Quick Takes is our summary of news and readings in management, sustainability and intelligent enterprise.
New Brynjolfsson piece: “Cloud computing and electricity: beyond the utility model”
In the May 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM, a column by Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School and MIT Center for Digital Business starts this way: “Businesses rely no less on electricity than on IT. Yet corporations don’t need a ‘Chief Electricity Officer’ and a staff of highly trained professionals to manage and integrate electricity into their businesses. Does the historical adoption of electricity offer a useful analogy for today’s innovations in cloud computing?”
Co-authored with Paul Hofmann of SAP Labs in Palo Alto and John Jordan of Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, the piece goes on to say that “While the utility model offers some insights, we must go beyond this simple analogy to understand cloud computing’s real challenges and opportunities. Technical issues of innovation, scale, and geography will confront managers who attempt to take advantage of offsite resources. In addition, business model challenges related to complementarity, interoperability, and security will make it difficult for a stable cloud market to emerge.”
Apple is an example. “Apple’s transition from a perpetual license model to the pay-per-use iTunes store helped it quadruple revenues in four years,” they write. “The tight integration between Apple’s ERP system and the billing engine handling some 10 million sales per day would have been difficult, if not impossible, in the cloud.”
Their conclusion? “If the utility model were adequate, the challenges to cloud computing could be solved with electricity-like solutions — but they cannot.” Instead, “The real strength of cloud computing is that it is a catalyst for more innovation.”
Link:
Thomas Malone on the Climate Collaboratorium project
In the summer 2010 issue of MIT’s Spectrum, Thomas Malone of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence talks about the Climate Collaboratorium project, “which harnesses the collective intelligence of thousands across the world to develop plans for what we can do about global climate change.” The story says that more than 2,000 users have visited the site, with 350 registered users contributing 22 finalized plans.
The Spectrum piece explains that “Google, Wikipedia, Linux, and YouTube already are using pooled brainpower to bring forth new solutions,” and that to best use these systems “we need to better understand them. That’s a main goal of the Center, where the big question is: How can people and computers be connected so that collectively they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before?”
This is a familiar theme for MIT SMR readers. The spring 2010 cover story was by Malone, Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas on “The Collective Intelligence Genome.” It laid out the ways that collective intelligence “genes” can be recombined according to the work required and allow managers to design powerful, useful systems.
Links:
- “New Ways To Amplify Human Intelligence,” MIT’s Spectrum
- “The Collective Intelligence Genome,” MIT SMR
- Climate Collaboratorium
“This is an invitation to you to take part in the creation of this laboratory”
That’s Roberto Suro, a longtime print journalist and a professor at University of Southern California, Annenberg, talking about a new venture at the school, the Annenberg Innovation Lab.
In an April 29, 2010, video from the “Dean’s Series on Sustainable Innovation,” Suro and clinical professor Jonathan Taplin explained that the impetus of the lab was to think about smart ways to create web journalism.
The school says the new venture “will create spaces, both virtual and physical, where USC Annenberg innovators can develop ideas and then eventually present them to the public. The subject matter that falls under the Lab’s umbrella will be broadly and loosely defined as the digital media revolution and its impact on society.”
The school also says that the lab might explore technological innovations and analytical work related to innovation of new business models for media or political mobilization via social networking.”
Links:
Strange but true: facts can make misinformation even stronger
Part of working toward The New Intelligent Enterprise is a willingness to consider new options, new connections and new ways that humans can work in concert with IT.
One of the challenges, though, is likely to be “a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information,” writes Joe Keohane in the Boston Globe. “It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.”
The research is by Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Jason Reifler of Georgia State University and is detailed in their work “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions.”
Nyhan and Reifler’s focus is on the “distinction between being uninformed and being misinformed” as political beings. But their work raises interesting questions for the more general challenge of getting people to accept ideas that are contrary to the ones they already hold.
Links:
- “How facts backfire,” Boston Globe
- “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions” (pdf)
Dilbert: “What part of your gut is the smart part? Is it the stomach lining?”
One of the tenants of The New Intelligent Enterprise is that science can bring a needed discipline to management decisions and that human decisions supported by information technology are better than human decisions made alone.
It’s a theme explored recently by Scott Adams, creator of the comic “Dilbert”:
Exec: “A good leader uses a process for making decisions.”
IT geeks: (“May I take this one?” “Go.” “Make us proud.”)
IT geek: “If making a decision is just a process, why can’t a computer do it?”
Exec: “Because sometimes I have to rely on my gut.”
IT geek: “What part of your gut is the smart part? Is it the stomach lining, or maybe the colon?”
Exec: “I’m taking about instinct. It’s an indefinable leadership quality.”
IT geeks: “Is the indefinable thing like a superstition?” “Or cooties?”
Exec (exasperated): “It’s a process!”
IT geek: “Is that your colon talking?”
Link:
Posted in: crowdsourcing, Innovation, knowledge management, managing information technology, managing technology innovation
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