The Long View

Lost Knowledge

I argued frequently with one of my former business partners about the utility of Wikis in a business environment. He felt that the entire concept was too difficult for the average employee to grasp, and too foreign for the average company management to embrace. I, on the other hand am convinced that with a well-designed Wiki system, and adequate training and mentoring on its application and use, companies have the potential to use Wikis to achieve significant competitive advantages.

All wiki software packages have improved greatly over time, whether an open-source project or a commercial product. This improvement along with the increased awareness of wikis by the business community is allowing them to see more mainstream application.

One of the problem areas that wikis can admirably address is described eloquently in a recent entry in Tom Foydel's blog. He describes the all-too-common situation in which Management is clueless about how things really work in the trenches within their own companies. Unfortunately, with many front-line staff  knowing only their piece of the process, they are in the position of the blind men and the elephant - the can't see the whole picture well enough to make improvements beyond their cubicle.

Having all processes completely documented would be a solution. However, using the usual techniques - static word processing documents created through email collaboration - such documentation would be extremely costly to create and difficult to maintain as the processes evolve.

Wikis are tailor-made to allow employees to contribute to the documentation of processes, and the on-going maintenance of that documentation. What results is a knowledge base that is a valuable reference for new employees, transferees, management and line staff. The value of this reference can itself provide an incentive to use and maintain the information that it contains.

The really good news is that wikis can be implemented relatively quickly and at a very modest cost. I can't think of another software implementation that has the potential to yield as great an ROI as a wiki.

More on IP protection and innovation

I was checking out one of Guy Kawasaki's older posts about creating slide decks for presentations. This is an outstanding short tutorial from someone who has had to sit through a lot of PowerPoint presentations - must-reading for anyone who has to create slide decks! Within that post, Guy refers the reader to another (useful and interesting) blog on presentation skills called Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Guy uses a presentation by Lawrence Lessig as an example of a very unusual use of slides. A video of this can be found here.

Beyond the very clever use of the slides, this is an interesting 30-minute talk on whether Google's Book Search project constitutes "fair use". Since I made reference to this issue in a post the other day, I thought I'd point folks to this resource. Lessig presents the issue very clearly, and it's worth sitting through not only because it's both entertaining and informative, but Lessig makes some important points in his conclusion w/regard to how the use of IP law by some companies (what he terms "IP-extremism") is dividing, not encouraging markets, and is having a stifling effect on innovation.

When to get out of the way of the bulldozers

Several years ago I had an opportunity to become an author of some technical books. My publisher includes me in his occasional email missives to current and former authors and editors. Recently he sent out a message that describes his struggles with issues surrounding the piracy of the electronic versions of our books. Part of his observations questioned the wisdom of recent lawsuits against Google for their Google Print project. His position is that print-only publishers will sooner or later go the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo Bird. It's better to deal with the issues surrounding digital publishing than to stick one's head in the sand and hope that it will go away.

I'm not sure that print publishing will actually be dead in my lifetime, But as a consumer I hate all the DRM (Digital Rights Management) solutions out there. I thwart DRM on music at every opportunity. I rip CD's to DRM-free high-bitrate MP3's then convert it to low-bitrate WMA format to load on my portable player. It's a pain to do the two-step process, but the resulting files can be archived onto CD's and I can play 'em anytime, anywhere, on any device.

I've been working on a team that has been developing computer-based content for education of technology entrepreneurs. We wanted everyone on the team to evaluate a textbook from Stanford University and we all ponied up the $42 to purchase the e-book from Zinio. I had trouble getting it to recognize my license to read the damn book on the machine from which I purchased, downloaded and installed the book, let alone the next machine that I buy and to which I will attempt to transfer the book! And if the mechanism were to make it easy for the transfer, how easy will it be to pirate the copyrighted material?

I'm glad it's not my problem to solve, but filing lawsuits doesn't solve the problem, and refusing to allow distribution of information in an electronic format or searching of content using online search tools doesn't solve the problem either; it only marginalizes the content. If I'm an author hoping to get a lot of copies of my book out there, then marginalizing my work isn't what I'm about.

My deeper concern about DRM, patent and copyright issues is that the criminal prosecutions and litigation are evidence of a failure of innovation. The world is changing, which is always a threat, but also (always, always) an opportunity. Maybe the old business models don't work. Look at what some companies are doing with open source (free as in beer) software. Rather than fight it, they're recognizing the technical viability of these products, and finding ways of adding value that creates a viable business model. The marketing of creative works and other Intellectual property too might need to be re-thought.

I don't have a solution to the fair-use and "piracy" problems, but I do know that standing in front of the digital bulldozer by filing lawsuits isn'g going to solve it either.