« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
May 31, 2006
Debating IT's Value
The April 14 2006 web version of CIO Magazine brings this refreshing editorial "Credit Where Credit Is Due" to the ongoing jousting about how to measure the business impact of IT. In the editorial, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson advises that, based on recent research conclusions, we need a new approach to talking about IT and business success.
What is "success"? From the perspective of the goals of the measurer, it is performance versus goals. Not coincidentally, when the business and its stakeholders think of "value" they typically think of performance versus goals. It makes perfect sense, then, that each business would want to recognize its particular success factors -- the aspects of its performance that drives it towards its goals. Naturally these goals may or may not coincide with those of other companies at the same time of reckoning. After all, any given time, two companies might not agree on where they need to try to be, but even if that coincides they might not agree on how to get there.
Good debaters know that a lot rides on how a question is phrased, and the right phrasing about IT's value is "what *kind of* value does IT offer to supporting the success factors of business performance?" This makes it more obvious that getting the success factors right is the first step in measuring IT value. In other words, the reason a tool is valuable is because the work that it's doing is valuable work.
This seems blindingly obvious; and more to the point, it is in no sense a new idea. As a concept, it doesn't need to change at all -- rather, when mulling over IT and trying to explain why we ought to have something, we need to abandon the distracting obsession of using asset metrics instead of using performance logic.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 29, 2006
Strategic Communications in Business-IT Alignment
Recently I was asked to revisit the book "The IT Strategy Management Process" by Eugen Oetringer (who has related work seen elsewhere here on Archestra). Oetringer's broad sweep in this book comes close to making its title a misnomer, as the first summation of the book's import is really about the creation of an internal commerce of knowledge to facilitate governance of IT operational performance.
However, the book's subtitle, "Supporting IT Services Through Effective Knowledge Management", promises a focus that would resolve some of the competition for attention otherwise being waged within its pages by governance, strategy, KM, and change management.
The question then becomes one of what KM's support of IT services has to do with strategy, and why this connection should be considered a management process for IT strategy.
In this book, the best approach to seeing that is to avoid trying to fit the book into other molds of that type. Instead, assume that the book brings whatever it needs, itself -- and chart out the connections.
As shown below in our original take (i.e., not Mr. Oetringer's, and not in the book), the key feature of Oetringer's discussion is the creation of a knowledge repository, for which the book offers an enormous amount of systematically integrated construction detail. The purpose of this repository (at bottom) is to foster the improvement of management's ability to optimize its performance (at top) in terms of solving organizational problems (in between). The organizational problems come in two broad categories -- structure and environment. Our original diagram here highlights in red the challenges in these different areas of concern.
As sorted out through this picture, one major corresponding observation in Oetringer's sweep of issues is that the structural problems suffer from sustained but inadequate responses, while the environmental problems risk going altogether neglected (sometimes unnoticeably). Intellectual capital is the common solution to the pair of problem areas: it most notably supplies strategy and policy in the prior void on the environmental side; meanwhile it improves the structural side.
With the assumption that this fortification "optimizes" I.T. management's ability to generate better services, business can better rely on IT to help successfully adjust to the continuing variability of the business operating conditions.
Given the above, the two obvious questions that the summary diagram raises are:
1. What is the mechanism by which the intellectual capital (generated from the underlying KM) is appropriately "invested" with the returns being effective structural and environmental management practices?
2. What is the mechanism whereby the incorporation of strategy is continually attended as a lifecycle of strategy use and renewal?
Overall, Oetringer's explanations point at communications as the primary "process" providing the mechanisms for these management enhancements. Oetringer's level of thoroughness shows that the communications issues are both pervasive and profound, but one might argue that the communications -- not the IT services -- are the focus of the KM contribution. However, in a success story, the services eventually gain benefit at their location farther up the value stack.
Consequently, from the standpoint of best categorizing the book's discussion, one may find both the title and sub-title of the book still somewhat orbital to the real distinction that it offers. However, as a hierarchical layout of the book's context, the titles do draw you to his discussion through explicit assertions of why you should care.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 28, 2006
Web What.dot.ever
I hadn't been able to put my finger on what has aggravated me so much about the phrase "Web 2.0". But the May 26 posting on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow nailed it.
Usually, the nature of my annoyance with phrases like that is easy to pinpoint: namely, that I didn't think of them first. This aggravation is a healthy Stage 1 denial that is not too hard to flip into grudging respect for someone else while still being entertainingly pissed off in private. But let's face it, grudging respect only gets you points if the subject of the grudge gives a hoot about whether you do or don't come up with it. As Woody Allen riffed so long ago, what's the point of self-awareness if no one else notices that you have it? Although he explained it in the perverse ("I would never join a club that would have me as a member..."), he got right to the point.
Stage 2 denial is more like self-defense. Sometimes the target phrase of my distaste seems like a gratuitous dare, tossed out on the table like casual porn to see who in the room is either dumb enough to drop their cover of propriety and pick it up, or stupid enough to be manipulated into showing their low brow by dwelling on it even when something better was readily available. Resistance to being manipulated like this is identical to my rehearsed disdain of most (but nowhere near all) junk food: if it was my idea to have some, I still wouldn't tell anyone that it was my idea even if they caught me having it. Briefly, I had thought my initial bristling at the phrase "Web 2.0" was mostly of this sort.
But now, thanks to the posting on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow, I'm comfortable with acknowledging a Stage 3 denial of the phrase, in which (this time) it is necessary to proactively ward off intellectual colonialism by fashionistas parading as "thought leaders". Truthfully, even at Stage 3 Denial, where you're blowing energy that could have been spent better elsewhere, there is normally still some entertainment to be had. The way you have fun with it is, for example, to choose a team and root like hell for it -- even though you know another team is probably better. The fun in this is all in the choice being willing, so much so that underdogs are actually more appealing than smug habitual winners. And the point is to not be told how to think. Furthermore, what's fun about rooting for teams whose winning just makes them smug? They're not more right for being winners, they're obnoxious. Ya just wanna smack 'em. The 1997 NY Yankees: "We want you to crave baseball all the time, but only if you're watching us." Whiners.
Parkinson's Law says that "buzz" will always expand to fill the volume of any container it is put in -- including the one between your ears. Insidious. Bad. Like millions of other folks, I just didn't know who coined the phrase "Web 2.0" ... Nor did I care, because, well, I hoped it would soon enough auto-inflate beyond the point of any gravitas. Yet more importantly, right at the beginning I sensed it trying to crowd out other thoughts and airtime around me. Then, Doctorow's Boing Boing post named names. Now I know that O'Reilly Media birthed the beast, and because they chose to be obnoxious about sharing it by handcuffing it to their lawyers, I can't retroactively grant them mere Stage 1 or Stage 2 denial. O'Reilly: "We want you to always be thinking about this as much as possible, but only if we tell you to!" Whiners.
The question we should ask is, if no one ever again said "Web 2.0", would there be even the slightest significant dip in the ability to talk about or understand what might happen next between the environment of the internet and the environment of consumer mentalities profit and non?
Duh, no. For starters, the idea of "the web" is not nearly as interesting now as "the channel", and even monetizing personalization is old news. In fact, the more interesting shift is not from Internetworking 1.0 to Internetworking 2.0 (which probably happened eight years ago), but instead from content personalization to access personalization. Gimme streaming hi-res Tivo'd podcasts of "Lost" and grad-school courses, with voice-activated search -- and no, I do not want to screw around with the plotlines. I do want really thin fold-out widescreens on the iPod, though. And/or a projector button, good enough to size and throw the image on an 8.5x11 piece of white paper.
And here's another "no". Is there any chance that only O'Reilly can explain what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 as well as O'Reilly can? Uhh, no. Further, is there something I now understand better about Web 2.0 than I did yesterday before I knew O'Reilly had anything to do with it? No.
Really, the irony is that because the web 1.0 works pretty well it is much more likely that I could continue to go far not knowing or needing that O'Reilly be involved. Nonetheless, does O'Reilly have a vested interest in the fruits of promoting the attention to the future of cyberspace under the Web 2.0 banner? Sure. But giving them credit for the phrase is way different from giving them cash for it. Not only do I refuse to use the phrase Web 2.0 with anti-litigative quotes around it, I'm basically disinclined to use the phrase at all. So there.
Bonus Beats: For more fatiguing commercialism that makes you crabby, let's dwell on the stupidity of the Beatles suing Steve Jobs. I mean, really. Although, now we have a new twist on the "apples to apples comparison" idea. (What? You mean all this time, they're not alike?) Where we need this one to go is to have Jobs sign up Pez to do Paul McCartney bobblehead iPods, in time for the Christmas rush.
Boing.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Broad Friggin Daylight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
Seeing the "I" in Team
Some popular notions of teamwork promote "selflessness" as a critical success factor. But the reality is that success in execution relies on acceptance of requirements by people who conduct the activity, and those people never want to stop being "themselves". The question is, can they find a self that they prefer, in the context of the group's needs?
Organizations rely on an interesting balance of interests: that people will accept the way management combines its awareness of people as resources with its awareness of people's autonomy.
The basic factors in this balance can be teased out quickly as shown below:
The illustration suggests and even argues that the way a member of the organization operates is subject to at least four different predispositions. This raises the question of whether a member of the organization feels compatibility amongst his or her four different predispositions. Additionally, at any given time, one or more predisposition may dominate. And even further, the predisposition(s) can easily be complicated by the influence of superiors or peers who "cast" him or her in certain positions that may feel more or less tolerable or interesting.
Often, organizations -- or at least their managers -- take it for granted that the member's four predispositions are aligned. The vocabulary of jobs, as seen inthe bottom half of the illustration, promotes the idea that alignment is almost matter-of-fact. At least, the assumption is that the member of the organization is experiencing a level of compatibilty amongst the predispositions that is critically adequate for effectiveness in the work at hand. Just in case, a combination of incentives and penalties wrap around the person, helping them to rationally "bind" the four predispositions together themselves.
But despite these behavior-management tactics, psychology, politics and luck are amazingly effective at changing the balance. Each is an influence with a more or less direct "line of communication" to the four different predispositions.
High-visibility persons intuitively feel that their profile (of predispositions) is under more pronounced scrutiny than do low-profile persons. In effect, the stakes are higher, and this raises the sensitivity that their predispositions have to the influence of psychology, politics and luck. It also raises the level of need to develop or exercise personal skills for managing the predispositions.
But this is not to point out an issue special to the upper ranks. Instead, the observation is more one that proves the point by magnifying it. To the extent that the organization's key objectives depend on personal commitment to goals and to "professionalism", efforts to leverage a balance of predispositions must practice a higher consciousness. They cannot afford to lose sight of the many ways that the person's four predispositions might combine to offer acceptance or resistance to the experience of the initiatives that the person predicts for themselves. The truth is, without the "I", there is not much chance of having a team.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2006
The Performance of Operations Management
Organizations struggling to get a grip on operational performance should remain motivated by the goal of higher performance. But it's not the management of performance that they need to solve; it's the performance of management.
As an activity, management's value lies in its ability to make a significant difference towards achieving the goals of operations. Operations construct support for organizational intents.
But in the bigger picture, there are also various other ways of pursuing the organization's goals. As a form of organizational conduct, when are "operations" needed, anyway?
Operations are distinguished from other forms of construction by their mode and their product. The natural comparison to make against operations is "projects". For example, the mode of a Project is to sequentially develop new assets to conform them to requirements (e.g. an application or a building).
We can also consider "processes". The construction mode of a Process is to sequentially transform existing assets in a way that outputs resources which have been requested (e.g., power from chemicals, or workflow from IT).
But the mode of an Operation is to direct multiple simultaneous functions to cultivate a defined synergy. (Think of it as synchronized energy.) Unlike a project or process, an operation intends to develop important impacts and outcomes by coordinating already developed, ongoing concurrent forces that are independent functions but that, if directed to leverage each other, will generate a collective synergy. Again, the defined synergy is the goal of using an operation.
Appropriately, being an operator -- whether it be driving a vehicle, conducting an orchestra, waging a battle, or whatever -- usually involves multitasking. That is generally familiar territory.
But more to our point, managing an operation is about providing for the means and opportunities to create synergistic coordination.
I.
Where "means" are concerned, we first look at the characteristic key dimensions of management. In the responsibility of management, the idea is that all of the dimensions are to be applied to each one of the the independent forces gathered within an operation, to direct and sustain its coordination with the other forces:
1. Monitoring
2. Analysis
3. Decisions
4. Communications
5. Controls
Normally, the primary goal of management is to be effective , through integrating these five dimensions as a "system" of capabilities.
Organizations like to approach this integration as a "process", in which the group of capabilities run in a closed-loop cycle from capability #1 through #5 and back to #1 again. That process mentality makes things easier to understand, but it may be a mistake. Instead, all five dimensions must continuously be exercised. Why? Because in real life, the opportunities presented to the set of capabilities may be random -- unpredictably multiple, concurrent, and inconsistent. They are never guaranteed the ideal opportunity to execute in the order we might want -- which tells us that at any given time, the output of one capability may not be ready as input for the next.
Consequently, it's hard to know when all capabilities will be productively available to each other. Analogous to a radio signal trying to make it through interference, the moment of successful end-to-end alignment across capabilities can quickly come and go, with a stronger overall evidence at one moment than at another.
Process uncertainty can't be the basis of solving performance uncertainty. Therefore, the essential management effort is not to activate a linear process, but instead to continuously exercise all five dimensions simultaneously, just-in-case -- with persistent vigilance for their moment(s) of alignment.
II.
Along with that persistence, the operations scenario is that all management dimensions are applied to each function of interest in the operation.
In tackling any one function to associate it with another one, each management dimension likely features some capability level that is anchored by some characteristic or preferred method. In each dimension, method is utilized as a type of capability assurance -- yet still not all dimensions contain "comparable" levels of capability at a given time.
Such comparability may be desirable, particularly where it offers more breadth of opportunity (versatility); usually, though, the more important issue is to establish balanced capabilities. Here, balance refers to every capability getting at least enough of what it needs from its interaction or dependency on the others -- to support the corraling of a function towards the targeted synergy.
But just as with the means, variability in coordination opportunities is more the rule than the exception.
Overall, each moment of management in operations features a variety of levels of capability, with each capability facing a different level of opportunity to produce. In the usual scenario, any capability, at whatever level when it faces its target environment, is looking for the complementary input or material that it wants to use and affect, without knowing how much it will find useful. Also, the profile of that moment, as illustrated by the example below, likely differs from a later moment's due to issues such as (but not exclusively) those seen at far right -- and that difference increases the challenge that management faces.
Those observations point out that there are constraints on both the means and opportunity for coordination -- affecting the ability to associate any one function with another. One kind of response that a manager may have to this challenge is to hunt for a "lowest common denominator environment" or scope that can consistently be addressed adequately by all five dimensions of capability. This approach tends to be one that defines a boundary of a recognized "system" -- but the flaw here is that such systems may be arbitrarily "created" based on whatever scope turns out to be manageable at the time.
The risk is that the resulting system might in effect allow some kind of work to be done well, while missing the mark of what work really needs to be done to drive progress towards satisfaction of the organization's actual need. (Classic examples of this problem are often found in arenas other than operations, including good automation of bad processes, completion of projects that will deliver the well-wrought thing at the wrong time, or even employees who will do things only the way "things have always been done around here"...i.e., the way that they have themselves already mastered.) Overreliance on such arbitrary systems is a serious defect in the organization.
It follows, therefore, that improving systems by raising capability levels, to cover greater scope or more important opportunity, is a worthwhile idea not just for versatility's sake. There is no absolute "best" level of capabilities; but capability should be raised to a point of "good enough" and "sustainable" for the operation's purpose. As we would surmise from the illustration, it makes sense to remedy things like mediocre analysis facing oceans of data, but only enough to give the followup decision-making relevant input that it should in turn utilize more promptly.
Yet, responding to the constraints can be done at a more fundamental level. To smooth out the variability of both means and opportunities, and thereby raise the overall prospects of being immediately effective most of the time, management needs to be a practice that pervades all levels of an organization -- not as a specialized role but as a learned behavior. Thi is what really fosters operations.
It doesn't mean that everyone should have the same tasks and duties -- but instead, that everyone should know what it means to conduct their activities from a "managed" perspective and in a "managed" context. This is not, in fact, about making better systems, but it is about making the success of operations more systemic, with success being good coordination of functions towards the targeted synergy. An example of this is a customer service desk (function) that easily cooperates with accounting (another function) to raise customer satisfaction (operation) during a testy product support call, by quickly determining that a free replacement is affordable. Coordinate functions and save the patient...
III.
In the abstract, we know what synergy refers to: a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But concretely, the "defined synergy" that management achieves with an operation is competency.
Another easy way to observe this overall effect is to consider the common example that getting a better coach can cause the "same" old team to win more than it used to. What happens here?
- Getting a "better coach" is a move that improves (sometimes suddenly!) the performance of management.
- The higher-performance management brings about stronger coordination of the team's functions, from its supporting services and facilities on through to the interaction of the roles of its players.
- The outcome is better execution on demand, with a higher frequency of significant payoff.
In that example, improved management is handily packaged in the person of the experienced coach; but the point is that the dimensions of management are better exercised, which makes the difference.
However, within the global alignment that the management cultivated, success really occurs and persists because each participant generally takes on the perspective of the need for and effect of alignment -- which orients their own individual interest and capability in monitoring, analyzing, deciding, etc. In effect, understanding and supporting the meaning of what they do allows better leveraging of their activities across roles and functions, whether requested or offered.
In light of all the above, some notable alternative strategies for production performance, such as collaboration and self-organizing systems, clearly reflect the emerging recognition of what an "operation" can accomplish in circumstances where other techniques do not or cannot successfully apply. It makes sense to examine them as two instances or flavors of operation -- ones that actually are not even particularly exotic examples, and that share the same interesting key characteristic: a desirable level of competency that arrives outside of the other more usual approaches. We should expect that their success, when pursued deliberately, can be accounted for fairly well in terms of the performance of their management -- as already outlined in this discussion. That is, if the desire is to increase performance, and approaches like collaboraton or other flavors of operation are considered, then it is important to recognize that the performance of management itself is still likely why those approaches can work.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2006
Seeing versus Looking
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company The New York Times
November 28, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section II; New Jersey; Page 40, Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk
ART; PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCUPTURE IN NEWARK
By JOHN CALDWELL
NEWARK - AT THE City Without Walls gallery here are two photography exhibitions of much more than usual interest. And a few blocks away, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is an opportunity to see the recent metal sculpture of Paul Sisko, one of the best-known artists from this area.
The exhibition at City Without Walls will continue through Thursday, and that at the institute through Friday. Of the photographers, Malcolm Ryder is perhaps the most accomplished, although at first glance he seems dedicated to recording the most ordinary and meaningless scenes.
All of his photographs on view here -they are in color - were made in Arlington, Va. Yet, they are remarkably unspecific, so much so that even someone who has spent his entire life in that suburb of Washington would be hard-pressed to recognize his hometown.
These pictures, in fact, could have been taken almost anywhere in the United States, and that is an important aspect of Mr. Ryder's vision.
What he is trying to show us - with conspicuous success, I think - is most apparent in a series of three untitled shots of parked panel trucks.
At first, after noticing the formal skill with which Mr. Ryder selected his images and his well-nigh perfect technique in making the prints, we are at a loss to understand just why be has chosen to record these particular images.
Then we notice the overwhelming blankness of the scene, the vast blue of the sky and the rental-agency markings on some of the trucks, and we begin to suspect the artist of making a point.
Yet, there is no conspicuous message anywhere, no particular beauty or tawdriness. There is just exquisite color, the total absence of human beings and an odd stillness.
Mr. Ryder could have made some trite point about the emptiness of life; however, judging from his other works, he is much too subtle for that. Rather, in the most laconic and specific fashion, he is celebrating the textures and feel of the real, ordinary world around us.
In another example, we see a slightly rusty Dodge Dart parked against a fence on an empty street, an inexplicably moving scene. Again, we see the most ordinary suburban house with flower beds in front
However, Mr. Ryder refuses to emphasize the banality of the scene. In a sense, he is too serious for that; instead, he forces us to bring our own messages to his work, to take our own readings of the reality that he records and we inhabit.
One of the photographs seems to focus on meaningless street signs, another on pruned rose bushes and a child's abandoned toys. The message here is that there is no message, no easy poetry, no sentiment What we do have is a surprising vision from an artist who celebrates things for what they really are and how they actually look.
As we study Mr. Ryder's photographs, we discover that he has renewed our connection with the visual world around us, which is a considerable achievement indeed.
David William Riccardi's black-and-white photographs, which also are on view at City Without Walls, seem less conventional than Mr. Ryder's, both in terms of form and subject matter. Many of them are beachfront scenes of boardwalks and amusement arcades, including some at the Jersey Shore.
Mr. Riccardi is not afraid to experiment with his camera, even to the point of moving it as he takes the photographs or adopting odd points of view. Sometimes this works very well, as in a picture of an overweight, middle-aged woman wearing a rather ugly print dress.
The woman was photographed from the waist down as she walked along a sidewalk. The hem of her skirt is coming loose, with the string hanging from it serving as the focus of the picture.
This detail is telling, and without seeing the woman's face we know something about a lifetime of small failures. Another time, we see a young, poorly dressed couple walking along a boardwalk under threatening skies. Beside them is an even younger girl, perhaps the young woman's sister.
Again, the artist's vision is poignant, and with a single image he bas managed to suggest a world of little hope and closed-off possibilities.
Other photographers have used similar subjects for equivalent ends. Mr. Riccardi is by no means as original as Mr. Ryder; yet, he is a good artist and almost magical in his ability to imbue his images with power.
City Without Walls is at 140 Halsey Street, in downtown Newark-It is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 AM. to 6 P.M. and Saturdays from noon to 4 P.M.
The New York Times, November 28, 1982
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 5, 2006
Does IP Matter?
When information of all kinds is so continuously ubiquitous, then what difference does it make who it originally belonged to?
With just the slightest yet obvious nod to one Nicholas Carr and the raw nerves he plucked with his essays on "Does I.T. Matter?", we lean onto the parallel slippery slope of I.P. or "intellectual property".
Topic: we know what the point of being "intellectual" is. But what is the point of the "property"? What difference does it make, and why should it?
With the internet making re-production of textual and visual statements such a "no brainer" effort, it's worth noting that a lot of what has ever been stated is just junk, about which in turn rears the question "who cares, anyway?"
This relative circumstantial worth, dependent on who cares, is the most interesting test for framing the value of so-called intellectual property. But it doesn't explain where the value comes from, which is the bigger part of the story.
That is, where the notion of "value" is involved, It's not that the statement in an intellectual property is smart; rather, it's that someone had to make it make a difference:
1 - the statement is a produced artifact; and,
2 - the artifact risks exposure; and,
3 - the exposure risks usage; and,
4 - the usage risks generating benefit or liability.
Each of those four conditions is a point that someone may care about quite anxiously but perhaps not a whit. Regardless, each point offers an opportunity for some kind of claim on merit to be credited to someone.
In effect, each offers a type of value -- which makes people want ownership of what they did. Respectively, they would be:
1 - producers,
2 - promoters,
3 - providers and
4 - sponsors (investors).
Normally, what looks lke fighting over property is really fighting over the credits. Why? Because the credits are what is supposed to justify a claim to any benefits. The trick is to understand which benefits ought to be claimable due to the different credits.
I.
Starting with the notion of having an "artifact" goes hugely towards dividing sense from non-sense about I.P.
By definition, an artifact is a product of labor. For those of us who take thinking to be an act of labor, it's easy to take even thoughts as artifacts; we save and store them as "ideas", and we really appreciate the mystique of solo originality attached to them. After all, that is the initial basis of making claims of artifact ownership. But on close inspection...
- "Solo" need not mean only an individual person, but instead just a singular distinctive workgroup of any size. The basis of the group's distinction is the most critical point of reckoning!
- And, in an unrestricted environment of information exchange, "original" thinking (i.e., idiosyncracy) does not necessarily result in "original" (i.e., new and unique) ideas. There are just too many thinkers. Nor must original ideas come from original thinking -- since sometimes they come instead from luck, mere observation, or someone crafting the same thing as someone else before but better enough to finally be notable.
This deflation of mystique points out two things:
- our voluntary labor may or may not hold the slightest bit of anyone else's interest, although we may lay claim to the labor regardless; and that...
- the product of our labor might be interesting more due to its availability than to its origin.
So if we will next desire compensation for exposing the artifact, there are those two issues to consider. What is not supported, yet, is getting beyond desire -- to the notion of having a "right" to be compensated. At this point in things, unless there is a contract that says the labor or the availability must be paid for, then in fact there is no requirement for anyone to offer any compensation.
So this starting set of "artifact" issues sets the general tone of "Who Cares?" ... That is, we might go through the motions of formalizing some labor product as an "artifact" in order to give its distinctive identity some external recognition, but even if we do, who cares?
II.
The next step, risking exposure of the artifact, often kicks in when we decide that we either want to package the artifact or distribute it. Aiming at determining value, the defining questions here are also pretty basic:
- who is the packaging and/or distribution intended for? And...
- who is doing the packaging and/or distribution?
In both cases, the answer can be "no one". That is, as the baseline scenario, let's imagine first of all that there was no intent by the producer of the artifact to package it, nor to distribute it, to anyone. Exposure of the artifact could still occur due to chance or exploration. The worst case of exposure would be from illegal surveillance or in a sense "trespassing" -- but to stress the key point here, avoiding such visibility and access starts with recognizing whether a venue is "exposing" and it continues with not putting or leaving the artifact in a place like that. So, think of it as privacy, prudence, or whatever: if exposure is unintended by the producer, what if a second party discovers the artifact and decides to do something with it -- namely, to package and/or distribute it? What value is about to be created or destroyed? And why do they need permission?
First, distribution. Distributing the artifact can be done with or without packaging, but let's ask whether there is value to distribution without packaging. If availability of the artifact to broader discovery (exposure) is important, the answer is "yes"... That judgement of "importance" immediately points to the influence of a context (again!). Exposure is a possible outcome of distribution, but again, who cares? Distribution per se may have no discernable value. But discovery is the flip side of exposure, and the value of distribution is not derived from the artifact itself but instead from the occasion that a discoverer gets something from the experience of discovery.
Meanwhile, there's packaging. An argument clearly exists for assigning new merit (however slight or substantial) to the labor of the packaging; the packaging also contextualizes the artifact and, by definition, generates a value in terms of that context. The issue is not whether the packager should be credited with that value creation, because obviously the answer there is "yes".
But should that packaging credit mean anything contentious about the claim to the artifact which is made by the originator of the artifact? There is no logical reason why it should. The roles here are distinctive. The reality is that the artifact's originator may or may not be valuable to the packager, but the value of the packager's packaging is not dependent on, derived from, nor part of the originator's claim to merit. What is clearly possible, however, is that an originator who has also done packaging might contest a second packager's claim to credit for the packaging, if the second packager's packaging is too similar to that of the originator's first.
This is the right moment to bring up an interesting and usually overlooked fact: value and worth are different. Let's say that similar packaging by two parties has approximately the same value in a given context. It might still be true that the level of value -- as opposed to the fact of having value -- might be either extremely low or might be better. Two parties might fight over who should get the credit for the value, but fighting over the value is not the same as fighting over the worth. One party might be able to use the packaging's distinctiveness (value) much more effectively than another to achieve greater worth from the value.
So that gets us to the usage issue, which is the third key aspect after the production of the artifact and the exposure of it. However, note that what is now in question is the usage of the artifact's exposure -- not the usage of the artifact itself.
III.
Espionage, gossip, or "intelligence" tries to make hay with what it discovers, just like newspapers. That is, for its value, It pursues a certain effect from its uses of the exposure of the artifact -- regardless of what exactly was discovered. Since the "haymaking" is possible independently of the particular discovery (which, after all, may have been pulled off by someone else), being credited with the effects of using the discovery is not inherently contentious with other credits elsewhere for production and exposure.
IV.
Ultimately, the effects of using the exposure have potential benefits and liabilites. Circumstantially, a party may have "rights" of some kind to be the provider of benefits or "obligations" to be the responsible party for liabilities. The question is how these circumstances are governed, and who agrees to honor those controls. For example, we know that customers pay vendors to be rsponsible for the quality of products offered, and they pay contractors to be responsible for what their subcontractors do. But those vendors and contractors may hold a disclaimer or waiver instead, which just points out that their role is not to create the effectiveness (as was the role in the previous step) but instead to capture it for the customer.
V.
Those descriptions distinguish the four different roles played in the availability and effect of the artifact. In each role, there is a sense of ownership to be understood, but what is evident is that the ownership pertains to the responsibility for certain kinds of action.
Claims to credit for the actions can readily be distinguished, which in effect distinguishes different kinds of value created. But the worth of the value(s) is typically circumstantial, and the claim to part of the worth makes sense only when the particular type of value has demonstrably created the worth in question.
Any time that some type of value can be eliminated from the ability to generate the given level of worth in question, the party claiming credit for that type of value cannot use it to lay claim on the worth. By process of elimination, only the type of value critical to the worth points at the rightful claim on the worth.
The other big issue usually at hand, though, is whether a party that created some value had permission to do so. This should be established by the explicit publication of enforceable rules that withhold or deliver the effects of one party's labor to other parties. As opposed to credit (in the way that was just discussed), the boundary established by permission is externally granted -- i.e., virtual, not inherently factual. In the end, the significance of the notion of "property" lies in understanding that this permission boundary is a convention.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack