Chicken Little Moment, No. 418
The sky really is falling. You can hear the creaking clearly now. At first little more than background noise, easy for all but the most perceptive to miss - or dismiss - but now it is clear. And interspersed with cracking, crackling as the existing edifice is inexorably and slowly - so slowly - crushed by the forces of technological and cultural change. But rather than give way gracefully and elegantly to a new reality, the incumbent architecture is robust (if brittle) and will probably - and sadly - fail catastrophically rather than fluidly, causing more damage and dislocation than strictly necessary.
Reading about how the music and publishing industries continue to try to desperately continue to control and dictate how their customers and markets should behave is pretty depressing. Having to live with the crap that ensues (for instance the nightmare jumble of incompatible hardware and software in home media) is even worse. It makes you wonder why the underlying asset - where the ultimate value lies, the ‘talent’ - doesn’t revolt (for they mostly suffer as a result of the continuation of an archaic rent-seeking behavior on the part of their erstwhile distributors…) Perhaps it is because no one has (yet) offered a compelling, joined up, credible alternative? I don’t know, but I sure get excited when I learn about initiatives like Connexions (and the fact that it was driven by my alma mater is only a cherry on the cake, more background information available here.)
The Connexions approach
Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons “attribution” license.
Content should be modular and non-linear
Most textbooks are a mass of information in linear format: one topic follows after another. However, our brains are not linear - we learn by making connections between new concepts and things we already know. Connexions mimics this by breaking down content into smaller chunks, called modules, that can be linked together and arranged in different ways. This lets students see the relationships both within and between topics and helps demonstrate that knowledge is naturally interconnected, not isolated into separate classes or books.Sharing is good
Why re-invent the wheel? When people share their knowledge, they can select from the best ideas to create the most effective learning materials. The knowledge in Connexions can be shared and built upon by all because it is reusable:* technologically: we store content in XML, which ensures that it works on multiple computer platforms now and in the future.
* legally: the Creative Commons open-content licenses make it easy for authors to share their work - allowing others to use and reuse it legally - while still getting recognition and attribution for their efforts.
* educationally: we encourage authors to write each module to stand on its own so that others can easily use it in different courses and contexts. Connexions also allows instructors to customize content by overlaying their own set of links and annotations. Please take the Connexions Tour and see the many features in Connexions.
Collaboration is encouraged
Just as knowledge is interconnected, people don’t live in a vacuum. Connexions promotes communication between content creators and provides various means of collaboration. Collaboration helps knowledge grow more quickly, advancing the possibilities for new ideas from which we all benefit.
No, the specific ecosystem it is addressing isn’t recorded music but rather academic textbooks, however I hope I won’t be alone in seeing many parallels and in highlighting the relevance of the general case represented by an initiative and platform such as Connexions. It is in my opinion an excellent and clear example of the “because of, not with” paradigm in the information economy. And this is why I keep coming back to this topic, not my concern with the music business per se.
So building on the open Connexions platform, after having closed in 1996, the Rice University Press has relaunched as a digital press:
Rice’s digital press operates just as a traditional press, up to a point. Manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed, edited and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. But rather than waiting for months for a printer to make a bound book, Rice University Press’s digital files will instead be run through Connexions for automatic formatting, indexing and population with high-resolution images, audio and video and Web links.
Users of Rice University Press titles are able to view the content online for free or, thanks to Connexions’ partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, order printed books in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound, full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper.
Authors published by Rice University Press retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions’ licensing agreement with Creative Commons. Additionally, because Connexions is open-source, authors will be able to update or amend their work, easily creating a revised edition of their book.
(from Library Journal): Users will be able to access press content online for free, or they can purchase a copy of the book for download through the RUP web site in a variety of formats. Print-on-demand services, also through Connexions, include various options. Also, authors will retain copyright for their works through Connexions’ licensing agreement with Creative Commons. And because Connexions is open-source, authors can also freely update or amend their own work… “…it’s safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least ten times less than what we’d expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model,” Henry said.
Time to short the giants (Reed Elsevier, Pearson, etc.) of the exceptionally lucrative academic and professional publishing universes? Let’s just say I wouldn’t be loading up the ol’ pension plan with these particular ‘blue chips’…
So why are these incumbents so blind to the tide of change that is inexorably enveloping them? I suspect in many cases it is ultimately a failure of leadership. A failure born of the inability or unwillingness of business leaders to allow access to new and challenging ideas and people, and to - often inadvertently I imagine - to surround themselves with at best people and ideas that are perpetuating not disrupting and at worst a bunch of spineless sycophants. And a natural tendency to stick with what got them to the executive suite in the first place. ‘Dancing with the one that brought ya…’, so to speak. The same failures lead to the seemingly inexplicable inability for most large organizations to adopt powerful new working tools - to answer the question asked by a (somewhat exasperated it would seem) JP:
We’re still stuck in a world of PowerPoint presentations of scorecards and dashboards and RAG indicators, fed by Excel spreadsheets and simple databases, and with considerable manual intervention. Considerable use of derived data. Considerable throwing away of useful information. Considerable scope for sins of omission and commission when interpreting the derived data.
Now most large-scale organisations are under market and analyst pressure to report more accurately and more quickly, and everyone talks about real-time information. Real-time monitoring. Real-time reporting. Real-time events. We talk a good story, but when it comes to true decision support and management information, we go back to using dead-paradigm slow-moving hand-crafted tools.
Why? Maybe it’s because we want to. Maybe it’s because we want the control it gives us, the ability to edit and spin the summaries we create. So we spend enormous amounts of time creating, reviewing, refining and negotiating the content of these carefully hand-crafted artefacts. And we manage to convince ourselves that what we see is real and accurate and transparent. And that the Emperor has Clothes.
As anyone involved in a startup company (with Digital Generation entrepreneurs) today knows, for these business people, setting up a corporate wiki is as much of (if not more of) a no brainer as setting up email addresses or a website (and probably more important than getting office space or mailing addresses etc. - if it weren’t for the constraints of the legal requirements of company formation.) Now I’m not saying their are many Fortune500 companies that still don’t have wikis anywhere behind their firewalls but I doubt anyone (outside the tech/silicon valley companies) at SVP level or above (except the CIO) has edited (or even read) a page regularly.
There is much talk and thinking about potential disruptive business models (including here at The Park Paradigm). There is however somewhat less discussion of the potential of disruptive organizational models to generate successful new competitors in various industries. Indeed, in many service / human capital driven businesses - where success is predicated on bringing and keeping together talented individuals and teams - there is a real opportunity to create powerful new competitors via organisational innovation (rather than through product innovation.) I think.
