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August 25, 2011
Reading: Longitude by Dava Sobel
A while back Craig Burton recommended Dava Sobel's Longitude to me. The book is a fascinating and easy to read tale of the problem of finding longitude and how a self-educated clock maker named John Harrison finally succeeded in building not one, but four time pieces with sufficient accuracy. Like any good story, there are twists and turns in the plot--even an antihero. Sobel brings the history to life. I found myself picking up the book any chance I got to find out what would happen next.
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August 23, 2011
Curation in the Small: Personal Event Networks and Getting Things Done
Over the last few days JP Rangaswami has published a set of three blog posts on curation:
- In Thinking about curation in the enterprise, JP begins the journey, talking about what curation is, why traditional enterprise organization has led to dysfunctional curation, and why the social enterprise (JP's words) holds the promise of giving us something better.
- Part 2 gets into the real business of curation. JP says "When a human curates, she does three things. She selects something (or things) from a larger group. She organises those selections cohesively. And she arranges to present those things in such a way that people find it easy to engage with those things."
- In the third post, Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information, JP talks about the reason we curate: to get something done. He gives his thoughts about what makes information actionable: Accuracy and veracity, timeliness, comprehensiveness, and comprehensibility.
I have to admit, all the time I'm reading JP, I'm thinking about how personal event networks play in the notion of the social enterprise that he's working on. I got to thinking about curation as a model for activities that we all do every day. And, naturally, about the role of personal event networks in assisting curation.
The general idea is that people want to get certain things done and that gives rise to sets of tasks they have to accomplish. What they want to accomplish gives rise to what they need to do. That process feels like an act of curation.
To see this more clearly, let me point you at a scenario I outlined on my blog almost a year ago, something I call "Project Neck Pain" or PNP. PNP involves a fictional personal named Scott Phillips. Scott has an unexplained pain in his neck and he's had an MRI. A few days later, he receives the report from the radiologist and it's not good. The radiologist recommends that Scott see an orthopedic surgeon and even recommends a few. Besides the obvious fear and potential disabilities that such news brings, Scott also has to manage the frustration and hassle of finding and scheduling a competent surgeon.
There are three large tasks that loom before Scott:
- Select a surgeon
- Schedule the initial consult
- Establish a patient record with the new doctor
Scott wants to get his neck fixed, so he needs to do these things (among others).
When Scott engages in these tasks, he is curating the information by selecting, organizing, and presenting. The end result is an appointment with the right doctor that gets Scott on the path back to health. Without some kind of help, this is a messy and time consuming process.
- Selecting a doctor involves finding out who is available in the area and determing what their credentials are. This might involve multiple Web searches, talking to friends, consulting with a family doctor, and making phone calls. Systems that present accurate information, when its needed, with the right parameters, and in context would help, but they are largely unavailable. We perform these various tasks in an ad hoc fashion.
- Scheduling the doctor is a familiar task to any of us. We all schedule things every day. Even with the tools that we take for granted at work like free-busy calendars, this is no easy task. In our personal interactions, we generally don't have systems that can help with the process.
- Lastly, we're all too familiar with filling out the same form over and over again every time we visit a new doctor to create a patient record. We're all hoping that some magical system will be created by the health industry to solve this problem, but 10 years in, we may want to take matters into our own hands.
So, while we might view this process as an act of curation and even see how the traditional tools of curation in the enterprise, applied to our personal systems might help, we're left to wait for some better future where curating our personal interactions isn't so difficult.
The problem, as I see it, is that while the Web has given us access to all kinds of information and services, we don't have good tools for integrating and orchestrating them. When I hear JP (and others) talk about the "social enterprise." I don't just see value inside the enterprise, but also value that is created when the enterprise and it's products and services interact socially with customers as well.
Why doesn't the CRM system that the radiologist and other health care providers use help me with all these tasks? Why isn't there a good way for me to integrate recommendations from places like Angie's List and my social networks? Why can't I automatically interact with my doctor's calendar? Why isn't there a convenient way for me to transfer my health information to a new provider?
As an aside, don't get caught up in the fact that this is a health care scenario. Think of it more generally as "find and schedule an appointment with a service provider." Whether you're trying to find an orthopedic surgeon to fix your neck or a plumber to fix your water heater, the problems and solutions are largely the same.
We developed a demo using a dozen separate Kynetx apps acting together in a personal event network to provide a loosely coupled solution to Scott's problem. Take a minute and watch this vide to show how it works.
The details of how all this works are available in the original blog post if you're interested.
Note that the video doesn't show a complete automation of the process--that's not desirable. The systems built for the demo simply aid Scott in his curation process, taking out some of the bumps, presenting information in a timely and comprehensible fashion, and orchestrating system interactions.
I believe that the fact that this is possible--that I can build it--means that it's inevitable. Probably not exactly as I've envisioned it, but generally. As companies become more "social" they will necessarily have to start providing us with systems that allow these kinds of systems to be built. Otherwise they'll just be spamming me with ads, and that's not consistent with the vision that JP and others are espousing. I'm ready for it.
11:36 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
August 22, 2011
When It Comes to Ecommerce, Most Retailers Don't Get It (or Why Amazon is Winning)
I'm mostly writing this to get something off my chest, but I think I have a point as well: Most retailers are blowing it and losing.
I think REI is an example of a retailer who gets how to leverage their online and physical stores to create something better than what you'd otherwise get. I can order things online and get them delivered free to the local store and free to my house over a certain price point. I'm willing to stop by the store to pick up a purchase because I like going there (and usually REI sells something else when I come by).
I've run across two merchants who don't get this at all. My first example is Eddie Bauer (EB). I stopped in to pick up some jeans because I like how the EB jeans fit. I was told "You have to order waist sizes over 40 inches online. We don't carry them in the store." Never mind that the 20-something clerk essentially just told me they don't have room to carry inventory for fat people. She didn't have a way to help me. Sent me out of the store and hope I go to the Web site. How stupid is that? But it gets worse. When I went to the Web site to place the order, they charged me a $3.00 "handling charge" over and above the shipping. They don't charge me a shipping OR handling charge when I go into their physical store even though they've paid through the nose for space, people, and systems.
Over the weekend I had a similar experience at Jos. A. Banks. I went to the store and they didn't have my shirt size in stock. I asked the clerk if he could order it and he said "sure." He walks to a terminal, orders the shirts, and when I look at the bill it has a shipping charge of $5.00 on it to ship to their store. Not only do I have to pay, I have to drive over and pick it up too.
Eddie Bauer and Jos. A. Banks are making a liability of the fact that they have both online and physical stores rather than finding ways they can work together. Rather than leveraging their presence in multiple markets they're making me resent it. Any wonder I buy from Amazon (where I have a Prime membership) any chance I get? Amazon has consistently captured a greater percentage of my retail dollar year after year. With policies like the ones above, I'm confident that will continue.
These companies are spending lots of money on loyalty programs and social media strategies and then killing it all with how they mistreat their online customers.
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August 15, 2011
Help Build Legal Sidewiki
Renee Lloyd is good at breaking down a site's terms and coditions (TC's) and saying exactly what they mean in plain English. Most are contracts of adhesion, which means they adhere to you simply because you use the service. Most, of course, also very one-way, favoring the company.
Pete Touschner recently proposed something he called "Legal Sidewiki" where people like Renee can comment on a site's TC's right on the site and anyone with the extension installed can see the commentary when before they click the "I agree" button.
This is a perfect task for KRL and browser apps. I'd like to see someone build it. If you're a Kynetx developer, consider this as a side project that's good for everyone. We'd need two modes:
Author mode would allow Renee and others like here to comment on the TC's of a site, edit past commentary, etc. The comments would need to be positioned relative to specific paragraphs in the TC.
Reader mode would show people comments. Most people would run in reader mode. Being able to hide commentary would probably be the only real interaction people would have in this mode.
Let me know if you decide to do this. I'd love to kibbitz and help where I can. And I'm sure we can get people in the VRM community to talk it up.
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August 8, 2011
Eric Schmidt's Commerce Fantasy
Last week, TechCrunch ran a story on Eric Schmidt's furturistic vision of ecommerce. Here's an excerpt:
In Schmidt's "Commerce Fantasy" you're driving down the street, and somehow your phone knows you need new pants. Roll with me here ... The phone somehow realizes there's a pants store on the left and a pants store on the right and knows that through Google Offers the store on the right has the cheapest pants deal. Your GPS says,"Turn right for your pants." When you walk in the store, its system understands it's you and that you need new pants and so the salesperson comes out with your pants, of course. You tap your phone to pay, and boom, pants.From Eric Schmidt's Commerce Fantasy | TechCrunch
Referenced Mon Aug 08 2011 09:26:49 GMT-0600 (MDT)
The focus of the piece is how mobile payments need to change for this to become reality. What caught my eye was the scenario itself--the focus on intent ("I need pants") and the automatic processing of multiple offers to provide the customer with the best deal in the current context.
The idea is not unlike the 4th party offer application, I wrote about a while back that I built on Kynetx. The mobile aspects of Schmidt's scenario present interesting twists to the story including the opportunity for mobile payments and identity.