Wow! Access to our deepest capacity to sense and shape the future. Right up my alley. By inspiring authors, too.

Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers

How would the world change if we learned to access, individually and collectively, our deepest capacity to sense and shape the future? This is just one of the questions posed by the authors of a book that combines unusual personal honesty with rigorous critical thinking.

Unfortunately, I'll probably never find out how Peter and Joe predict the world may change, for they are asking $40 for the book, and that's outside my price range for unknowns. I may still be smarting from giving up trying to get through The Fifth Discipline despite several attempts. Guess I'll have to wait for the Presence Fieldbook.

You didn't need a crystal ball to see this coming. Five years ago, business gurus showed us that profits come to organizations that focus on core and outsource the rest. Don't do your own payroll; don't take your own garbage to the landfill; don't assemble your trucks; stick to the knitting. Outsource! (And I don't mean "offshore" or "near-shore," although that could be the choice.)

On Friday I talked with Chris, Sam, and Heather at Intrepid Learning Solutions. They are dropping the L-guide brand that got them started in order to pour all their energy into learning outsourcing. (They manage training for Boeing. See Brad and Heather's presentation to Emergent Learning Forum last month to grok the dynamics of their business.) They've grown from 10 to 80 FTE by concentrating on outsourcing. Forming a long-term relationship takes a while: it requires the sort of trust that only experience can provide. You take baby steps ("out-tasking") to begin with. As I mentioned to Sam, "You gotta date before you decide to get married."

Emergent Learning Forum dedicated its July meeting to the topic. SRI Learning on Demand is issuing a report on it. Bersin & Associates' latest report is titled The Economics of Outsourcing Training Technology and Operations. T+D will be publishing a series on outsourcing. ASTD says it will effect 50% of major training departments.

Accenture, IBM, and even my Workflow Institute talk about outsourcing learning as if it were already here. So far, I see more smoke than fire. The fire's on the way; IT, call centers, HR, and finance are being outsourced. However, earlier this year, when I asked Accenture for the names of clients who'd outsourced all training to them, I only got one name: Avaya University.

All of which leads me to a release from KnowledgePool. "One of the best-known names in the training and development industry has chosen to focus on its core capability of providing outsourced learning services.... As part of its new focus, the company has launched an 'outsourcing menu' - a list of training functions and projects that it can manage on behalf of clients"

"Outsourcing is an attractive, low risk strategy that enables an organisation to increase capacity, reduce administration costs and accommodate fluctuating workloads," said Rod Edwards, CEO. Low risk? This is the opposite of the message from Intrepid (start small, get to know one another) or Accenture (look for a business partner, not a vendor). One person's outsourcing is another person's out-tasking.

Since outsourcing is so hip, Internet Time Group is getting into the game. Need a report? A white paper? Advice? They are all on the menu here. Tell us what you need. We might be better at it that you are. We'll in-source it for you.

Isn't RSS wonderful? Actually, I should ask "Aren't webfeeds wonderful?" because Amy Gahrain's term describes what we get better than any TLA (three-letter acronym).

This morning, Bloglines led me to a refreshing and informative article by Stephen Downes in College Quarterly. I'm preparing for a conference where my audience will have more educators than business people, so I was scouring the literature when I came upon Stephen's From Classrooms to Learning Environments: A Midrange Projection of E-Learning Technologies.

When a new technology appears on the scene, it starts out performing an old task in new ways. Hence, we had the "horseless carriage" before it evolved into the automobile.


Horse putting car
Stephen points out how the electronic classroom is evolving into something entirely different, the learning environment. The good aspects of the learning automobile, its radial tires and microprocessor controls for example, are shared, reusable content, syndication, and personalization. Just as the automobile no longer has a way to hook up the horses just in case, the learning environment often exists outside of the classroom.

The transition is not without risks, among them commodification, mistaking a part for the whole, and creating a 24x7 hell for learners. (In my shorthand, this is focusing on workflow while leaving out the flow.)

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Stephen's article is a keeper, so much so that I'm going to experiment with keeping a cache of articles worth revisiting.

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A few months ago I signed up to be emailed changes from a friends blogs via Bloglet. It seemed a good way for people to subscribe to changes if they prefer email notification to RSS. Also, Bloglet will enable me to alert people to changes on any of my blogs.

How's about you sign up so I can test this sucker? After a couple of days, tell me if it's been well behaved and whether it lived up to expectations.

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THOMSON TO ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGENET
Acquisition Will Enhance Thomson NETg Enterprise Learning Offerings

STAMFORD, Conn., – August 27, 2004 – The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) and KnowledgeNet, Inc., a privately held company recognized as a leader in live e-learning, today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Thomson will acquire KnowledgeNet and merge it with its enterprise learning business, Thomson NETg. Terms of the pending transaction were not disclosed.

"Thomson NETg and KnowledgeNet are a perfect fit," said Thomas R. Graunke, chief executive officer and co-founder of KnowledgeNet. "Both companies have a long history of improving the effectiveness, accessibility and success of an array of training, development and learning programs. By merging our products, learning philosophies and industry expertise we are creating a compelling combination for all of our existing -- and new -- customers."

The transaction, expected to close later this year, is subject to customary regulatory and closing conditions, including the expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended.

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Full Press Release

My congratulations to Tom Graunke and the folks in Phoenix. I remember when KnowledgeNet was a pup. When they gave the remote demo (Placeware, if I remember correctly) that landed the Cisco account, I was in the next room working on another project. As they walked out of the room, the Cisco folks appeared quite impressed. The "no travel costs" argument was important back then.

A lesson for training professionals: Thompson doesn't differentiate learning from information. Neither should you. Both provide value. Training is simply another delivery channel. If it solves the problem, go for it.

"The Thomson Corporation (Thomson) is a global provider integrated information solutions to business and professional customers. The Company generates revenues by supplying its customers with business-critical information from multiple Thomson and third-party databases, and further enhances the value of that information with analysis, insight and commentary. To enhance the speed and accessibility of information, Thomson increasingly delivers information and services electronically."

KnowledgeNet will be merged into NETg. Joe Dougherty, current president of Thomson NETg, will lead the combined business.

This evening I attended a meeting of BayCHI (Computer Human Interface Group) in South Hall, the oldest building on the Berkeley campus. The topic: It's More Than ROI: Defining the Business Value of User-Centered Design. Speakers from Leap Frog, World Savings, Adaptive Path, PeopleSoft, and Ask Jeeves spoke of measuring the value of interface design.

I've heard precisely the same conversation on the topic of training. How can we demonstrate our value to the business people? Aren't some worthy activities inherently immeasurable? Why do we always get chopped when there's an economic downturn?


Sather Tower is directly across from South Hall. It's foggy tonight.

The difficulty of pinning a credible number on intangibles cropped up. You'd think that in an era where intangibles create half the value in business, more people would have figured this one out. It's like not believing in microwaves or germs because you can't see them.

Would any business person in their right mind voluntarily throw away good customer relationships, know-how, and brand reputation? Of course not. Because they have value. So it makes more sense to give them an approximate value rather than factor them into the equation at zero.

My new ThinkPad should arrive tomorrow; I'm like a kid in a candy store. I've lost track of how many computers I've owned -- an early Apple ][, a original disk-less IBM-PC, several more IBM PCs (often with exotic storage media), a Toshiba 1000, a Gateway Handbook, a Dell portable, a Compaq luggable, three or four Gateway desktops, two SONY Vaio laptops, a SONY Vaio desktop, and two ThinkPads. Still, getting a new machine is as exciting as hopping into a new car. The way prices are going, I should probably drive my Honda Accord for the rest of my life but buy a couple of computers a year to keep my batteries charged.

A couple of times today I stopped to reflect on what was going on around me and was simply amazed. I was tweaking a few things on a website. A dozen times in rapid succession, I made a change, then checked the web to see how it looked. Imagine. In less time than it took some of the old machines to read a file, I can go back and forth with a server on the other side of the company.

More astounding still, I can click a button in an email and track the location of my new PC. I know exactly when it passed customs in Shanghai, when it was rerouted to Anchorage, when it arrived there, and when it's due to depart for California. One long number retrieves this real-time history.

The sweet spot in business is when supply and demand are in equilibrium. Customers buy all they want; you sell all you got. This morning I noticed a perfect example of this in Google's Gmail.

Google markets Gmail through referrals. Current users can invite others to sign up for the free service. Early users were allotted ten invitations. After that, the invitation button disappeared from the screen.

Google must have caught up with demand, for these two links appeared on my screen this morning:





I assume these will appear whenever Google's ready to take on more customers.

Most messages I receive are less useful. What are these messages suggesting I do?





Here's a real show stopper. Maybe I should say "sale stopper." Barnes and Noble invited me to an online sale. When I try to place an order, I receive this somewhat geeky message:



Now what? I do have cookies enabled. Do you think they'll notice the problem before they see that online revenues are dwindling?

The human brain is a trickster. It takes in a gusher of visual, auditory, and sensory input, throws 99.99% of it away without our knowing it, and presents us with a coherent picture of the world. The pre-conscious brain chooses the slides in the show we see. It even gives us the illusion that we're in control.

Brain wave studies show that consciousness lags reality (and then covers its tracks).. Your pre-conscious mind is a lot closer to "now" than you are. The brain decides to hold up your right arm--and you think it's something you thought up. Hah!

We can only see what we know. People accustomed to medieval paintings couldn't appreciate the perspective of Rennaissance painters. Caribbean natives couldn't see the ships of Columbus until perceptive medicine men told them what to look for. Consciousness is low-bandwidth; being oblivious to things we don't recognize is a survival strategy.

This train of thought was leaking into my consciousness as I read through the agendas of the five conferences I'll be attending in the upcoming months. From the topics, you'd think that the only thing that trainers see is training.


Despite my fanning the flames for the last year, the training community is taking a wait-and-see attitude about what I've been calling workflow learning. Some say they'll get to it when the time is ripe. Or when the powers that be express interest in the future beyond getting through the next month.

There's a flaw in this logic. The trickster brain has you thinking you have a choice. Listen up: a new way of computing is on the way. It's web services-based, decentralized, rich-client, Internet logic, interoperable, process-driven, individualized, real-time, pervasive, and absolutely inevitable.

The new framework will be everywhere within five years. Early adopters are taking advantage of it now. It's compelling because it routes around IT and hands the management of business processes back to business people. It does this by overlaying what's already in place instead of replacing it. You can implement it on a pay-as-you-go basis. In time, tapping into real-time process management will be as necessary as having a phone or a website today.

What do senior executives expect from training professionals in all this? Nothing. Why? Because training is not driving this decision. The new computing, what IBM calls "On Demand," is on the way because it clears bottlenecks, cuts costs, empowers workers, speeds things up, reduces IT busywork, future-proofs applications, plugs into a universal value network, facilitates process outsourcing, puts managers in charge of improving business processes, and lets the organization focus on its core strengths.

It's difficult to understate how little say-so the training function is going to have in choosing the new approach to conducting business.


Training is but a grain of sand in a very large desert.

Resisting the future is futile. The world grows more complex by the hour, and a return to basics is not going to simplify it. No one's asking us to make the major structural decisions. Our function is to help people do their jobs well. Our challenge is to figure out how to leverage change, not resist it, for change will happen with us or without.

This is akin to VCRs in classrooms. Every teacher has access to one. Because of sound pedagogy? Because of a study at Columbia? Because we wanted no child left behind? No, no, and of course not. VCRs became plentiful because millions of adults purchased them to watch pornographic movies, and economics of scale brought the price down from tens of thousands of dollars to less than a hundred. The new computing will proliferate because it makes good business sense.

What the Workflow Institute has been calling workflow learning is no more than the optimal way to improve worker performance in the new environment. It's up to us to make it relevant, timely, easy to access, and enjoyable to use.

Workflow learning is not the right term for this, but it's the best I've come up with. Workflow has the baggage of document handling; we're more focused on the progress through the value chain. Learning calls up images of courses and class, but we foresee more focus on small bites, collaboration, reference look-up, and imbedded support.

We're not convening the Workflow Learning Symposium in San Francisco to sell our vision of the future. Rather, we hope to engage you in a dialog about the new technology and how to take advantage of it to improve individual and organizational performance. Maybe we'll even come up with a new name for workflow learning.

From the publicity Bersin & Associates and Brandon Hall generate, I assume lots of people read comparisons of Learning Management Systems. One item they probably don't factor in is vendor viability. How likely is the vendor to go down the tubes or be merged out of existence? Think about it: Which is worse, to discover some glitches in the code or to find out your vendor is no longer answering the phone.

That's why Emergent Learning Forum has been publishing financial analysis from ThinkEquity since the beginning of last year. We've got 90 of these financial snapshots of the learning industry online. Take a look at the latest issue to see what you've been missing.

Here's a summary of ThinkEquity's Ten Commandments of Research. Great stuff!


This is not a better view of the world; it's a different view of the world.

Better than any book. Check this animated description of the Olympics. A great example of motion graphics. Noted in elearnpost.

Which reminds me. After years learning from the links Maish points out, I'm cancelling my email subscription to elearnpost. Not that I'm giving it up. This week I'm dumping email subscriptions because I will be tracking their webfeeds with Bloglines.

I'm recrafting my life on-line with more pull and less push. I plan to gather news on my schedule, not the provider's. Also, I can home in on topics that grab my interest without sorting through the chaff. Tools like Blogdigger and Furl make it easy to monitor what's going on with, say, Workflow Learning.

---

Love/hate. I just got off the phone with a charming, personable IBMer, someone whose company I really enjoy. Then I opened my next email, from another area of IBM. I ordered a ThinkPad on August 5. It's a plain vanilla X40 ultralight. The email informed me that my ThinkPad went into configuration on August 18. The configuration process requires approximately 15 business days to complete, about September 8. Then UPS Standard Ground takes 3 to 5 business days. Dell would have put a custom machine on my doorstep the day after my order. IBM is taking six weeks to deliver a standard laptop. What arcane process can IBM be using to slow their production time down like this? What sort of manual backwater held up my order from August 5 to August 18? The eBusiness cobbler's children have no shoes. Lucky for them I love their product.

Update. 8/21, the next day. Another email arrives from IBM. My PC has shipped! The problem appears to be poor customer communication rather than fulfillment.

---

Reverse Engineering. The Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte is a superb conceptualizer and salesman. His book Being Digital taught me early on to look at bits, not atoms. Today I read about a company that's reverse-engineering the concept, making a buck translating bits back into atoms.




Download free CAD software

Design the model

Shop creates it

The Berkeley Manual of Style

Wired News has announced, "Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet. At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net." Same here. For a while, this will be like trying to write the correct year on checks in January.

The Wired News article links to a piece they wrote four years ago explaining why they intended to use e-mail instead of email. On Google five minutes ago, e-mail has 22 million entries to email's 280 ,000 million. Email it is.

Once again, I've been asked if it's e-learning, e-Learning, eLearning, or elearning. The answer: it doesn't make any difference. I switched to eLearning long ago and am not about to go back now. Besides, I prefer performance improvement to any of the variations on learning.

The truism "Top-down KM didn't work" has given rise to something called Bottom-Up KM. No, no, no. That makes it sound as if the underlings are dictating to the topsiders. In reality, the former top is no longer part of the picture in our flattened, decentralized organizations; there's no there there. To borrow from complexity science, the opposite of top-down is bottom-out. It's a collaborative thing. Peer to peer. Communal.

By the way, you are reading a blog. Short for weblog. The little orange button labeled XML links to my webfeed.

While I'm at it, Workflow Learning no longer needs a TM. Since I have embedded the term high and low, it will take a while, but I'm going to try writing is workflow learning. No caps.

To answer your questions, the car above is a Bugatti Typo 35 from the late twenties. A Bugatti 35 won the first Grand Prix de Monaco in 1929. The little 2-liter, 8-cylinder race car won hundreds of races. One of many masterpieces from the hand of Ettore Bugatti.

You can hear it here!


Print by Roger Hector. It's for sale ~ $300.

Sun Microsystems has a very cool conceptual map of Java on their main site. The map is part definition, part advertising, part propaganda, and tons of information on a one-pager.

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A few months ago I read de Bono's Thinking Course on a long flight. I'd picked it up at a used book sale for fifty cents and the topic was intriguing. Thinking is a skill. It's like driving; you can get better at it with practice. After you do, you'll begin doing it automatically. People confuse thinking with intelligence. Bad mistake, for it leads to intelligent people squandering their potential.

Before I recount lessons learned from de Bono, I want to make some independent observations of my own.

There are two types of people in this world: those who can count and those who can't. Well, that's not quite right, but it probably seems reasonable to binary thinkers. Binary thinkers? People who see the world in terms of either/or. On/off. Dichotomies. To them, everything is black or white but rarely gray.


Bipolar thinking oversimplifies. Most issues contain gradations, maybes, what-if's, emotions, mitigating factors, and other entanglements. They are analog. They are a continuum.



Business school teaches one to consider everything as a tradeoff. One becomes accustomed to weighing factors on either side of the issue.

A session at last year's I-KNOW in Graz looked at virtual communities of practice as a series of trade-offs. Were they seeking innovation or standards? The list grew rapidly:

Objective	Subjective
Content	Context
Central	Distributed
Description	Prescription
Reaction	Proaction
Predict	Self-fulfilling prophesy
Static	Dynamic
Solutions	Problems
Value: replicability	Value: Appropriateness
Efficiency	Efficacy

Last night a group of us went to see What the Bleep is Going On? In our post-mortem of the movie, we agreed that we'd have been less skeptical had the flick been positioned as art or poetry instead of science. The world is not made of absolutes. Everything's a matter of degree.

Yesterday I received a critique of an article I'd written, saying that what I had proposed was "just another ridiculous buzzword meant to repackage the same old things." If the critic had moved the slider a little away from the edge, offering some pro's in the prose as well as the con's, I'd have taken her more seriously.

On today's walk, I listened to an interview with Alistair Cockburn, whose concepts of Agile Development, designed for creating software, are perfectly applicable to Instructional Design.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Development is a cooperative game

"Software development is a series of resource-limited, goal-directed cooperative games of invention and communication. The primary goal of each game is the production and deployment of a software system; the residue of the game is a set of markers to assist the players of the next game. People use markers and props to remind, inspire and inform each other in getting to the next move in the game. The next game is an alteration of the system or the creation of a neighboring system. Each game therefore has as a secondary goal to create an advantageous position for the next game. Since each game is resource-limited, the primary and secondary goals compete for resources.

The software development game is played in a milieu of many other games, personal and organizational, simultaneous and criss-crossing in time and purpose. One of the other games being played is to be able to play the next round of this game, i.e. the next game. That is, having once deployed a software system, to set up for changing, replacing, augmenting or complementing it.

Therefore, there is a residue to the game: a set of markers that will inform and remind the players of the next game. The players of the next game will know a different amount from the players of this game, and so what counts as "sufficient" for the next team is different from what counted as "sufficient" for this team."

A move isn't right or wrong; it's better or worse.

People trump process (and in a small group, seven or less, the process is nearly automatic). Politics trump people. (Power corrupts....)

The archive on Cockburn's website contains a wonderful article entitled Process: the Fourth Dimension (Tricking the Iron Triangle)

Cockburn writes that the "iron triangle" of project constraints (time, resources, and scope) is missing an important component: Processes.

"The three outdated and inefficient process conventions I tend to watch and replace are

• Get the requirements right before starting design and get the design right before starting coding.
• Writing things down in detail is better than sketching them and then talking about them.
• People work better in private offices.

Replace those with:

1. Overlap activities in concurrent development. Get just enough requirements to get started on the design (where just enough varies from project to project), use early coding to get valuable feedback on the properties of the design.
2. Capture documentation mostly in quick and rough form and support the documentation with good conversation.
3. Get the people out of their offices into a shared work space."

Cockburn has a lot more where these came from. Take a look in the Agile Toolbox.

A frequent Internet Time Blog reader dropped me a note, fearing for my health and wishing me and my family well. I hadn't blogged in 72 hours, a sure sign that something was amiss. Thanks for the concern; I'm touched, but all's well in Berkeley. I've been busy working on the Workflow Learning Symposium and contemplating the future of learning.


Today was the deadline for submitting descriptions of the seven sessions in the workflow learning track at Training Fall this October. Why not join us? The conference is in San Francisco. Register through Workflow Institute's Anne Henry to receive a free white paper as part of the deal.

The world is changing at a dizzying pace. Moore’s Law seems to be contagious. Not only is computing power growing exponentially but so are information, networks, biotech, and the choices at the local supermarket. There’s more to learn and less time to learn it. Cycles are faster; their swings, more volatile. By the twenty-first century, our biggest problem was supposed to be figuring out what to do with our leisure, but now that we’ve arrived, we find that the leisure has disappeared. Everything’s connected. Nothing stops. It’s 24/7. Frenzy.

My old notions are not aging well. Personally I’m so deep into Western Culture that a truckload of Franklin Planners, PDAs, and time management books can’t pull me through. I wonder. Where is “the profession once known as training” headed? How are workers of the future going to carry out their jobs? In fact, what will those jobs be? What will business look like?

Whenever the squirrel-cages that power my thinking swirl so rapidly that everything becomes a blur, I simplify. I retreat to first principles. I look for a few pegs on which to spin a new solution.

I'm noodling through the implications of increasing complexity, network density, global connectivity, infoglut, the lessons of the Internet, process orientation, and the flattening of hierarchy. I haven't figured it out yet am handing it off to my subconscious to mull over while I get some shut-eye.

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...and I awake with new ah-ha's. The boundaries between corporation and customer, work and thought, boss and worker, inside and outside, and other fundamental dichotomies are getting fuzzy. Both/and is replacing either/or. Cause and effect are merging into, pardon my French, "shit happens." Some things are inexplicable and trying to cut them down to size with logic deprives them of their mastery. Enlightenment in the world ahead will require new categories of thinking.

I think back to the words of David Cooperider, describing Appreciative Inquiry: "We must learn to scale wholeness, to ask what's possible rather than what's wrong, and to move from systems thinking to systems living." In this, we must rely on intuition as our guide.

As Einstein profoundly observed while challenging the boundaries of Newtonian physics:

• "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew."
• "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

One last observation before I head out on my morning walk in the fog: it's about blogging.

A few evenings back, I became involved in a conversation about blogs. Inveitably, we overgeneralized. Blogs are no more one thing than are television shows. When people talk about Seinfeld or Ken Burns's The Civil War, they don't get into whether these shows compete with news shows or are tarnished because they reflect personal and perhaps narrow viewpoints.

A cool thing about blogs, something that can transform a blog into a mold-breaker, is closure. Or rather, lack of closure.

Many bloggers write self-contained articles or recommendations; every entry is whole unto itself...atomic.

Internet Time Blog is evolving into a stream of conversation. Because it's a blog, not an article, I don't feel compelled to draw a conclusion when I don't have one. I'm happy for you to look over my shoulder as I paint on the canvas. With luck, or maybe a miracle, something meaningful will take shape.

from the NYT

This morning, on a lark, I saved a couple of years of Blog entries in several categories as Microsoft MHT files, which are readable in Microsoft Word. Perhaps these will appeal to people who aren't comfortable with Blogs (even though the style remains Last In First Out and the tone is flip).

Internet Time Blog on Networking, 611 KB
Internet Time Blog on Collaboration, 1 MB
Internet Time Blog on Emergent Learning, 1.6 MB
Internet Time Blog Book Reports, 1.7 MB
Internet Time Blog on Whatever Jay Feels Like, 8.1 MB
Internet Time Blog on Caring for Customers, 125 KB
Internet Time Blog on Learning, 20 MB (!)
Internet Time Blog's Reference Section, 1 MB

Since these files are in Word/MHT format, right-click to download them. Earlier errors fixed.

If you use Internet Explorer (for shame!), you can simply click on these, but be prepared to wait a while for them to open.

Remember when thick, paperback software manuals were the rage? You could pay $25 for the book or $50 for the book+CD combo. Similarly, you might pay $1,200 to hear a visionary speak at a conference for an hour or $35 to buy her book. We have predefined notions of what a package should cost no matter what the value of its contents. Hence, we pay the same amount to rent a great DVD as a mediocre one. The Rhino CD of 20 versions of Louie, Louie retails for the same price as a CD of Glenn Gould playing Mozart's Goldberg Variations. The latest book by Danielle Steele costs the same as a hardcover by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Changing the media can truly distort pricing. The high-profile consultant charges $20,000 for a one-on-one session, $10,000 to lead a workshop, $5,000 for a research paper on the topic, and $30 for his published book. Price irrationality really gets out of hand on the web. Some of the freshest, most direct information around can be found in Blogs, yet nobody pays to access a blog. The Blog form factor comes with the notion "free." Some of the thoughts you're reading right now may morph into a book or, better still, a $20,000 one-hour consulting engagement.

I just finished the first chapter and a skim of Howard Smith and Peter Fingar's Business Process Management: The Third Wave. This post is an amalgam of their ideas and mine. I've been obsessed with the metric of time today, exploring where layers that usually move in tandem seem out of sync. Reviewing Steward Brand's How Buildings Learn and Clock of the Long Now brought up parallels to my thinking about the rhythm of business, the future of work, and the assimilation of the Net into virtually everything, so don't blame Howard and Peter if the following words don't speak to you.

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Many people were relieved when the dot.com bubble burst. Back to business as usual. Enough of this virtual nonsense. No more twenty-somethings cashing in on paradigm shifts. The skeptics won't like what I'm about to write: the bubble was just an early ripple in a sea change that's going to restructure business, economics, trade, work, and management on a scale never before imagined.

For the better part of the last 200 years, an enterprise has consisted of several businesses lodging under one roof. There's a customer-acquisition business, a product-innovation- and-development business, an infrastructure management business, and support services such as HR, finance, & training.

It once made economic sense to keep all these processes in-house. (It would have cost too much to manage an outsider to do them.) Now the Internet has trivialized the cost of farming things out.

The current rule is to outsource the non-essentials. Example: Let UPS handle our shipping. They are better at managing delivery than we are. Better to free up some cash by having UPS own the trucks instead of us. Invest the money in our core competence (what we do best). Since this is what we excel at, we should extract a higher return on our investment. Using someone else's assets like this enables us to do more with less. Nike doesn't manufacture shoes. Cisco doesn't make routers. We could all hand off less-rewarding functions and be better off.

Time and time again in business history, an upstart outsider topples a market leader. Inevitably, the new leader enjoys a cost advantage in the neighborhood of 30%. How? By managing the costs of an entire value chain rather than just its "own" costs. They're all costs to the customer, no matter who owns the means of production. Business management becomes less like Monopoly, owning and managing assets, and more like Chess, making a series of good moves.

A game of Monopoly can wipe out an entire afternoon, but a chess master can play two dozen games at once, often declaring victory in less than fifteen minutes. Few enterprises are swift enough to mix and match steps in their value chains at the speed of the top players. The chess board these losers face is always two moves behind.

It's as if the losers' view of what's happening has been trapped in some terrible time-delay. You see, yesterday's managers came up with the best ways to do things, and they handed it off to their IT departments to implement. IT translated these solutions into indecipherable code. This was equivalent to carving the way they did things in stone and pitching them into a black hole. When conditions changed, obsolescence was assured. And change is rampant.

IT is not the bad guy here. Until quite recently, computer technology was so immature that years of study and teams of experts were required to communicate with the systems. Computers required users to bend to their will, to speak their arcane langauge, and to make people serve them rather than the other way around. This is about to change.

In the near future, business processes will be exposed for all to see. They will be like a document on the web. Since there's only one copy, everyone sings from the same hymnal. It's quick. It will always be up to date. Write once, read many.

Granted, the views on screen will differ by individual. The business analyst will see a process flow diagram that she can manipulated in real time. The business manager will monitor results from an executive cockpit with the ability to what-if analyze reconfigurations of the business. The worker will see a derivative of the process in a transactional portal or portable device. The programmer, who generally won't be that involved since changes to the process automatically change the underlying code, will see the process at the code and interface level.

As the inside flap of Peter Fingar and Howard Smith's book puts it, "Don't bridge the business-IT divide, obliterate it."