The future of books (ahem!)

Interesting conversations abound on the intranet about the future of the books and include several insightful observations plus the usual hysterical posts that sometimes make me wonder if it is necessary to be either shrill or extreme to be heard online. Anyway, my take (for what it is worth) is that there is a good case for moving beyond the either/or premise that seems to characterize conversations about the 'future of books' (a portentous theme if there ever was one). There seems to be a haste to reach conclusions such as 'books are dead' or 'wikis will be dead in the water'. A more level-headed approach may be to view books, MSM, everything 2.0, etc. as part of an information continuum that has space for each one of them, without the imperatives of a zero sum game, and in which each of these media forms shall gradually evolve in response to each other (and borrow traits from each other -- this includes 2.0 as well, which has a lot to learn from traditional media). The real value of information springs not from its form, but its message (regardless of what McLuhan might have said) -that shall never change. The author, individually or as part of a ‘crowd’, is the most vital part of the information loop.

Here's a glance at what the future (and I mean the next 5 years by that) may look like for books and 2.0 tools -

1. Books shall continue to be alive and kicking but change in subtle ways. We’ll see more 'on-demand' distribution; more 'editions' and 'versions' in different market segments shall become the norm; readers shall expect and receive more current and updated texts; there shall often be tighter linkage to 2.0 tools but this shan’t always be led by authors; we’ll see 'merged' online/offline distribution as digital readers become more popular; there will certainly be more multimedia within pages; 'chunk' or ‘module’ based distribution that doesn't force readers to buy the complete book shall become increasingly profitable; and 'custom' books that let reader combine information from different books to create their own books will be passé
2. 2.0 tools shall become more mainstream and lose some (but not all) of their 'edgy' independent elements (4.0 will be the new 'cool'!). Wikipedia will likely remain the flag bearer for 'mass wisdom' but in many ways it may be one of a kind (and gloriously so). 'Branded' wikis (say a WB wiki on development issues) shall proliferate and straddle the line between mass participation and 'expert community' driven initatives; successful blogs shall drift towards corporate ownership with news organizations and others of the ilk 'employing' or 'co-opting' the more credible voices in the blogosphere; all publications will definitely become collaborative to a degree with reader ratings and responses becoming the norm; many bloggers will however remain resolutely independent but only a few of them may attain consistent and influential visibility (with most bloggers writing about their kids and sports schedules); the amateur blogger will be important largely in concert with others as a statistical indicator to take the temperature of the crowd, but not quite as an individual

More on other media elements/tools in another post.

The death of navigation

Time was you would spend weeks, if not months, designing elaborate left hand navigation schemes, figuring out how deep your site should be (3 is best practice but we probably need 5'), and creating clever site maps ('look no scrolling'!). And then the navigation would soon grow too deep or unwieldy or plain unusable and there you'd go again. Has the time come to call the bluff, and move away from sites based on the classical navigation paradigm?

The evidence around us points overwhelmingly towards sites built upon 'progressive', 'user-driven' or 'query driven navigation' rather than drill down navigation systems. Wikipedia, for instance, doesn't really feature any formal navigation system -- you search for a term, and then follow contextual links (a classical navigation system, on the other hand, would force you to go through hierarchies/categories of information and finally take you to a page that 'belongs' to a defined part of the site, unlike the relatively anarchy on Wikipedia in which a page 'belongs' to multiple categories/pathways -- and of course, search never quite works on classical navigation driven websites).

Amazon or Netflix or YouTube or Digg or even New York Times (and others of the ilk) are further examples of sites that feature very little formal navigation schemes -- each click on such sites really launches a search query and leads to a page assembled from multiple content sources (often unique to users). What really drives these sites is the content taxonomy that can have unlimited facets and be experienced in multiple ways, plus task-orientation that is focused on the local and the immediate, rather than 'global' options. There is no 'designer experience' that you must suffer - you instead build your own experience based on who you are and your behavior on the site in the past.

I should however add that while Navigation with a capital N may be dead, task-oriented, modular, contextual 'little navigation' is alive and kicking and in fact never had it better. All the sites mentioned above dedicate extensive attention to 'contextual navigation/content' and interactive options, and place you in little worlds where you have everything you need or want. There give you none of the feeling of being in a big world represented by huge sites that glory in appearing massive (because they have 15 links in the left hand navigation which open 10 sub-menus each and in which bread-crumbs run 3 lines and where sub-sites assail you after every click), and are awash with best practice navigation. The online world is now instead being driven by the 'level 3 internal' pages and 'local elements' you never bothered to design because you were too busy designing the home page and the left hand navigation and countless other global elements.

Twenty-20 cricket - it ain't broke (yet) but two fixes

While cricket's craven aping of baseball is amusing (hear, hear I guess to 'dugouts', 'hitters', 'ballparks', 'hitting' and other baseball vernacular), the ICC World Cup Twenty-20 championship definitely makes the case for adopting at least one of baseball's conventions - separate batting and bowling units, so that batsmen or hitters don't bowl, and the bowlers or pitchers don't bat, and both can be substituted at any point in the game. As I wrote earlier, in much greater detail , this takes the guesswork and luck out of team selection and also guarantees that the most skilful players face each other at all stages of the game (so that nobody has to suffer through tailenders trying to bat their teams out of trouble, charming as this occasionally may be, or batsmen feasting on clearly second-rate bowlers, in the team largely for their batting while better bowlers cool their heels in the pavilion, nee dugout).

The success of the World Cup Twenty-20 championship means that ICC is unlikely to tinker with the rules that currently govern the Twenty-20 format. Teams that want to win consistently may meanwhile try another tactical ploy - play with 11 specialist batsmen, a few of whom may be able to passably turn their arms over. This seemingly contradicts what has ostensibly been the biggest lesson of the World Cup Twenty-20 championship that it is bowlers, rather than batsmen, that eventually make the difference. The lesson is however deceptive and there is only a small difference between the effectiveness of part-time bowlers and that of specialists. The runs conceded per over are only marginally different (take the two games played today as example - Broad, Tremlett, and Sharma suffered about as much as the less regular bowlers in the India-England game, and Pollock and Oram/Martin didn't exactly cover themselves with glory in the South Africa-New Zealand game). The same applies to bowler strike rates and luck or mistakes seem to play as big a role in wickets as skill.

So, is there a case for saying that team packed with 11 batsmen would concede only a few more runs in an innings (rarely exceeding 225, given current rates of scoring) than the current norm, while its batsmen, freed from any need to conserve wickets, would be almost unstoppable (or worth at least 10 additional boundaries per innings)? The math seems to favor the equation and it can't be too long before at least one international team takes the plunge.

Let's improve search - the biggest red herring of all

'Garbage in garbage' out is every IT designer's favorite cliche and provides a ready-made escape route to paper over cracks in content management systems ('it's a great system but folks just don't use it right'!). The sad part however is that classical content systems are designed to accept only garbage and nothing else, and as long as the traditional content management paradigm that content management begins after a document is created endures, we must live with systems that only IT departments love. This is the paradigm where quests such as improving search spring from -- an eternal quest if there ever was one. You will never have 'better search' (whatever that may mean in the absence of a superior baseline than 'like Google' and a constricted definition of search as activities that start with a search box) as long as your content can be dismissed, by IT standards, as 'garbage' in the system even though your content/documents make perfect business sense.

For a content initiative to be successful, designers must start the content lifecycle before or during a content artefact is created and then consider its implications beyond its immediate purposes. Too many content management designers are beguiled by the content infrastructure (storage, workflow, forms, interfaces, etc.) at the expense of the truly meaningful parts of the content lifecycle -- the capture, creation, and consumption of content. The infrastructure is vital, no doubt, but it is in relative terms no more than grunt work, the equivalent of pouring concrete in highway systems. What makes any highway system tick -- the laying of concrete or the design of experiential elements like signage, lane marking, and contours? The traditional systems unfortunately seem to pander to the 'truck in the concrete and we'll worry about the rest later' model.

The real questions that content managers should be asking are -- how can I meaningfully capture what the business generates (without a formal 'capture/upload' step), how do I interpret output without an intervention (don't ask any self-respecting author for a 'summary' after the project's done), how do I capture metadata invisibly while the writer is producing content (any system that asks authors for metadata -- a bureaucratic extortion on par with any -- is doomed to fail), how can I design content quality standards that don't detract from business quality (asking somebody to upload a file in two systems for content reasons just won't cut it), how can I integrate content management processes with business processes (with the latter always taking precedence, with zero content management overhead), how can I reassemble content on demand (canned options suggest the limits of your imagination rather than real user needs), how can I make everything available in all formats and platforms (content and data really must be free), and how can I deduce the purpose of my consumer (this is the real value of search -- show answers before somebody starts a search, a la say, Amazon or Netflix).

The content management experience must begin and end at the desktop and never make its presence felt -- let people get on with their work and take care of their content management needs on their behalf. Don't ask for 'a little more metadata, and can you change the format please'. You'll be surprised how much better search is when it isn't an afterthought any more.

A content management maturity model

Maturity frameworks are standard practice in industry to define how business processes, associated tools, and governance practices mature over time and often serve as roadmaps to determine priority areas of action. Examples of maturity models include the Organizational Project Management Maturity Model, the Information Process Maturity Model and the Capability Maturity Model published by the Software Engineering Institute.

Within content management itself, a maturity framework has been slow to evolve and no widely accepted industry standard models exist yet. Here therefore is a proposed content management maturity model that may be generic enough to be applied to a variety of business contexts and take adequate cognizance of past industry practices and emerging industry trends to be applicable to most environments.

The content maturity model spans these measures –

1. Strategy – what are the components of the unit’s content strategy, and how comprehensively are they defined
2. Governance – what sort of team and organizational infrastructure is available to carry out the content management mandate
3. Processes – how well are content management processes defined in the unit
4. Tools and technology – what tools and technologies are available to the unit to carry out its content management mandate
5. Implementation – how widely are content management practices actually adopted by the unit’s management and team
6. Benefits – what are the measurable results that can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the unit’s content management strategy

Here is the link to the detailed content management maturity model.

The revolt of the conformist

Agitations sweep India once again as the anti-reservation (and pro-reservation) stir gathers momentum and rumors fly on SMS messages and e-mail chains. Once again, all the visible signs and tools of change and transformation are in full force and we wait breathlessly for a new dawn in Indian polity. Unfortunately however, our protestors are not fighting for a new future, they are fighting for the right to ape the dreams of their parents. This is a conformist generation dismayed that change is in the air.

The signs of change that this generation recognizes are the ones that would have struck a chord in their parents’ times - reservations, quotas, disputes over 'merit', and the politics of victimhood. The generation does not recognize that the real issues are elsewhere - they lie in an elitist structure in which millions of people have no realistic shot at a decent education, healthcare, or professional opportunities, with or without reservations. The reservations bill will make no tangible difference to the vast majority of people, upper caste and OBCs alike, because the resource pool they are competing for is infinitesimally small. The real tragedy is not the politics of reservations, but the politics of scarcity, and our misplaced priorities that perpetuate scarcity as a way of preserving social and political dominance.

Two questions to ponder over - why do we want to build/perpetuate a society in which clearing the right exam can make or break your life, and why do we want to focus on exclusive institutions (a la another AIIMS in a city of a politician's choice) when it is less expensive and hugely more beneficial to support more popular institutions (say refurbishing regular government hospitals and creating accountability in their governance). The world that the anti and pro reservation demonstrators are fighting for is one that produces poverty of mind (as our schools languish while we thump our chests over wasteful IITs and IIMs, the ultimate refuge of the supremely conservative and self-serving), poverty of thought (as we peddle borrowed, rebranded ideas and squabble over shibboleths), and the worst, poverty of the body (while we dream of building an AIIMS, where a well functioning clinic would do).

This is a revolt not to rebuild India, but to claim its spoils.

A time for modesty (and a little fear)

These are transformational times in India (at least for some people), and the cockiness is evident on the streets, in the mainstream media, and (nowhere more so than) in the boardrooms of alleged business titans who have perfected the swagger of the noveau-riche. The spirit has percolated to the job market where a vastly inflated sense of self-worth has become the norm, and coarse, blinkered hype has driven away advocates of perspective and proportion.

These thus are treacherous times for India because naked pragmatism has its limitations, the most cardinal of which is the proclivity to set aside bad news and/or never prepare for it. If India is indeed to make the best out of this tremendous opportunity, it must, silly as it sounds, spread a little pessimism around; our backs are still against the wall.

The new Euro-Dollar

I'm obviously not an economist, and dread that the current post reflects naiveté rather than acumen, but I wonder about the economic ramifications of unifying the currencies of the United States, Canada, and the European Union. The currencies have comparable value today (give or take a bit), operate in relatively similar economic environments (though you can quibble against it), and constitute a largely friendly (if occasionally fractious) political bloc. And all these countries, so used to being the most dominant economic forces in the world, now face growing economic challenges from the rest of the world, especially with India and China poised to join the largest national economies of the world.

The western world must gear itself to meet this challenge in a variety of ways, not the least of which is its ability to create, define, and sustain new types of institutions that anticipate change and leave society better prepared to profit from them. Can a unified currency framework be one such institution? Would a common currency reduce inefficiencies in the economy, help widen internal markets, and encourage greater economic responsibility?