Breaking a consensus?
Balancing divergent interests is one of the key things to do in a project: between business people defending the functional requirements and technologists pushing for non-functional, between the project manager guarding his time and budget constrains and the project member wanting to figure out the details of a problem, etc…
Lacking a brilliant visionary that can nail the silver bullet (the number of Steve Jobs in this world equals “limited - 1” these days), most project teams settle around a consensus. This decision approach does not always lead to an optimal solution (referring to the Belgian situation would be too easy), but allows building a shared discourse that is broadly supported and accepted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making).
Once such a consensus is found, introducing a divergent idea (e.g. to accommodate new insights or other requirements) is hard. Lacking the in depth elaboration, the required maturity and the broad understanding of the consensus idea, it is rather easy to shatter it to pieces and dispose of it - no matter if it may have a potential or not. Furthermore, most projects do not have the luxury to return on decisions taken or bet on several horses. Unfortunately, it may take a long time to validate the assumptions behind any large decision and assess the impact (market fit, technical feasibility, …), so doing an a posteriori evaluation of the original decisions is an exercise rarely doable.
My suggestion: make sure that you are part of the initial consensus building team. Breaking a consensus later on may seem a worthy cause, but chances for success are small & will in any case require lots of effort. And for the shortcomings of the/any consensus… I guess creativity will bring the right answers :)
Feel free to share your own experiences!
Surfers and Divers, Patients and Doctors…
While I am keeping my promise of reading more on the Personal Identity Management, I gladly take any opportunity to exchange ideas with open but critical minds. This morning one of these opportunities took place… and one of the questions was:
Does a person use information available - and how? Is a better informed person a smarter person? And how will the informed person interact with an educated person?
I do not have an answer, let alone thé answer to these questions, but an extremely interesting read on how the information society - in a broad sense of the word - is impacting our generation (and the generations to come) is “The Barbarians” from Allessandro Baricco (Not translated in English as far as I can tell. For the Dutch speaking you can listen to the Cobra interview, read the Humo review, or even better, read the book)
The key observation in this series of essays is that our society is moving from the “romantic” era, where the ideal of study and effort - resulting in intellectual and cultural depth (diving), is replaced by a horizontal movement, where people glide over the surface in the search for short cuts to fresh excitement (surfing).
Do not expect pages of incomprehensible theory, but short chapters where the consequences of this idea are applied on wine, football and many other - cool - topics… Alessandro fights the idea that there is a big battle between civilization and ‘barbarians’, but rather presents a gradual transition from within society. The only ‘paternalistic’ advice he gives is that we should think well on what we want to keep from the old world. A great read!
In relation to the questions above, we could replace the informed person by the surfer and a smart/educated person by the diver. What happens if a surfer meets a diver? Will the surfer recognize a diver? Will the surfer be willing to recognize a diver as a ‘smart’ person, not really valuating the diving qualities any more? Or will the surfer use the diver as a short cut and continue his journey as soon as he can?
To make these questions more tangible, one could map them to the patient-doctor relation. The surfing patient has now access to a huge set of health information. The doctor has been “diving” for years to build his expertise. When the patient meets the doctor, a surfer-diver communication needs to be established… taking into account that the doctors’ intellectual depth (for many years the summum of the romantic ideal) is not necessarily part of the frame of reference of the patient. It is clear that the patient-doctor relation is already changing and probably will continue to do so. Perhaps Baricco’s paradigm can help putting things into context and provide some ideas on what to keep from the ‘old’ world.
At this moment, we are only seeing the beginning of this shift, and perhaps the mutation from diver to surfer is hiding yet another mutation. One thing is for sure: “We are living in interesting times!”
Personal Identity Management
A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a blog post “Thoughts on Data Privacy and the Penny Gap” [link], which took me to the website of www.personal.com. A couple of days ago, their blog featured a Forrester report titled “Personal Identity Management” [link].
The idea behind personal identity management is that the control over data shifts from the (large) operator of a service one wants to use, to the individual data owner, i.e. yourself. Each of these data owners will have one or more lockers on which they have the control and expose the relevant data when they see fit. Personal takes it a step further: they let you manage your data, not only for you own use, but also allow you to sell your data, withholding a transaction fee. This way, your data becomes an asset you can capitalize upon.
My first thought is that the consequences are huge.
The promise of being able to control who uses your data for which purpose is great. After all, it is private and yours. But in exchange for a real value in return, you’d want to share it (temporarily). Or perhaps I may even win the lotto by just being me?
But I guess there are some challenges that are similar to what we’ve known for a while… Rather than functionality provider, we need to select (and trust) an identity management service provider. What happens if they get compromised? How well will the business model work? Do we want to hand over a key asset to a governmental service? What is a reasonable price for my data?
My second thought was simpler.
Read more on the topic :)
I’ll keep you posted if I get some more insights!
