Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com)consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.
The irony is that, in experimenting with various ways to augment our attention with useful and targeted information, we may actually be reducing, not increasing, our ability to pay attention to the really useful information we need to interact with the people and the world around us.
The data presented in Kevin Roose’s The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Trust, It’s About Desperation doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between a deteriorating job situation and the rise of “sharing economy” services like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Correlation isn’t the same as causation.
Selling new tools is easy. Figuring out how to orchastrate all the resulting business process changes — including better coordination in customer support management — is more difficult.
Eventually management notices the disparity. So it will be with Google. This will be accelerated when advertising revenue starts to flatline and pressure emerges within Google to start charging for individual services that are currently subsidized by advertising. Stuff like Glass and driverless cars won’t help the situation. Nor will a walled-garden-in-disguise that pretends to be a social networking tool.
One assumption is that a core set of project planning and task assignment information exists that can serve as a baseline model for structuring how data are organized, displayed and updated. Regarding the last point: the app needs to have the ability not just to organize and display information, it also needs to make it easy for participants to update and report status on actions and deliverables.
The bottom line: in a post-smartphone era, the more we know where our data are and how they are used the better off we are. Network companies — or governments — that resist making such data more accessible will be disadvantaged in the marketplace. Users of networks that ignore the interests of their customers will likewise be disadvantaged.
In the world I live in there are still a lot of people who are satisfied with having “just a phone.” Still, what passes for “just a phone” these days is more powerful than the combined computing power devoted to the Manhattan Project, the Air Force/NASA X-15 program, and the early Space Shuttle Orbiter’s primitive onboard computers.
I remember being a bit surprised at how easy it had been to “weed” the collection of harcover and paperback book we had built up over the years. Now I’m reading a book — a “real book” printed on paper — in amongst the books and various documents I’m also reading via my Kindle devices and software. Reading this physical book is a pleasure so I thought I would put some of my thoughts about the experience in writing.
What drives me crazy about the debates around Google Glass is the groups of people who keep on saying, “Society will adjust. People will get used to it. It’s no different than what we have now with omnipresent security cameras and smartphones in every pocket.”
You can’t follow the technology press without being aware of Google’s still under development Glass project. Recently a Verge video was published that illustrates how the video and information display functions of glass might operate. Geeks everywhere responded with oohs and aahs.
It’s no secret that mobile technologies are disrupting traditional IT management approaches. Industry analysts such as Gartner acknowledge this. But what’s the link between the public’s increasing use of mobile technologies and the governments agencies at all levels are making their programs — and their data — more open and accessible?