Many modern companies tend to view IT as a utility like water or electricity. While that might be true for some parts of IT (the parts in the lower end of the IT stack like hardware), from the software level and up, IT is just too complex to be treated as a utility.

Then again, it also depends on the type of business to which extend treating IT as a utility will affect you. It is not hard to imagige businesses that only need email, an office suite, a website manager and some other basics to function succesfully. Those kind of businesses can treat IT as a utility. Online cloud services like Google Apps or Zoho provide all and more of what they need. Please note that in those cases, the company does not need an IT department.

So maybe we could state that, if you have an IT department, it can be assumed that IT potentially plays an important role. Because if you only need services of the level like the ones mentioned above, why do you have an IT department at all? I think it needs no clarification that organisations, whose business depends on creating and managing knowledge, like many organisations nowadays in the developed world, can be tremendously helped by IT. Then, if IT is an important part of the success of your organisation, why do you treat it as a liability (an expense account) rather than an asset?

Let’s have a look at three organisational diagrams and reflect on the place and possible role of their IT:

#1

#2

#3

1. Marketing and IT under 1 manager? That’s a very bad idea. This is a knowledge firm (high number of consultancy departments) so you would expect them to have at least a separate IT department. But no, the guy that prints the brochures is also responsible for your Windows hotfixes.

2. I can hardly find the IT department (Chief Infocom?) and it doesn’t seem to be important enough to be mentioned in one of the core business lines (Onshore,Offshore,Exploration). This would be probably a oil or mining company, traditionally without an IT department maybe. Could be that IT is so embedded in the organisation that they don’t need a separate department.

3. Very good, looks like a learning institute (VLE admin) and the IT department seems to be in the proper place: they have a Learning Technologies manager right in the middle of their core business and on the same level as Course Development and Instructional Design.

Having separate IT departments is not a bad thing. It can be even the way to go to cut costs on the lower end of your IT stack. But to be a successful company and get the most out of your IT deparment investments (hardware, software and humanware), you’ll have to start viewing IT as an asset to your organisation and open that asset to all your employees. Based on the charts above, I would most like to work for organisation #3.

sources of the organograms:

• http://uniexgh.com/about/organogram.php
• http://www.ongcindia.com/organogram.asp
• http://www.virtualcampuses.eu/images/1/13/Organogram_hibernia.jpg

Facebook is the god of  Mother Theresa

Actually, I do not have that much positive to say about Facebook per se. Fair enough, they provide a great, free (as in beer) service to stay connected to your global network of friends, exchange photos and recommend stuff you find on the web to each other. Moreover, by being such a massively used platform, they amassed enough resources to develop some really cool and interesting new technology like ‘HipHop for PHP’ or the Cassandra noSQL database. What’s even cooler is that they released those technologies as open source projects.

The web (the Internet) enables us to connect to each other and create interesting networks. Facebook is a succesful application developed on that web, leveraging some of the characterics and benefits of networks. The most famous cases being the recent uprisings in Northern Africa where Facebook was supposedly a catalyst of the revolution (which I do not believe, I think the web was a catalyst of the revolution, Facebook was just the application which happened to be most widely used and available at the time (o wait, this paragraph was supposed sum up the positive sides of Facebook, please forget the previous sentence.)).

So Facebook is cool if you want an easy, brainless way to stay connected to your friends, start a revolution or if you are interested in state of the art web development and system engineering.

But there is a shadow side!

Facebook is the god of Richard Dawkins

Facebook owns you and your data, period. If that doesn’t scare you enough already I’ll try to elaborate a bit on that.

Besides Facebook owning you and your data, Facebook is a centralised technology as opposed to a federated one. Centralised technologies are scary as well because it enables a ‘killswitch’. Theoretically Mark Z. in California could decide that it’s in his company’s best interest to disable Facebook access for Libya. Or he could decide to sell your data to some advertisement company or the government. The point being is that we and Mark have a conflict of interest. He makes decisions based on trying to maximize his company’s profit. Those decisions are for now still in favour of the user (that is, us). But that will not necessarily always be the case.

What you’d want is own your own data. So your pictures sitting on your server in your broom cupboard. You decide who gets to see what and you decide when it’s time to remove them, lock them up, disconnect the server from the network, whatever. Not some socially challenged clown from California.

The same story could be held for Twitter. A federated alternative to twitter is identica, developed by statusnet. Identica doesn’t own your data. In fact, you can set up your own identica node, as it were. Identica offers me choice. Choice enables freedom. Facebook does not offer choice. Facebook is not freedom. Facebook is the nail on your coffin. Liberate yourself and the web, ditch Facebook, embrace freedom.

Find some links on the bottom of this post to help you explore internet freedom.

References

• Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion (read it!)
• hiphop Facebook’s PHP to C++ code transformer
• Cassandra Facebook’s noSQL storage engine
• XMPP a federated, open messaging protocol
• identica and statusnet the libre Twitter alternative
• Bits Of Freedom
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Freedom box

To say anything at all about workflow, let’s first clarify what I mean by workflow. By workflow, I mean the acquiring (input), analysis and storing or archiving of information for personal use (both work and personal related). With the advent of, first of all, the Internet, Internet based applications, the Freemium Business model and  a growing number of different types of Internet connected platforms, a lot of different kinds of information processing solutions became available to the wider public. That’s great, but how does that trend actually influence our (in this case mine) information processing workflow?

Apps

Web 2.0 for me means two important things: the participative web versus the consumption focused and dynamic web based applications versus static pages. Apart from but parallal to that the Freemium business model gained popularity. The Freemium model was important in removing the threshold of trying out and using new apps. For me it’s very common to subscribe to and/or download a new app to check out what it can do for me and see if I like it. Apart from being free, being connected is the thing which makes you use Apps instead of sticking to Post-it notes (pun intended). Being consciously (actively) connected means I can easily share information. Being unconsciously (passively) connected means information is abundant versus rare allowing for exploiting the Long Tail. Summarising, accessible Internet apps enable network effects.

Some of my favourite workflow related apps: Diigo for social bookmarking and note taking, Evernote for note taking, Google Reader for RSS feeds (RSS being one of the most powerful and underused technologies of the past and coming decade). WordPress for writing blog posts. Dropbox and git for backing up and sharing files. Mindmeister for organising my mind. Google will help you find all these apps.

Platforms

In the old days, the Desktop computer with an (Internet) browser was the main way the majority of us connected to the Internet. Since some years however, starting with GSM enabled laptops, more and smaller portable Internet enabled devices are getting available. The most ubiquitous one must be today’s smartphone, the most recent one the tablet. For me, getting a smartphone, meant two important things: first, being able to access the Internet everywhere and anytime made important parts of my workflow independent of space and time. Second, GPS allows for location aware apps. In practice that means that I virtually always have a zero inbox because gmail on my phone allows me to read and follow up on mail during otherwise lost time like when waiting for the train or during a non-important point of a meeting. Note taking apps like Diigo or Evernote make it possible to take a note, make a picture or record a voice message anytime and immediately sync it to the cloud. The current trend of newly emerging platforms scaling from smartphone to, let’s say, desktop computer I believe will just fill the niches which are merely expressions of our different personalities.

Workflow

To be honest. I think Apps and Platforms have no other impact on my workflow than making it more efficient. I can use my time more efficient by not being dependent on a physical location to access the Internet or my notepad and pencil. And tagging and search systems make information easier to store and retrieve. That is all a great asset and I am very happy with it. But still, I believe THE most important aspect of any information processing workflow is reflection. You can use your favourite RSS reader to quickly digest enormous amounts of news. You can use Diigo to bookmark and archive the whole internet. You can use Mindmeister to organise all your brilliant figments. But if you don’t have a feedback system which reflectively reprocesses that information, it will become a useless pile of data. The conclusion must be that apps and platforms are great for turning information into organised data. But that’s not what you want, what you want is to turn information into knowledge. To do that, you have to reflect, learn, write, teach, do, live …

Me writing this post has been way better for me than me discovering and using Evernote.

NOTE: I did not include any hyperlinks (o, how much I love that word, hyperlink!, it has this futuristic, but futurustic from the 80′s feel about it) in the text. I recently read somewhere that including links in text drastically reduces the readibility of text and makes the reader quicly lose focus. As stated in the text, there’s always your pal Google to help you out.

Writing about how to engineer serendipity for last month’s parallax entry got me thinking about the nature of serendipity. I already concluded that serendipity is a state of mind and cannot easily be learned or taught (think ‘tips on how to win a beauty pageant’: 1. be beautiful 2. win the pageant). On top of that comes that serendipity is favoured by random and/or unexpected events. Unexpected events are actually a conditio sine qua non for serendipity.

Now, if you look at the social web of today, you’ll notice that what a lot of sites and services are doing is really try to remove as much randomness as possible. The general strategy is as follows: 1. create a profile / account so you can be tracked 2. your online behaviour is tracked 3. your online behaviour data is clustered and classified so it can used to eg recommend similar content and profiles. That means that the social web is constantly looking for similarities. Something which is hindering serendipity.

Below I’ll use three well know websites as an example of how we are creating a suffocating cocoon of similar information around our own online profiles.

Amazon

If I search Amazon for a book on statistics, the most popular or most sold book shows up first. Then, when I visit that book’s page, Amazon kindly shows me other books which customers who bought this book, also bought. Then, when I decided to purchase the book, I will get either informed by email or after logging in a next time, about new editions of the book, similar popular books and so on. All this is great if you are constantly looking for the latest and greatest on statistics but it will deny precious serendipity time.

In contrast, if I search for a book on statistics in my local bookshop, chances are that I will first have to fight my way through 3 pallets of Harry Potter junk before passing the International Cooking shelf only to be redirected by the staff to the proper section (via Sports and Travel, up the stairs and then the top shelf at the South wall); plenty of opportunities for serendipitous discoveries.

So Amazon has excellent algorithms to help me find ‘more of the same’. Thanks Amazon.

Last.fm

Last.fm is a music aggregation site. It tracks the music you play on your computer and so builds up a profile of your musical taste. Based on that profile it can recommend similar artists, provide information on relevant live concerts in your area, suggest tags and it shows your so called neighbours (people who have a similar taste to you). That makes last.fm great for finding John Coltrane if you are playing your Miles Davis discography or finding a rare live recording of that cool Bad Brains track. But you will probably not find anything wildly different from what you were listening to.

Some might argue that the neighbour system allows for some serendipity, which is true. But the sad paradox is that the more music you play and is tracked (scrobbled) by last.fm, the better last.fm’s algorithms will be able to find an exact copy of you. Each played mp3 increases the stranglehold on serendipity’s throat.

Google.com

When I start typing a search term in Google it seems Google knows what I am searching for better than me myself. Especially with the new ‘search as you type’ functionality, you are guided to the most likely outcome. When you start typing brit , Google suggests you are either looking for Britain, British Airways or Britney Spears. This might seem like serendipity (great! you found an airway when looking for your idol) but it’s not. It’s not random. Every time, anybody who types brit , will get the same suggestion.

Google prevents me from making mistakes while mistakes are a possible source of serendipity. Moreover Google overloads me with a pile of (similar) data of users who did searches like mine. Google is not a good place

I don’t want to be a mussel!

The solution is simple: look for the human factor. Sites or services with a high human factor will provide the biggest opportunity of doing serendipitous discoveries (think twitter, blogs).

By the way: shouldn’t you have noticed already but Hans and I think serendipity is a good thing.

Serendipity and the Internet

First of all, I think serendipity cannot be engineered. I strongly think that serendipity is a mindset. To illustrate that, I’d like to compare serendipity to humor. Humor cannot be engineered either. You cannot learn to be funny, you cannot go to humor school. Humor is merely a sense of timing and looking at things from a different perspective.

Same with serendipity. I’m sure Pasteur was not the first to accidently inject spoiled bacteria into test animals. But apparently he was the first to notice that the side effect of the chickens not getting sick anymore might be related to ‘spoiledness’ of the bacteria.

What I think the Internet has done for serendipitous minds. is leverage the impact of single serendipitous discoveries into whole strings or chains of discoveries because of it’s strong network effects.

A second effect of the Internet is that it has provided the lucky few with an enormous new source of serendipitous opportunities. Serendipity is favoured by the amount, richness, and pluriformity of events. The Internet did all three of these things: it increased the amount, richness and pluriformity of events.

Music

So, somewhere in 2008, at the bar of the biking club I learn that one of my biking friends has a similar musical taste as me and he is a huge fan of the Melvins, whom I did only know by name by then. So I order a pile of their CD’s from some Internet shops and I find out that their latest efforts are released by Ipecac, the label of Faith No More frontman Mike Patton, who also did vocals on one of my favourite Dillinger Escape Plan releases. Via his wikipedia page I come across his gazillion side projects among which Moonchild, with John Zorn, who also released a really nice CD with a reinterpretation of Ornette Colemans work, the pioneer free jazz saxophone player. Moonchild was partly inspired by the works of Aleister Crowly, who was also a main source of inspiration for Current 93, a British experimental group which is closely related to Nurse With Wound, a project which I was notified of by my good friend Seiya from Japan who stayed with me last month and who played guitar for Naiad, a Kyoto band which I found with Google in 2001.

I can spend hours hopping from related band to related genre to related artist to related producer to related influence etc on last.fm, wikipedia or myspace.

The Internet has tremendously increased the speed with which these kind of chains grow.

Tumblr

Tumblr, I even forgot how I found it but it came as a huge surprise to me. It’s one of those Internet things which you don’t know about but seems to have millions and millions of subscribers and followers. I love it. The interesting thing is that tumblr itself (I like to view it as a twitter on steroids) is a tremendous source of serendipity. Via tumblr I found fffound, visualizeus and many other interesting pages, blogs and aggregation sites.

Mobile Internet

In February 2010 I visited my first real geek conference with Hans in Brussels (which in itself can be seen as the result of a serendipitously driven chain of events). In the evening I was browsing the neighbourhood map on my phone and found a really nice restaurant just a few blocks away of our hotel, which we surely wouldn’t have found otherwise. In contrast, the next day we used some old school serendipity to find a good place to have some breakfast coffee and a croissant: drive around randomly until you find an open bar. Both ways work and produce satisfying results. It’s just that the Internet, and in this case the mobile Internet, adds opportunities and lowers thresholds.

closing remark: the intro uses ‘the web’ and ‘the Internet’ as synonyms. A recent article by Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson argues differently (recommended read).

1.What is Goodreads?

Favourite topic

I wanted to say by far my favourite topic, but that’s a bit too much. So, my favourite topic was What on Earth is Remote Sensing?. After two years in a completely different field of work, I was 3 months or so working in my original field of Remote Sensing. That, in combination with the format, made the post really enjoyable to write.

The reason I withdrew myself from saying by far …, is that I also deeply enjoyed creating the clips for Kaizen versus Good Enough. That post might even be the start for a new category of posts I will do together with my wife on her blog.

Favourite post (Arjen)

This one is easy. That has to be my first attempt in this series: Planning your Career or the Boundary between Private and Professional life. At the time I just changed jobs so I gave this topic a lot of thought. It must also be my most spontaneous and emotional post.

Do nice things with nice people. Where, how and what you do is of minor, if of any, importance.

Favourite post (Hans)

Easy for me again: the six books that had the most influence on who I am today. Favourite, partly because Hans and I started with an almost identical disclaimer. Partly because I love reading and immediately ordered all the books from Hans’ list which I didn’t have. But I mostly liked this post  because I feel it has the most Hans in it. I like personality shining through in writing (is this English?) and this is Hans’ best example in my opninion.

Formats

Coming up with a new format every two months was part of the fun as well as seeing what Hans’ would come up with every other month. I still remember being full in moving from one house to another when Hans sent me this notice: ‘Order this book, the new parallax topic will be about the book’. I read the book in my sleeping bag in my new, unfinished house. The reason we introduced constraining formats was to induce the creative process. And that for sure worked out. Especially when you are limited to, say, 500 worrds, you are forced to be concise and say exactly what you want. It also induced the creative process in a more indirect way: you first have to be creative in coming up with a new format, then you have to be creative again to comply to format and come up with something decent. One format I would like to explore more is the one with guest authors. Maybe something with a dialog or, even better, polemy. Another thought is to include more alternative channels, like twitter, facebook or a post composed of only creative commons content from flickr. Well, shouldn’t spill all my ideas yet.

Hope the coming year of parallax posts will be as fruitful as the last and I will try to improve my English writing style. I enjoyed writing, I hope my 10 readers enjoyed reading (10, that is including the Googlebot. Hi there again, thanks for not giving me a Page Rank).

I had a tough time reading this book. I do basically agree with all the things stated in the one page chapters. Most of my ‘career’ is even based on the spirit advocated by the book. But the writing style and the way of arguing were driving me crazy. The pattern is as follows: “Lot’s of people say you can’t do X. But look at us! We did X, so it is possible”. For me that reads as: “Lot’s of people say you shouldn’t base your life’s path on winning the lottery. But look at me! I won the lottery, so it is possible”. Yes it indeed is but don’t underestimate Lady Luck. She’s a bitch called hope. And hope is for the weak.

Here are my three lists:

Done

Go to sleep: this could be my life’s motto. You will never be creative or productive when your tired. That goes for physical as well as mental tiredness.

Embrace constraints: this Parallax series is based on this principle. Constraints boost creativity. Constraints are freedom.

Sound like you: I don not possess many qualities but you can be sure that I never ever write or produce anything which is not me. I say and do as I think and try to do that in the best way I can.

TODO

Your estimates  suck: I often tend to plan too much and too far ahead. I should really limit my planning to 1 to 3 weeks ahead and for the rest depend on vision and strategy.

Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority: I sometimes let myself be carried away by my enthusiasm about new stuff whereas it would have been better to first finish other things up or focus on useful quick wins.

Sell your by-products: interesting thought. I never really thought about focusing on 1 product / service and see the rest as by-products. So maybe for me it should be: focus on your main products, the rest are by-products.

The hand that feeds you

Hire managers of 1: I’ll be so arrogant to state I myself am a manager of 1. I hope that my bosses realise that those are the persons that will make our company stronger.

Build an audience / Out teach your competition: our company is still only famous in it’s own parish. We should get out to the world and blog, microblog and organise workshops and seminars, go to conferences more.

Resumes are ridiculous / Years of irrelevance: anyone can write an impressive resume and everyone can suck at a job for a very long time. But that doesn’t make them good people for your company. Always rely on solid interviews and make sure you test drive newly hired staff.

I choose this particular format because I wanted to think about what was really important to me given two obviously ubiquitous dominant technologies. Polarising them as the ends of a spectrum forces you think about (1.) the nature of the spectrum and (2.) possible hierarchies or gradients within that spectrum. I decided to start at ‘Internet’ and then see how that would trickle down to ‘microprocessor’. For each item I reflected on why I think it is important. The ‘cannot live without‘ from the title is highly overrated (i.e. for me) and is only there to satisfy search engines.

1. The Internet

The Internet for me equals connectivity and exchange. Connectivity and the open exchange of data and ideas allows and enables innovation at an hitherto unseen speed. Moreover, it democratizes the means of production by putting (access to) generative tools in the hands of everyone willing to create or share products and ideas. I realise there’s a cultural bias here as not everyone in the world has an equal opportunity to access the internet. Let’s be positive and assume that will only be a matter of time.

2. The Commandline Interface: CLI

This was the hardest item to pick and at first sight it might seem like the stranger in the midst of these 5. But choosing one particular, ‘most important‘, tool to access the internet left me hopelessly undecided. The closest would be the web browser, in particular Chromium, but the problem with a browser is that it does not have any direct link to my local computing device. That’s why I choose for the cli, for me the glue of any OS and the bridge between the Internet and you(r computer’s files, databases, programs, tools, whatever).

3. Linux

I use Linux as a placeholder for FOSS. Together with open standards, FOSS is such a powerful combo that it’s a mystery to me why governments don’t invest more money in it or develop more legislation around it. Of course, for me Linux is also synonym to all my favourite (cli) tools like vi, grep, bash, wget, rsync, R, find, sed, awk, php, apache, python, [endless list of tools I myself never even heard about]. It’s your workstation and server in one. It can do everything you want. If you can’t do it, you probably don’t want it.

4. My Laptop

A laptop is still my computing device of choice. For me, being mobile is a number 1 requirement. Of course there’s a boom in mobile devices nowadays (smartphones, tablets, netbooks) but I still feel these all fill in a niche whereas my laptop is really more like a Swiss army tool of productivity: I can create and edit documents, images, audio, video, browse the web and do programming. There was a hard fight with the netbook for this position. Still, the powerfull processor and the slightly bigger screen give me that extra edge that makes me opt for a laptop.

5. The Microprocessor

The microprocessor is the driving engine of most of the technological developments of the last 30-40 years. Together with it’s older brother, the microchip, it’s becoming to dominate actually everything. Think about the rise of the internet of things, Sensor Webs or just your bank’s debit card. The microprocessor is already at the stage of just being there. I think The Internet will also reach that status some day soon.

Looking at points 1 through 5, the eerie feeling comes over me that it seems to be a gradient of less and less choice. You can choose to live and function normally in society without the Internet for example. But I doubt if you could live in a Western society without microprocessors or microchips. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as long as the choice within those levels stays open and free.

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

1. bertboerland @arjenvrielink you can still do a BoF at the#drupaljam

I submitted a proposal for a presentation which was refused. But one of the organisers informed about the possibility of a BoF via twitter, which is very cool (considered but didn’t do a BoF after all). Furthermore, I learned  something since I didn’t know what a BoF is. Luckily wikipedia did.

2. arjenvrielink Would be cool if solr could build spatial indexes from shapefiles and geotiffs to allow semantic spatial search #drupaljam

Tweeted when watching a presentation by Robert Douglas on the excellent Apache Solr, which integrates beautifully in Drupal. Two slides later, Robert announced integration of of geospatial indexing in Solr. Supercool!

3. ijansch #drupaljam not sure I get it. If drupal and solr are free, what’s the added value of the commercial aquia search wrapper?

Common misunderstanding of the freemium model. I think Acquia is a great example of how freemium can be successful: release your software as open source and offer paid services around it.

4. kanariezwart @shderuiter Die views overtuigen mij niet zo. MySQL views zijn toch sneller? part 2 tippeldip? #drupaljam

rough translation (ed.): Those views are not really convincing to me. Aren’t MySQL views faster? part 2 tippeldip.

Two issues: 1. I think he completely misses the point of Drupal Views. Drupal Views are so powerful because it basically puts the tools of a DBA in the hands of a non-techie (the Drupal admin).  2. tippeldip  = tippelphip = tippelvip = drupal lingo for template files which end in .tpl.php. Nice to see that all communities have their own idiom and language.

5. shderuiter Loving the changes to theming in Drupal 7, but upgrading’s gonna be a bitch. So basically nothing new… :-)#drupaljam

Drupal is not backward compatible and upgrade paths are not always clean and smooth. I think this fundamental design decision is one of the forces that drives Drupal’s success. The developers are free to create the best thing that the current state of technology allows for. Moodle for example suffers from the opposite decision. Lot’s of ‘bad’ design choices in Moodle can be traced back to the quirks and limitations of early MySQL and PHP versions.

6. regnard RT @arjenvrielink: Design for the mental model, not for the implementation model. Drupal7 UX #drupaljam

Another reason why I love twitter: twitter is a mental note taker; tweet was about that often techies tend to design from the perspective of all the cool stuff they’ve build where they should be designing for the people using it.

7. hansdezwart What is the reason @mortendk has chewing gum in his mouth while presenting? To make sure we can’t hear what he is saying?#drupaljam

This was tweeted by several other people and the presenter apologised afterwards. The best presentation of the day severely wounded by chewing gum sounds. Bummer man.

All in all it was good to be at the Drupaljam. Met some cool people, got some fresh ideas and had fun hanging out with Hans.