" to our friends and "weak ties":

(btw - watch for Paul's new book "Social Circles" )

So, the good news - for users and for the "strong ties" project - is that we're seeing players like Google and Orange market test the "strong ties" concept as a design principle for new social communication applications and devices.

Facebook Open Graph

 

pointed out by Bernard Lunn's summary...

Old World vs. New World

 

Back in 2006, as I started to realize how consumer oriented innovation was leading enterprise innovation and could serve as a proxy for future enterprise applications, I started a habit of replacing the word "computing" with the word "communications" when reading new announcements and visions of the future for computing.

You know... "cloud-computing" became "cloud-communications"..."virtual computing" became "virtual communications"... "social computing" became "social communications"... you get the picture.

Where am I going with this?

I found myself repeating this habit when reading Steve Frank describe an interesting way to think about the difference between "Old World Computing" and "New World Computing" when reacting to the recent Apple iPad launch: 

"The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps"

So, take out the word "computing" and replace it with "communications" and we have a rough draft vision statement for the future of communication applications... driven by the emerging computing model.

"The bet is roughly that the future of communications:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

For me, this New World vision for (consumer + enterprise) communications implies a number of important user experience, user interaction, device and web application design choices for new products that need to be considered and tested with users.

Do you agree with this view for new world communication applications?

Measuring and Managing the Real-Time Web

I recently read two posts --- one by @StoweBoyd (The False Question of Attention Economics) --- and the other by @JohnBorthwick (Charting the Real-time Web) --- that had me thinking (again) about the challenges of information overload and real-time streams in the enterprise.

Here are a couple of quotes from each post that I found interesting.... first from Stowe:

"I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways... the only ones that will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to extract more from the increasingly real-time web."

Stowe Boyd, The False Question of Attention Economics

and also this one from John:

"As interactions online shift to streams we are going to have to figure out how measurement works. I feel like today we are back to the early days of the web when people talked about “hits” — it’s hard to parse the relevant data from the noise."

John Borthwick, Charting the Real-Time Web

Both posts highlight the need for better tools to measure, manage, filter and render the streams of information being generated as user interactions shift to the Real-time Web or Live Web.   I agree.  

In some ways, we need to apply to the real-time web a management maxim from the industrial economy attributed to a number of people including Deming, Grove, Drucker and Kaplan:

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"

There are a number of social monitoring and analytics solutions from companies like Crimson Hexagon, Radian6, Chartbeat and others.  For example, Chartbeat is focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing real-time interactions across the web.  This video provides an interesting demo of real-time activity on Fred Wilson's AVC blog:

Yet, Chartbeat is a solution focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention from other people to my content / website / service.    It helps me understand certain (not all) flows of attention to me... and to my content.  

If we're to improve management of our attention allocated to the flood of information overload,  we need a "personal" chartbeat-like service focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention coming in to ... and going out from ... me 

To try and manage the real-time stream of information... of conversations... of how I allocate my attention, I will need better tools:

- First, to measure my individual incoming and outgoing real-time interactions, and 

- Second, to manage the most important and relevant real-time streams created from my two-way interactions with my most important personal/work/commercial relationships.

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Top 5 for 2009

I went back to see what topics were the most active on this blog and seemed to resonate with you and other readers during 2009.      

So... here are my "Top 5 Posts for 2009" along with a key theme cloud.

 

#1 - Guiding Principles of Innovation at Apple

If you had to summarize the guiding principles of Apple's Design and Innovation Strategy what would they be and how might you embrace them to drive new product designs and create new revenue streams from new markets?  

With the help of Chris Morrison, Bruce Nussbaum, Owen Linzmayer, Umair Haque and Daniel Turner, I've summarized a draft list of 11 guiding principles that appear to be important to Apple's innovation strategy.  

#2 - User Experience for the Business User in 2009

Four fundamental forces of change are driving the evolution of the user experience for the Business User in 2009:

(a) economic recession and its impact on the enterprise IT budget 

(b) enterprise governance, security and business policy requirements force "hardening" of consumer apps

(c) new sources of value and revenue continue to be found at the Enterprise Edge

(d) consumer innovations influence and shape business user expectations 

#3 - Social Enabling Voice Conversations

The people we call and engage in voice-based conversations, in our personal and work lives, represent our active - and in many cases our most relevant - social graph.

To build a resurgent voice industry, consumers and business users need a new user experience that helps them unlock the value of their active, relevant social graph by social-enabling their voice conversations.

#4 - The Future of Games @ Work

To engage business users in a compelling and continuously productive collaboration experience, enterprise apps need to tap the user's individual motivation, unleash the user's curiosity and align the user's incentives, unique skills and social networks.  

Are there proxies for this type of engagement?  Yes; in multiplayer gaming applications.  

A powerful example of users who are engaged in self-motivated, aligned, collaborative efforts can be found in massive, multi-player on-line games.

#5 - The Live Web of Interaction Signals for Business Users

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.   

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the Real-time Web.

Evolving toward a People-Centric, Real-Time Web

There are plenty of reasons to consider the collaborative opinions of Chris Messina and Jyri Engstrom. Chris is a champion of the open web and leads/contributes to the DiSo Project, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, activitystrea.ms and Portable Contacts initiatives.   Jyri is the founder of Jaiku, one of the first real-time microblogging social / mobile apps acquired by Google.   Both Chris and Jyri have co-authored a post outlining their vision for the next phase of the web and describe it as a "people-centric, real-time web":

"It’s 2009, going on 2010. For the past three years, the web has been morphing into a real-time and people-centric place. We’ve seen this trend among individual users — through their actions and demands for better social experiences — but also increasingly among companies and developers. We want a web that’s more “like us” than the old model was. We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents."

Both Chris and Jyri recently presented at Mindtrek where they outlined their perspectives on the value of taking control over our personal identity, our activity streams and social objects as the people-centric, real-time web emerges. 

Chris presented Identity is the Platform with a focus on data capital and social objects centered on our personal identity across the open web:

1. Data Capital - All the data we're creating as personal activity streams has value ... and we should control access / use

2. Social Objects - Activity streams related to our "social objects" are meaningful and valuable too

Jyri presented Snack Size Sociality outlining how the battle for the people-centric, real-time web will focus on 4 important areas:  

1. People's identity
2. Activity Stream Routing
3. The Social Inbox
4. Real-time Search

I think it is valuable to consider both of Chris's and Jyri's Mindtrek presentations together as an indication of how they see the People Centric, Real-Time Web emerging.   They've pointed to key enablers that include:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example. 

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies a la the DiSo Project:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

While it is early days in this next phase of web innovation, we'll see progress and proof points continue to emerge in the consumer space.   So let's say we see the emergence of a people centric real-time web as envisioned by Chris and Jyri.   

What might that mean for the enterprise?  

How and when will this set of building block technologies impact the enterprise space and create new value for business users?

Is it reasonable to think that the enterprise will embrace a people-centric, real-time web, when they've had a hard time embracing the social web?

PS: I'm a big fan of the opportunity and user value to be generated by "conversation threading" and have been pushing an enterprise Sensing, Threading, Sharing strategy for a while now...