There's a whole in your bucket dear Liza, dear Liza,
Traditionally businesses (especially enterprises) are like containers or buckets of information. But they are not hermetically sealed, despite their CIO’s (Henry’s) belief to the contrary. The average Henry regards leaks in this corporate seal as flaws and immediately dispatches more technology (Straw) to fill them, just like the rhyme.
Well fix it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, Well fix it, dear Henry, well fix it.
And just like the rhyme Henry soon finds out that straw can be difficult to administer particularly in cases where the problem isn’t the right shape.
With what shall fix it, … With straw, … The straw is too long, … Well cut it, … With what shall I cut it, … With an axe, … The axe is too dull, … Then sharpen it, … With what shall I sharpen it, … With a stone, … . The stone is too dry, … Then wet it, … With what shall I wet it, … With water, … . In what shall I fetch it, … With a bucket, …
Pretty soon Henry is back where he started the problem is recurrent and never ending, because information wants to be free. It’s just like water and it will flow around, over or under any obstacles within it’s path.
Henry is not familiar with the concept of a Permeable membrane, he’s not paid to be, he’s paid to keep the lights on.
Unfortunately for Henry, having failed to plug the email gap last decade (port:25), he has been besieged by the onslaught of the Port:80 leak. Henry’s efforts have of course been futile, the leak grew to a hole, the hole to a chasm big enough to ride a space shuttle through. Not only that but there is a preverbal space highway traversing in both directions through the anomaly these days.
I feel sorry for Henry his task is a difficult one, no one ever told him he would turn from plumber into a policeman, no one told him it could be about people. But the reason I feel most sympathy for Henry is that people inside his organization (people he used to call friends) are planning his demise. Slowly but surely they are taking it onto themselves to introduce there own software as services and under tables with OpenSource code slipped in through port:80. Pretty soon there won’t be room for all of these amateurs and the pro Henry in the organization and what then…
There’s a hole in my bucket, …
Death by a thousand cuts, how does the spreadsheet resist
Yesterday I talked about the ‘death of the document’ my primary analysis was around word processing. Although this is probably the most common use of office products it is certainly not the only one. Another common office driver is the spreadsheet, particularly in financial parts of organisations, but also in sales departments along with budgeting across departments. Even though spreadsheets are documents, their manifestations are not always document centered like word processing documents (think of linked worksheets etc..). There are online spreadsheet applications (EditGrid as well as Zoho and Google apps), most online versions are functional replicas of their offline versions + sharing. They don’t appear to be real innovations, rather spreadsheet with collaboration grafted on. Just to jog your memory I am suggesting that word processing documents are experiencing death by a thousand cuts. The cuts are being administered by a plethora of paragraphs from blogs, wikis, email, and numerous other online services. The same cannot be said for humble spreadsheets, to date I haven’t yet seen the emergence of numerical online tools that kill off spreadsheet usage within organisations. Maybe I’m missing something here, help me out. Is it already happening or do you have idea that it will, if so what does it look like ? is it also death by a thousand cuts?
Are you using Semaphore or do you still speak in documents?
Many of you will I’m sure of heard about Office’s recent demise, initially coined I think by Steve Gillmor on the Gillmor Gang as ‘Office is dead’. I however have a different inkling about its demise. I (and others) have noticed a rapid decay in the use of Office like products, to this effect I haven’t even installed a copy of office software on my current system (6 months old).
I remember when I used create documents in word for all sorts of work related reasons, but that has completely tailed off over the last several years, to the point where I can’t actually remember what my last word processing document was. Now this isn’t a desktop vs online word processing post, what I think might be happening here is that I no longer produce documents. Rather I communicate in a series of paragraphs and one liners using the following : My blog, Twitter, Social sites like Facebook, Numerous online tools/wikis for projects/events and all manner of other things and occasionally even email (which is also decreasing).
Because these forms of communication are digital packets rather than documents I have no need for document based software. This to me is the crunch, this is where the revolution is happening it isn’t Office thats dying it’s documents that are becoming extinct. Are you converting to packet based communication? Are you also noticing the reduction in packet size with the increase of packet frequency that I am experiencing?