eBusiness and the DIY culture
Thu, Nov 16 2006
By Jonathan Oxer
I had two very interesting experiences last week.
The first was a baby step toward fulfilling a dream I've had for a long time: learning to fly. After years of not really taking the idea seriously I got in the car and drove out to the local airport, went through a pre-flight briefing covering an introduction to the physics of flight along with the basic aircraft controls and their primary and secondary effects, and spent about 45 minutes in the air getting the feel for how it works in reality.
In some ways the whole experience was exactly what I expected and in some ways it totally wasn't. For one thing the aircraft itself was very "agricultural". If you think about the build-quality of a typical car you'll realise that the way everything is fitted together and the level of attention to aesthetic detail is very high. The dash is perfectly moulded and all instruments are neatly labelled. Everything is clean, and if you did something silly like break part of your dashboard somehow you would have it replaced with a brand new identical piece and the car would look exactly "like new" again. Likewise if you dinged the door you would take it to a smash repairer who would fix it so well that you couldn't even find where the damage was done.
In contrast to that the training aircraft I flew had a repair that consisted of a piece of metal rivetted into place on the wing. Switches on the instrument panel were labelled with stickers. A crack in the plastic side window had been reinforced by drilling tiny holes along both sides of the crack, looping wire through them and twisting it tight. The pre-flight check included removing the fuel cap on each wing and poking a piece of wood marked with indicator lines into the tank to check the fuel level.
Now I'm sure these are very well maintained aircraft. The instructors know their lives depend on them and each aircraft is physically inspected prior to every flight: part of the drill was working all the way around the aircraft and checking that a whole bunch of things were working properly, such as indicator lights, control surfaces, hinges, and undercarriage, and the pre-flight checklist is very extensive. Imagine if every single time you drove your car you first had to check that every indicator was working, test the fuel to make sure it wasn't contaminated, check your tire tread and pressure, and do about 26 other checks then sign a logbook stating that you'd done so. It would take 15 minutes just to get out of your carport but you'd certainly have an intimate knowledge of the condition of your car.
So I was left with the overall impression of a very strong DIY culture in the aviation community. It might sound like I'm being critical of the state of the aircraft but my opinion is actually quite the opposite. The value that is obviously placed on a deep understanding of how the aircraft works and exactly what condition it is in gave me a lot of confidence that I wasn't going to suddenly fall out of the sky.
Then a few hours later I did a talk at the monthly Linux Users Victoria meeting titled "Software Freedom: Pragmatic Idealism?" where I examined the role of Open Source software in fostering an innovative local ICT industry and the macro-economic impact on metrics such as the national balance-of-trade.
Of course there's no group with a stronger DIY culture than the Open Source community. The entire Open Source software development paradigm is about looking inside the magic box to understand why and how it works, and being allowed to modify it until it does exactly what you want it to do rather than being forced to just accept software "as it comes" with no choice in the matter. The premise of my talk was that by encouraging a return to the "looking under the hood" roots of computer-related training at school level we could build a much more innovative and stronger local ICT industry by turning out not just technology consumers but also more people with intimate knowledge of how modern technology works internally. I believe that the high level of technical literacy we associate with younger generations is largely an illusion: younglings today may be very gifted when it comes to using technology such as mobile phones and instant messaging but they have remarkably little understanding of how technology actually works internally. They tend to treat gadgets as handy but inexplicable magic black boxes.
So what does any of this have to do with eBusiness?
Quite a lot actually.
Early eBusiness adopters were the DIY type as a matter of necessity. There were no "out of the box" solutions to putting a business online so they had to make everything up as they went along, experimenting and creating the components required to put new systems into place. Early adopters developed an intimate understanding of exactly how their eBusiness worked and were hands-on right from the start. Early content management systems were custom-written for each site so the cost of deploying them was extremely high, but over time general-purposes CMSs were written that could be used over and over again without modification and deployed much more simply for a new eBusiness.
That in turn decreased the need for a technical understanding of how eBusiness infrastructure works. Taken to an extreme it's even possible to get a "website in a box" solution that creates an entire site using a cookie-cutter approach, and many people now just sign up for a service such as an eBay Store and load up their products with absolutely no knowledge of eBusiness fundamentals. eBusiness technology has become a magic black-box that people with little or no technical knowledge can learn how to drive without learning about what goes on behind the scenes.
The upside of this technology commoditisation is that you can spend less time reinventing the wheel, but the downside is that a cookie-cutter website looks and feels just like thousands of others and isn't tuned to the specific requirements of your business.
And a major side-effect is that the focus has now changed from the delivery technology to the actual content, which is exactly as it should be.
But not just any old content. User-driven content.
In the last eBusiness News ("Internet / TV convergence is here, and it's not what we expected") I wrote about the rise of online video content and how the traditional distribution pyramid is being replaced with a bowl of relationship spaghetti. David Boloker (CTO of IBM's Emerging Internet Technologies Software Group) pointed out to me afterwards that I overlooked an important point: user-driven video content mashups. He's absolutely right, and this really highlights the change in focus from delivery technology to user-driven content where the value of a website or service is in the content that has been contributed directly by users.
Looking at the Top 25 US websites for October 2006 as reported by Hitwise this trend is extremely obvious. The top site for October was relationship site MySpace, and others in the Top 25 include eBay Motors, You Tube, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, and a variety of Yahoo! and Google sites that all heavily feature user-generated content. Not one of the sites in the Top 25 could be considered a traditional "we publish our content, you just read it" website. Every site in the list is in some way designed to act as a third-party facilitator to connect people to each other or to help them publish their own content.
What does this mean for your eBusiness?
It means that you shouldn't just sit back with an operational website and expect that it will keep working for you indefinitely. Basic content management is largely a solved problem, but the early adopters have now moved way past that into the realms of relationship enablement, business process management, and business process integration, and that's where all the hot action is right now.
The rules of the game are always changing and you need to be hands-on with a deep understanding of how your eBusiness works. Don't treat it as a magic black box - take off the lid and really learn how things work and how you can maximise your business success. That doesn't mean you need to understand the underlying technologies but it does mean that you should have a DIY attitude when it comes to understanding your eBusiness processes and your customers. In fact don't even think of them as "customers" anymore: think of them as participants, with your eBusiness as the enabler. Build a community, not just a customer list.