Understandably, quality management is not outranked by any other type of service management attention. But where managers depend on measurements, the most common problem is a confusion about what measurements are "quality" measures and which might be unnecessary or better suited to a different management concern. The most frequent point of confusion is with performance management.

To distinguish the two, first it is worth noting that many measurements are important to both. But as facts within a point of view, these "shared" measurements fit differently into the two perspectives.

Quality is a percentage of a level of performance achieved both without defects and within the intended structural design of the acting entity. In comparison, performance itself is a level of operation achieved versus a target level of operation. As an example highlighting the difference and the relationship, high performance may be obtained from an acting entity, but because the quality of the entity is poor, the entity may break down or be distorted by the effort to reach and sustain the high performance. Logical management approaches aim to synchronize performance expectations with identifiable levvels of quality.

In overall operations, services underpin the performance of both products and processes, while the services themselves are also managed for their own performance. Different contexts then contribute the conditions that point those performances at quality considerations.

Having a strategy means taking a position from which operations will extend in logical directions and relations. In that sense, the strategy dictates a structure. This structure must function as an environment within which to comply to the strategy. Within the environment, certain behaviors are critical to the strategy by forming an alignment to the sustainability of the strategy. This means that the strategic requirements of the environment are for the environment to sustain the mandated logic of the operations.

No wonder, then, that strategy often precipitates re-organization. Organizing that environment is an architectural concern. Architecture creates the "spaces" in which behaviors conform to generate the impacts that function as the support for the strategy.

Spaces created by architecture are designed spaces, and the purpose of the design is to specify the characteristics of the space that are necessary to assure the needed functions (which are the impacts of behaviors).

The essential behaviors pertinent to a strategy are generic, but for any given strategy the behaviors are specifically related. This reflects the reality that strategy does not define behaviors (which are autonomous, portable and reusable) but instead defines their relevance. Behaviors typically needed for strategy include, for example:

• reconnaissance
• analysis
• communication
• production

These behaviors may be understood as "domains", and within a domain the activity can occur across a "range" of various disciplines, locations, resources, events, processes, and other phenomena.

The importance of acknowledging the domains and range is to understand that at minimum there is, for a strategy, an architectural framework that maps out commitments to some domains and commitments to some of the range. This framework is readily envisioned as a 2-dimensional matrix, but the likelihood is that more than two dimensions will be needed to sufficiently articulate both current commitments and the progression of successive commitments over time.

Architecture also is responsible for designing the spaces (the intersection of domains and ranges) in such a way that they facilitate the progressions, not just the moment. This is, for example, what is meant by saying that a flexible architecture is a prerequisite to strategc agility.

We can apply the concept of an architecture of a strategy to the scale and activity of an "enterprise".  This architecture is especially important to an enterprise because it is the nature of an enterprise to set external boundaries and internal relations that in both cases cross over multiple significant time periods and multiple discrete organizations. Enterprise Strategy does not simply mean "the enterprise's strategy" -- but much more significantly and primarily it means "strategy that enables continuity and persistence of operation as an enterprise".  To that concern we secondarily add the context of particular goals being addressed by the selection and plan of a strategy dedicated to external impacts (being, namely, where you're going to be and why you're going to be there).

Understanding the order of precedence of those two issues is esential to understanding that the relationship of strategies to enterprises is that they need each other but that the relationship may still fail or succeed. This relationship outcome usually has only some predictable factors, and uncertainty is a built-in characteristic of strategies but not of their good architecture. The risks of a bad strategy can include the risk of disrupting the viability of the enterprise, and the benefits of a good strategy can include enabling enterprise status where it had not existed before.

The Archestra Topical Framework (June 14, 2005) is the central reference framework of the work that appears on this website. As a reference it may be used as an instrument -- to contrast or confirm, extend or constrain, and describe or dissect the subjects, topics and propositions about strategy that come from theorists, analysts and practitioners, presented in their work.

(This text, and the Archestra Frameworks, are copyrighted by Malcolm Ryder.)

Meanwhile, scheduled for late 2010, the book from strategic technology architects Greg Suddreth and Whynde Melaragno called The Path to Real Business Transformation discusses "dynamic synchronization... a rigorous, business-case-driven collaboration between the business-process owners and their IT counterparts." For this, the framework of problem-solving is what they call business architecture.

"Innovation" always has an aura that suggests the big moment of arrival of the new. But getting to utilize the new is the only way that value is derived from innovation, and utilization requires integration into, and synchronization of,  the operational scheme of things. This emphasis on synchronization firmly declares that the problem of follow-through on business strategy is fundamentally about coordinating the moving parts.

Anyone who has tried to manually shift gears in a moving vehicle knows that synchronization has two operator-controlled aspects: time spent in the gear, and timing of gear changes. In a competitive context, where time and timing are pre-planned and managed for variances and circumstantial adjustments, this plan is even seen as a strategy itself. The performance level of the plan's execution, especially in complex or volatile environments, is then most often seen as "agility". Achieving agility is, for that reason, a common business objective related to scoring business goals.

Suddreth and Melaragno further state that "business architecture" is developed through a process that defines and institutes long-term change within a framework of strategy (for example of goals, related positions and directions), planning (for example, of resources), and execution (for example, of services). They go on to point out that multiple business areas must be complementary in the context of solving a defined business problem.

To assure proper pursuit of that agreement, it becomes necessary to appreciate the difference between innovative business uses of IT versus business use of innovative IT.

• In the former case, the emphasis is on the business-level understanding of how moving parts might be aligned in a new way.
• In the latter, the point is to introduce moving parts that have a different set of characteristics and interactions than those typically tried before.

From the point of view of these authors, the former issue is a concern of business architecture; and the latter issue is a concern of IT architecture, in which (among other things) the business architecture is  "physicalized" according to Suddreth and Melaragno.

Given those points above, it would seem that the challenge is to prioritize business innovation, then leverage business architecture to identify and incorporate IT innovation that can be scheduled within IT architecture for a reasonable chance of sustained synchronization.

Following requires accepting an extrinsic agenda.

Acceptance requires accomodating the agenda within a disposition.

The disposition is a point of view from within a network of influences.

Change management must generate a disposition favorable to leadership. 

It is said, "Individuals do not evolve; individuals change, and populations evolve."

Although corporations are in a better position to maximally exploit new web environments, the common verification of web evolution is most strongly felt at the individual user's level, where over time the following distinctive progressions have occurred as "status quo" of reasonable expectations and the baseline expectation of using the web. In the original stage, digitization supported broadcasting; then in the next stage browsing supported the read/write web; and bandwidth pulled up the third stage. In that representation, key bundles of capability reached a critical minimal maturity at each stage and together set operational expectations.

Tracking such progressions always raises the question of "what next?" -- and in this case the most important next stage will find enough overall functionalities and interoperabilities such that an entire system -- and ecosystem -- for a given subject domain can be affordably traversed on the web by the individual user. This "vertical integration" means that the web will cease to be an undifferentiated "superhighway" and a series of outlets or malls, and instead become the virtual world of rich, semantically inter-activated media in which lifelike simulation will become comprehensive daily personal production: not just an internetwork of information but an internetwork of targeted special interest.

Text and images copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

This is where "innovation" gets tricky. It isn't the ability to manage the change that starts the trickiness. The tricky part starts with the decision about "doing innovation" in the first place. Innovation can take place in a way that amounts to being very good at something unnecessary, and it is exactly that risk that challenges would-be innovators -- unless there is a compelling logical justification of the innovation beforehand.

Generally, there are two compelling scenarios: competition, and recovery. Either one drives the desire and need to change rather than to stay put. The temptation is to immediately ask the questions, "competing with who?" or "recovering from what?" but having those answers does not make the value of an innovation assured. A predisposition to change will begin to influence a variety of things, which in effect need to respond not to the high-level goal but to related objectives.

The closer examination of needs seen in the framework here addresses the difference in perspective between what is important and what is also urgent. Circumstantial urgency often has the look and feel of importance, but there should be a deliberateness that is not overly reactive at the expense of being smart. Furthermore, the intent should not be merely to be different, but to be better. Better should mean greater satisfaction of prioritized need.

All innovation, by definition, introduces something new. But the complexity of even an ordinary business means that there are many different things that might be included -- and effort spent on the wrong things can easily translate into economic and political difficulties instead of benefits. Drilling down to more specificity, the following points out the basic types of opportunities to innovate. The role of the innovator is to produce something different, so the key terms that point to innovation opportunities are likewise terms that indicate the value of "products". 

 All text and images Copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

(All text and images copyright 2009, 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra)

Emphasizing the obvious, when a business strategy works, business activities have impact. But it is more precise to say that the activities make the impact -- either by creating circumstances that allow it, or by directly causing it. So, the important way to start thinking about strategic "success" is to start with the practicals: activities mean tasks, and staff comes to work to do tasks with tools.

This makes it obvious why tools like I.T. (information technology) are not just helping business, but instead are an integral part of the "body" of business, as much as are people. Said differently, I.T. management has reasonably been a critical concern of the management of the internal "corporation" of the business.

While "internal IT" has evolved dramatically through several generations of computing, the essential organization of people and "IT" has not really changed: IT is part of the environment in which work is done.

Companies that do not already have a "cloud" environment do already have an environment subject to a vast array of managerial concerns that address costs, engineering, and other factors that are decisive of the range, reach and utility of the environment's functionality in actual use. The different types of concerns also cut across the "levels" of structuring that compose the environment, which means that the overall management complex can be difficult to balance; when balance more or less exists, no one is especially excited to upset it -- and moving from that status quo to something different easily runs into a lot of resistance. 

 Yet in general, the reasons to make the move from a non-cloud environment to a cloud environment are business reasons: the two primary issues ultimately addressed by IT management of the work environment are economy of scope and economy of scale. If either one cannot be solved and sustained to the business's satisfaction, then there will be changes made of some kind. Economy of scope must be considered first, because it more closely relates to the reality of variety in the business's requirements. Normally, an internal non-cloud environment is tamed by managing the three key factors of its dynamics: demand, operation, and capacity. Management approaches focus strongly on the interrelationship of the three. Even the most general schema involves the following approach (as diagrammed)for packaging the Users'  environmental leveraging as services:

Put simply, without capacity, demand cannot be met, and without operations, there is no way to meet demand with capacity. Assuming this challenge is adequately addressed, there is always the matter of whether any of those key factors will change, so everyone is concerned about changes getting the upper hand. That set of conditions precedes the actual achievement level of economies of scale. Without economy of scale, the structural components of the environment do not "add up" well in the business perspective.

Good design helps to bring resources that are capable of supporting adequate economy of scale, but the actual deployment and utilization of the resources is what finally drives, and surfaces as, "economy". If not attended in a mature way, the dynamics of economy are more difficult to manage than the attributes of systems that can run at large scale: 

IT strategy must be seen not as a monolithic pronouncement but instead as a continual practice with which use of information technology is tailored to the business use of information.

Business use of information falls into many separate but inter-operable domains including (but not limited to) communications, learning, analytics, research, and history -- along with production, and then of course, process management.

When we say "business strategy", the assumption is that there is a type of influence that the business seeks to have on its community of stakeholders and in its operating environment. This is an influence that depends on a position that the business can establish for itself, relative to other functional or operational entities that are either contiguous or party to the community and environment. The strategy is made up of the intent and plan to take the position for the purpose.

The use of information corresponds to the strategy, but -- not all information usage is about the strategy, except in the sense that it needs to either allow or cause the strategy to succeed. This means that the usage itself needs to succeed given the particular method of usage and the actual information itself.

IT strategy must concern itself with what methods can be combined with what kind of information, to provide the opportunity that the business strategy needs, by creating effects that are either preconditions or causes of the opportunity.

Accordingly, for IT strategy to make sense, first the opportunity needed by the business strategy must be identified, and then the type of information usage needed for the opportunity must be enabled by IT.

This requires understanding how the different information usages will co-operate to create conditions that will add up to the opportunity.

Some of those combinations are intuitively appealing because they are part of proven past efforts.

• Communications, Production - selectively informing participants and stakeholders to establish efficiencies and quality in work
• Research, Analytics -- diligent search/discovery/arrangement of data, patterns and models that are useful for making and explaining things
• History, Learning -- compiling descriptions and interpretations of experience that clarify contexts and relationships

Bottom to top, those pairings usually allow the business to identify functions, design ways to conduct them, and generate specific operational capabilities from the designs. Obviously, relevant capabilities are an essential type of "opportunity". Drawing learning from history, or drawing analytics from research, and so forth, are typical interactions, and the effects of one pair are commonly leveraged by the pair above it. 

At the same time,  there is no guarantee that accomplishments in one area will flow up into others. Even where certain lineups are compelling, it is necessary to look into how a network of influences can arise in non-linear fashion amongst the full set of usages. These influences can be inhibitors as well as promoters.

For example: history can predispose analytics, by culturally reinforcing attention to some issues and neglect of others. Meanwhile, learning can predispose communications, by preselecting audiences. And production may impact research, whenever they compete for resources or persuasiveness.

Along with new capabilities, most business strategies can think in terms of ideas (knowledge), relationships and assets when exploring the types of opportunities that may be needed. Usually, in a mature business organization, these are all enjoying focused management The question is, for each type of opportunity, what should IT do to enable and orchestrate the six or more basic information usages required for creating and maintaining it?

The touchpoint between business strategy and IT strategy is those usages. In practice, the business strategist must determine which certain opportunities should be pursued. The IT strategist must identify, engage and evolve the related touchpoints so that their interactions are balanced towards providing the opportunities that the business strategy needs.

• an ongoing running operation,
• that is presented to a consumer of the operation's output,
• with an offer and a mechanism (interface),
• for invoking the delivery of the output upon the consumer's occasion of demand.

The reason why this arrangement can actually work without imploding is three-fold:

• the provider of the service can share terms of agreement with the consumer about the allowable occasions of demand;


• the full range of operation outputs need not be offered as a service; and,


• the consumer need not know how the operation is constructed or maintained, so the provider can modify the operation behind the service.

In effect, it is do-able because the scope of the service can be managed.

Typically, it is the issue of operational modifications that generates the most excitement -- and the excitement typically comes to a head in the IT (and facilities) departments of the business. Levels of service, and qualities of service, are bound to managed risk and performance factors that must be aligned to each other within the architecture of the operation that will be exposed as a service.

To add further perspective: it really does go without saying that different tools may be employed to do the same job; and this points out that deployment decisions are more critical to risk and performance than are the attributes of the tools themselves. With that perspective, a "business view" of an operation concerns itself primarily with the possibility that operation structures are both rational and sustainable. This means, in turn, that the business view of how to reasonably warrant a level or quality of service relies mainly on two things:

• it looks at those same operational decisions


• it acquires a validation through test-and-proof that the outputs for offer are acceptable, within the risk and performance allowed by the decisions.

This structural coherency sought for operations is essentially what is pursued by the prescriptive practice called Configuration Management. Configuration Management is historically maturing within the domain of IT software and hardware management for integrated production systems. Today it is most heavily influenced by best practices described in the knowledge domain called IT Service Management, or ITSM. 

From the above notes, however, the emphasis would appear to be not primarily technological but instead concerned with the decisions (left side of the illustration), underpinning the business information model and business process model (right side) that together shape those outputs of the operation that are eventually made selectively consumable.

Where technology takes root, through IT architecture, is in operationally instantiating the service -- to meet a quality and level that works for the business. Primarily, the service must, on demand by the business,  be available within the rationality and sustainability that the business can accomodate. In that sense, the first customer of the service is the business itself.

The net of this is that the IT practice within the business will need to understand and mature configuration management on business terms, especially in a time when systems management of IT-based operations is relocating outside of the business campus to what is called the Cloud -- managers of provision of web-based delivery of IT-systems-as-services. Although the Cloud is most often referred to as an "environment", its business role is that of a contracted service partner or supplier, conducting critical chunks of operations that must not disconnect from information and process management.

The takeaway: alignment of operations to information and process models will call on the ability to articulate how much configuration specification by the business is necessary for the business to achieve confidence in risks and performance levels, and thereby agree to the terms of service delivery.

 The distance between current benefits and future benefits is, in an unadorned sense, the territory for which leaders are bred to navigate. Leaders are expected to represent to us why a different future will be better, not just different. This explains why the idea of vision is so important to most models of leaders that history provides in our look to the past.

Vision may be a fundamental attribute of leaders, but no less important is acuity -- the type of perception that allows leaders to understand if you really can "get there from here".

Acuity may be the explanation for how leaders emerge from the complexity of ongoing operations. We expect leaders to be able to navigate; but often, after the goal-setting that dictates what should be IN the participants' points of view, the remainder of the task is largely delegated -- and this creates the risk and problem of losing awareness of what is AT the points of view. On the other hand, the successful navigator may acquire the leadership, gathering the role and position around them as they are found repeatedly, by others, at the right place at the right time -- a trick attributable to acuity.

Mythical leaders are most often soloists, but the complexity of modern organizations means that leadership teams are the rational way to assure that goals and navigation are not disconnected from each other. The purpose of the team is not to forsee the future, but to develop 20/40 vision of the present. Delegation into teams is a collaborative strategy that provides the bandwidth of attention to find the track to the goal and stay on it. And like all lines, the track is a collection of key points.

Image and full article Copyright 2009 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

The track from current benefits to future benefits can be seen as a passage through various gates. Generally, four gates are along the way.

At the first gate, current pains are felt as a tradeoff accepted to sustain the currrent benefits. Because their impact extends beyond their causes and justifications, pains may become excessive and trigger a decision to find a substantial remediation, the second gate. This research for a course of action, usually fueled by analysis, will separate remedial action options into those that are mandatory and those that are not. With the weight of "necessity", these decisions or change mandates -- the third gate -- will drive determination of priorities going forward; and those priorities -- the fourth gate -- will in effect set the grounds and boundaries from which future benefits can develop.

For this pathway, it's often the case that leadership must reverse-engineer the course, finding and aligning the appropriate set of conditions at each gate. In this effort, acuity is paramount to determining if these conditions do, or can, exist. 

Said differently, the gates in this route are practical checkpoints in the assessment of an organization that presumes to form itself around the leadership and follow.

• Priorities correspond to culture. Culture is the primary factor constraining future benefits. 
• The requirement for changes that precede the culture corresponds to politics that, understood objectively, is the negotiations about the balance of risks between stability (quality) and progress (advantage). But it must be understood that because requirements are decisions, all needs are not necessarily requirements.  
• Preceding the change requirements, administration moderates  a competition for attention to needs;
• and administrative transparency may be critical to allowing the environment of operations to present its true current pains.

Building forward again, those issues can manifest on familiar management terms -- for example, terms such as quality, resourcing, policy, and governance. Other terms may similarly and respectively apply

But the more interesting aspect is this: the necessary ability to identify the path to future benefits within an existing organization suggests that from the perspective of the participating organization, real leadership may have to be discovered more than to be supplied.

But one of the most understated things about strategy is that it is more a response than it is anything else. The value of a strategy is not primarily in the impact that it ultimately has. Instead, a strategy takes its basic value from the problem that it wants to solve. In most instances, if the problem is very important, then the strategy that responds to it will be important.

However, what many people, including practitioners, fail to attend to is that a strategy's being important does not cause the strategy to be a good one, nor does it prevent the strategy from being a bad one.

That fact is why the quality of the strategy must have high priority, and why making strategy must prevail over the culture of execution. In too many cases, practitioners trip over another conceptual stumbling block, which is that execution does not make an important strategy good. Instead, a good strategy enables execution to be effective.

The most prominent dimensions of a good strategy are the following:
- Relevance
- Logic
- Credibility
- Visibility
- Urgency
- Distinction
- Change

What practitioners may discover, to varying degrees of surprise, is that the list above is a good predicter of whether execution is likely to result in effective outcomes. Even more importantly, they may discover the reasons why an existing strategy may be unusable or failing. In general, any point in the list makes sense only if the point preceding it is in good stead.

The overall single reason why a strategy may be structurally predisposed to fail is that the chain of dependencies inherent in the above list can be broken at any point by a failure of stakeholders to "buy in" at that point. What is even more surprising to presenters of strategies is that such "buy in" failures are not due nearly so often to rejection as they are to indifference.

The cult of execution holds that indifference can be pushed out of the equation by performance incentives. This poses the situation that a key participant need not worry about why assignments matter if they are well rewarded for being carried out successfully. These "rewarding" outputs are then advertised as "priorities", and managers are deployed to enforce priorities and to maintain a balance of their alignment amongst the complexity of their concurrent demands. This is exactly why metrics dominate management. Management then tends towards the idea of "best practices" -- the patterns associated with manageable high performance. But this is fundamentally different from strategy.

Let's turn back to the essentials of strategy and look at how indifference first appears. The most important notes to make are about why people decide to not buy in -- which takes place mainly by their choosing to not listen. As opposed to merely hearing, listening requires that the person absorb, interpret and represent the offered idea in their own mind. This is not the same thing as acceptance; instead it is the same as "realization", which for that person allows the idea to become the basis of their follow-on action. Otherwise the strategy remains an external fiction: someone else's story. In noting this, we also have to remember that typically, with strategy, exposure is not a universal experience. Different people need to listen at one or more different points in the chain of dependency:

- Relevance: how do we know that the problem being tackled is the right one? This may start out with identifying what the problem is really pointing at -- namely, a need. The primary needs are innovation (evolution), preservation (growth and health), and recovery (healing).

- Logic: what plausible mechanism is readily apparent to address the need given the most plausible disruptive risks or inhibitors to that mechanism?

- Credibility: who is the source, and presenter, of the case for the need and the logic? What is the agenda of that source?

- Visibility: what modes of validation-on-demand are available for the participants approached with the presumed relevance, logic and credibility?

- Urgency: why is the opportunity for the presumably required effort (not the desired outcome) more available now than it is later?

- Distinction: what is it about doing this with the designated parties that makes the effort as likely to succeed as competing strategies?

- Change: how do I know I will wind up better off than I am now?

Experience shows that strategies are often undermined or aborted due to such things as competing ideas, turf wars, and under-resourcing. That is, that actual design of operations indicated by the strategy cannot be fully completed, communicated, and subscribed. This general picture of resistance or disconnect suggests the scope of challenges to any strategy. But the picture should be much more specific; and again the matter is not so much one of rejection as it is a failure of the strategy's proposition to overcome the inertia of the present.

Given the specific dimensions listed above, here are the associated ways that people are predisposed to not listen. The idea that a strategy has high quality is all about the way that the strategy predictively addresses these issues:

- Relevance: not aware of this need's primacy over other possible or identifiable needs
- Logic: don't understand the mechanism
- Credibility: lack of trust
- Visibility: limitation of information access
- Urgency: risk to current commitments
- Distinction: appearance of being excluded
- Change: fear of loss

Given those issues, it is apparent that the most important things to materialize for substantiating the strategy at the participant level are models, education and proof -- none of which are the domain or responsibility of execution.

Without end-to-end substantiation, the interdependencies within the proposed strategy are not integrated, and this in turn means that the organization available to execute the strategy is either missing, logically misaligned or inherently deficient -- in other words, the engineering of the strategy is suffering from classic flaws of omission, errors or defects.

The pressure on managers and executives to deliver "performance" can often provoke them to "re-organize" somewhat ruthlessly as a way to "enable" a strategy. This is not uncommon as a business practice, and none of the above argument is intended to claim that it should or should not be done. Instead, the takeaway from the above is more importantly an awareness that aggressive management is not a substitute for actual strategy, and that the purpose of strategy is to create a basis for effectiveness, not to to create results.

Strategy designs operations; execution conducts them. As a further caution, it must be pointed out as well, though, that strategy is not static; as it is fundamentally responsive and is a design discipline, strategy must be dynamic and itself must be managed for real-time quality -- an ongoing process, not just a product.

Or that's the script, anyway. Notable exceptions include sites where it has already taken root, sites where it is not debated and is actually planned for implementation, and sites where it is just a cultural reality not needing additional formal justification. But even if all of those sites made up half of the places that use the term KM, the other half are places where KM is still either unconvincing or on the loose. What needs to happen at these places? 

Let's approach the challenge like this. ask the question(s), "how do you know if you are managing knowledge?"

Of course, that is really two questions: how do you know if you're managing, and how do you know that it is knowledge that you are managing?

For the most part, knowledge is a "resource" and management is a practice that pursues the efficient and effective application of a resource to operational performance requirements. But let's be far more specific.

As for distinguishing knowledge from other resources, we like the value-chain model that shows data becoming information through modeling, and information becoming knowledge through practical utilitarian relevance to a context or presumed circumstance.

In effect, knowledge is a status, not a material -- very much similar to "health". This helps to identify what is at stake when managing it, as well as suggesting what kind of risks accompany neglecting it.

We know that under pressure, healthy bodies can do more than less healthy ones, and/or that it will take more out of a less healthy body to do the same thing that a healthy one does.

This throws the light on the matter that the skeptical half need: the big problem of not doing knowledge management is the opportunity costs that result. For an organization that presumes to compete and win based on advantages, understanding knowledge management is a no brainer.

And still, below, my notes to myself.

As these social networking instruments continue to power up the breadth of opportunity for participants in the "read/write web", it becomes more evident that vast social experimentation with communications will fall into a relatively few categories of general importance.

Each of these categories will be an arena where we will see development (planned change) and evolution (adopted adaptation), and eventually we will see certain types of relationships developed and evolved between the categories as well. The categories are content, community, and channels, in the midst of which sits a media user.

Content

Self-publishing is the primary driver in this category, with multi-media presentation being the most compelling target. Technicians point to "rich media" on the developer side, but this is essentially about bringing portability, seamlessness and streaming to presentations. On the evolution side, the goal is convenient compilation and tagging as a way of dynamically organizing and discovering special interests. 

In fact, discovery is the key link from here to the next category.

Communities

This area is driven mostly by communications dedicated to representing and validating common interests. On the development side, discovery tools are premium; and on the evolution side, sharing is the top priority, which as a result also makes access privileges and property rights a key issue to decide.  Social policies emerge as the main indicator of evolution here, which is why the cultural dimension of social networking is most basic in this area compared to the two other areas (content and channels). 

The key link between this area and the next is targeting.

Channels

The exponential increase in "offered information"  does not cause a similar level of increase in "attractive content", but it clearly stages the occasion to produce more content that is attractive if the information can be appropriately contained. It seems inevitable that information consumers, who are the full population of social networkers, will not spend most of their time "boiling the ocean" by speculatively exploring unfamiliar information, much of which is hardly, if at all, "packaged". Instead that they will increasingly devote their consumption time to credibly familiar information sources. Social networkers will do an entirely traditional and conventional thing: they will more and more often pick certain routes and destinations first, and those first picks will use up most of their time and, barring interventions, become somewhat habitual. This will be the case regardless of what communication instrument is in use. Typically, when innovative instruments are released, the excitement is all about convenience and this stimulates speculative use. But familiarity of results will almost inevitably take over as the ersatz "content" either delights or frustrates -- and this will make discrimination the user's priority over convenience.

To make use of that discrimination, the link between Channels and Content is, not surprisingly, promotion.

Survival Strategies

As we can see, there is not really that much new going on in the overall dynamics of communications. Instead, there is a difference in the task-level efficiency of communications efforts, which amplifies the dynamics in various ways. Depending on who the stakeholder is, some of this amplification is deemed positive and some negative.

Arguably, fatigue is the main culprit in content, as publishers find a recurring audience more or less elusive and begin to evaluate the effort to continue publishing. Whether we point at blog graveyards or a deeper excavation of sites like Facebook, it is predictable that most publishers will significantly diminish their output over time unless they can leverage discovery to refresh their audience and thereby regain incentive to publish.

In the area of community, the most obvious dynamic is that communities are, from the bird's eye view, "chaotic", with ongoing splintering being just as important as ongoing conventions. What this really means is that communities are not so much simply environments themselves but also they are organisms within a larger environment. Organic development, assuming survival, may mean compositional change, maturity change, change in range and reach, or any mix of those changes. This is continally fortified by the ever-increasing ease of communications, which presents alternative stances and boundaries to the current community. So while communities are concerned with sustainability, what actually happens is that the community is more dedicated to the survival of "a" community than it is to the retention of most of its particular members. It is predictable that a community will diminish unless it can leverage targeting to reinforce adoption of its agenda, whether by new members or old.

And with channels, the lack of regulation means that a limitless number of potential channels compete and must rely on profiling the relationship of their content to channel users -- then promoting the profile. The underlying secret success factor, however, is that the promotion must actually change the cost effectiveness of competing --favorably for one's own channel, and unfavorably for competitors. The content itself is possibly a way to do that (think historically: MTV and "reality" shows), but such cases will be few, unusual and at best famously disruptive with an uncertain timespan of reaching evolutionary equilibrium. Some get there almost immediately, but some never quite make it.

So, in the full picture:

- Content is linked by Discovery to Communities

- Community is linked by Targeting to Channels

- Channel is linked by Promotion to Content

This is certainly not always a virtuous circle or even one that can be fully traversed by any one party. But importantly, it is more like a spring coil spiralling up and away over time/distance, while the whole coil might rock to and fro in different directions, pointing at a wide range of destination points. With predictions, one needs to consider also how long the coil is and what direction it is pointing in. In that light, what causes the coil to change directions? As of this writing, one of the curiouser matters is that promotions are getting more attention as content than is nearly any other kind of content, because there is such a frenzy about how to "monetize" social networking. But if this monetizing was not such a prominent issue, other kinds of content might be more highly valued.

This model looks an awful lot like marketing. And if marketers find it appealingly credible and familiar, they risk being accused of wielding the marketing hammer and seeing all problems as "nails". Non-marketers may be much less comfortable with it all. On the other hand, few disciplines are as relentless in their study of social communications as is marketing. So, as one of my colleagues taught me to say, this is king of the hill until somebody knocks it off.

I'm sure that creators of ads would be amused (NOT!) to find out from media professor and consultant Jeff Jarvis that ads are not "content" !

Jarvis's stance, as reported by Stefan Deeran of BNET in the article Who Benefits from the "Link Economy", is summed up as this problem:

"In general, the consensus is that producers of original content that want to put their work behind a paywall or demand payment from linkers, just don’t get the fluidity of web."

The proof of this, they say, is that linkers prosper without paying non-ad content providers; instead, linkers get to charge the ad providers, while non-ad content providers don't get to do that.. Thus the Jarvis claim that we are shifting from a "content economy" to a "links economy".

But obviously, ads are content, and meanwhile, how many linkers actually turn a profit?

So to remain clear, the shift is about what kind of content has the most "economic" value as currency, not as net income that supports a continuation of the cash flows for non-ad content providers or linkers.

Non-ad content, now highly commoditized by the web, is most similar to currency that has suffered inflation beyond any important redemption. The "face value" has stopped being significant.

But while technology has made ad content easier to distribute, and thus magnified its face value, there is no rational proof that people suddenly prefer ads to non-ads. Instead, there is proof that ad-content providers are willing to work harder to deal with the problem of someone's "preference" than are most people willing to work on it for themselves.

As soon as non-ad content providers get people used to paid subscriptions again, the "economy" will rebalance in favor of branding, editorialism and other things that people want with non-ad content to conform to their preference.

 "Non-ad Content" providers must solve the Cost-of-Preference problem. This is already being trial-and-errored with concepts like "MyContent", "Premium Content", "Actionable Content", and so on -- and most of these approaches are long past being "new". 

But if paid "links" are simply today's version of booth rentals at a trade show, it's not the content that dissuades people from buying; rather, it's that the trade show is huge and unmanaged, so people are fatigued by it very quickly.

The general sense of "customization" compares against three basic options for the formations of a business process.

Option 1: One-Size-Fits-All

For business processes, this is a myth, because “business” is primarily about accommodating multiple relationships and requirements, not primarily about manufacturing a standard product. The “process” must support what business “is about”. Relationships tend to be privileged, not indifferently available.

Option 2: Specialization

Sometimes incorrectly called “customization”, specialization is different: it means variations on a single theme. The theme has standard requirements; the fulfillment is where the variety occurs.

Option 3: Customization

Customization begins in the requirements, not in the fulfillment of them.
There are three reasons why requirements may be “custom”:

• Cost structures


• Competitive Innovation


• Capability Immaturity

Three reasons why requirements may be custom, not generic.

Cost Structures:

• Satisfying customers is not profitable if it is too expensive; different organizations (different suppliers, and different consumers) have different cashflows

Competitive Innovation:

• Existing customers, to decide to stick around, need to feel that the relationship is fresh and current
• Potential customers need a reason to prefer one provider over another

Capability Immaturity:

• The time available to use for improving capability may not be in synch (priority, availability) with other resources

Three reasons why requirements may be "custom", explained.

Cost Structures:

• Lack of visibility on true economic impacts puts operations on a risk-aversion basis seen in typical micro-management approches

Competitive Innovation:

• High rate of change is necessary to sustain improvisations that generate necessary nw effects or advantages

Capability Immaturity:

• Required performance level outstrips currently available supporting mechanisms, forcing risky workarounds. 

How to mitigate or avoid customization.

Micro-management:

• An operational performance model allows activity to be prioritized and weighed by differential contribution to goals and thus by ROI perspective. (For example, the 80/20 rule.) Relieves pressure to dwell on the microscopic. Define objectives, CSFs and KPIs. Switch to “trust-and-verify” mode.

Improvisations:

• Linking process models to knowledge management allows standardized roles to be able to move quickly and differently on incoming information, without re-organizations.
  

Workarounds:

• Organizing around known best practices clarifies ways to structurally reduce risk and to more rationally divide the labor required to meet performance targets. Such greater clarity allows managers to make the compelling business case for additional help to cover properly allocated responsibilities.

When to Customize.

Considering the above notes, executives should still project the likely value of customizations. The punchline is that it cannot be taken for granted that customization is the best path to take, neither in the short run nor the long. Customization proposals that withstand comparison to the above considerations should be given even more enthusiasm than usual, as they probably then point at nearly unique opportunities to do something strategically important to the business.