Build to last is dead, speed rules, competency is currency. Resistance is futile.

An email exchange with a few colleauges last night, including Chris Bernard and Josh Holmes, got me thinking about the network as platform concept.  I went on a bit of rant, and Chris suggested I post it here....

In the late 1990’s we saw the emergence of the so-called “Network Effect” and increasing marginal returns (which classic economic theory said was impossible).  The key to understanding that phenomenon and rationalizing against traditional economic thought was to realize that the source of value was from the arcs in a network – not the nodes. 

The continuing evolution of the network as the uber-platform with many channels takes this thought to a new level.  More channels means more consumer nodes (my Vista Sidebar gadget, Outlook add-in, Messenger, etc.) to consume services from a growing number of platform service nodes.  Moreover, service nodes that allow consumers to create and host mashups that provide services to others means a rapidly growing volume of what you might call “virtual platforms”, as well (i.e., I’m consuming and aggregating three services in my mashup, and mine can be one service provider in yours). The result is even faster exponential growth in the crucial value-producing arcs.   

This would be powerful by itself, but there’s a related phenomenon at play here, too.  Larry Keely of Doblin, Frans Johansson of The Medici Effect, and probably others, recommends looking across multiple disciplines to find the innovative ideas likely to offer the best yield.  More than just good advice, I think this is actually an important adaptation in how we as humans and innovators cope with the volume of information around us, the rate of information growth, and the level of specialist knowledge/effort required to innovate within a single discipline.  The net is a system that rewards game-changing behaviors, and exhibits increasing levels of  entropy/decay rates/instability.  It’s not random, it’s emergent.  The decreasing half-life means were increasingly facing ontological uncertainty.  Build to last is dead, speed rules, competency is currency. 

For more in this vein, I recommend browsing the Santa Fe Institute’s site, skimming the first three chapters of The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson and reading this article by Larry Keely of Doblin Group, and if you really want, some of the white papers on the Doblin site. 

From Larry Keely:

“Instead our focus should be on platforms: broad capabilities that have the potential to cut across industries, markets, and applications. Platforms often have some proprietary capability at the core, but not always. Indeed, it is common for platforms to integrate many otherwise ordinary ideas into a whole that is collectively remarkable—as is the case with most of the innovations on the list, and the reason they go beyond mere inventions.

“In this way, platforms have big ambitions. They take something hard to do and make it routine, affordable, and robust. As the famous science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke used to say: "A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Finally, from http://www.locutusforpresident.org/about.html.   Locutus on Education:

“Your current system of education requires decades to disseminate knowledge. Your organic memory devices are incapable of holding the wealth of information required to survive. Upon assimilation into the Borg collective, you will receive the cumulative knowledge of thousands of species.”

Resistance is futile.

****UPDATE:  Comment submission doesn't seem to be working for me (not sure if it's a Telligent issue or a John issue), so I'm responding to Josh's comment below here at the bottom of the post: 

Hi Josh, Thanks for the comment -- I think you've hit on something important with the Agile IT point.  I would go even further: this issue is larger than IT.  Business success, and ultimately survival, requires rapid business evolution. 

Certainly, Agile IT is a big part of that.  Given the opportunities for information and technology intensive improvements to drive business evolution, it's probably critical.  But Agile IT by itself is not sufficient.  Success will require business decision makers to make decisions that bring the benefits of Agile IT to bear for the firm. 

I believe that the most successful businesses in the future will be the ones evolving their businesses faster than their competitors, and that optimizing around the ability to drive this evolution will be a core organizing principle for the most successful enterprises -- both within and beyond IT.  This is not completely new: Jack Welch, John Boyd, and others have been saying similar things for some time now.  What is new is that the accelerating pace of change around us has reached the point where we can perceive the effects of this reality more easily... that is, the winners and losers are getting sorted out much more quickly, and as the pace of change continues to accelerate "the sorting" will happen quicker still.  

BTW, Curt Devlin has an insightful post that touches on the importance of "non-IT" groups in this transformation, looing through the lens of a "Service Oriented Culture".  Worth taking a look at.