The Smarter the Technology the Dumber the People

It is hard to read the news these days without being overwhelmed by stories whose key actions can be attributed to ineptitude. Whether it involves software development by drones who know how to use fancy automated tools but lack any basic understanding of how code actually works, slaves to CRM systems who misread the input and sign up health insurance for the family dog (whose name was given as the answer to a security question), or a pilot who lands his large-economy-sized 747 at the wrong airport and can't take off because the runway is too short, it would seem that relying on "advanced technology" is creating a new culture of incompetence. E. M. Forster predicted that support technology would break down because people would become so dependent that they would forget about principles of maintenance. However, he failed to consider the possibility that "smart technology" would erode cognitive capacity to the point where people would do dumb things with it. In the spirit of Yogi Berra, one might say that, if Foster were alive to witness the direction his prediction actually took, he would be glad that he is dead!

Is Customer Relevance a Secret?

The good news about Rafe Needleman’s column today for the Rafe’s Radar department of CNET News is that it presents a brief and cogent account of why every new technology business needs to remember that the customer is always more important than the product.  The bad news is that this argument was delivered under the headline “Startup Secret No. 3.”  The connotation is that this is some arcane insight of great value to every would-be entrepreneur but not readily available.  The fact that this precept is not common knowledge (let alone the highest priority) among those obsessed with “innovation Kool-Aid” as the only remedy for our economic crisis goes a long way to explaining why that Kool-Aid is as toxic as it is.

The fact is that our current dire economic straits have a lot to do with the reckless actions of those who never bothered to see customers as anything but “emergent phenomena,” not necessarily directly related to all the data points casually gathered and manipulated on spreadsheets.  Put in the bluntest of terms, you can never have a business without customers;  if you ignore them, then they will ignore you, even if it is later, rather than sooner.  This applies as much to those who have been recklessly innovative with financial products as to those obsessed with promoting the next “killer app” (a metaphor more applicable, so to speak, than most would like to suppose) or the toy to displace the iPad.  Needleman has had a long-standing reputation as a voice of common sense for CNET.  Today’s piece reminded me of just how short the supply of that common sense is!

Who Reacted and How

Last night the Security section of CNET News ran the following report of a breach by Edward Moyer:

Epsilon, which manages e-mail communications for TiVo, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One Financial, US Bank, the Kroger grocery chain, and other clients, said this week that it suffered a security breach that revealed data on some of its clients' customers.

Epsilon, which says it sends 40 billion e-mails annually, released a statement yesterday saying that on March 30 it detected an "unauthroized entry" [sic] into its system that exposed customer names and e-mail addresses. The company said "no other personal identifiable information associated with those names was at risk."

Bloomberg reported that an Epsilon representative would not say how many other clients might be affected, citing an ongoing investigation.

While this is clearly interesting on its own merits, my attention was drawn to Moyer’s account of how some of these businesses reacted when they were informed of the situation by Epsilon.  Kroger’s strategy was to use electronic mail to deliver a short message:

Kroger wants to remind you not to open e-mails from senders you do not know.  Also, Kroger would never ask you to e-mail personal information such as credit card numbers or social security numbers. If you receive such a request, it did not come from Kroger and should be deleted.

While this does not say anything that readers should not know, it provides a useful reminder through the very channel that had been placed at risk.  This amounts of a vote of confidence in Epsilon’s statement and their approach to managing electronic mail.  It is also likely to be seen by those who matter the most.

This strikes me as a far better understanding of “customer relationship management” than the actions of Chase and Capital One, each of which simply posted the information on their respective Web sites.  Chase did a relatively poor job of directing attention.  The notice is on the home page in the form:  “Please read important message to all Chase customers  LEARN MORE.”  Most critical is that this summary should have been more informative.  Many (probably myself included) would view this with suspicion as being just another pitch to sell something.  In my case, though, I would never see the message, since, as a Chase customer, I tend to go directly to the My Accounts page.  Not only is there no notice of the problem on that page, but also there is not a message in the internal Secure Message Center alerting me that a problem may exist.  Capital One, however, turned out to be even worse, since they do not even provide a pointer to their message on their home page.

It seems to me that the main conclusion to draw from this comparison is that Kroger gave more thought to communicating with their customers than either Chase or Capital One did.  One reason may be that Kroger has to deal with its customers as grocery shoppers on a week-by-week basis, if not with greater frequency.  The financial sector, on the other hand, does not think about engaging with customers with such frequency.  As a corollary this means that businesses in the financial sector “understand” (scare quotes intended) their customers by analyzing databases, while Kroger’s may actually try to establish understanding through engagement on the floor of their outlets.  I would further suggest that Capital One, in particular, seems to feel that it is important to invest its resources in advertising to bring in more customers than in engaging in any meaningful way with the customers it already has (perhaps because they think of engagement in terms of selling more stuff rather than providing the services associated with that stuff).  This may be yet another lens through which we can examine the state of our current economic problems and our prospects for recovery.

Friedrich Hayek at the Safeway

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been discovering that it has been getting harder to find several of my favorite items during my weekly supply run to Safeway. When I ask about those items, the response I get is either a blank stare or a pained look while explaining that a branch store has no control over what the warehouse decides to send them to put on their shelves. From this I conclude that the decisions made at the warehouse level are probably all determined by yet another complex piece of software that no one really understands, at least not at any useful operative level.

About a month ago I wrote a piece in which I made fun of AdSense for placing an ad on one of my pages that happened to be for a business (Anthem Blue Cross) that I was attacking with my usual polemic vigor. This was again a matter of relegating a highly individualistic decision to the generalized algorithmic abstractions of a piece of complex software. (This, however, was probably a case where at least one person, and probably several, in Google knows very well what the software does; but Google is very close-lipped when it comes to sharing that information with anyone "on the outside.") I made the assumption that the software was probably based on some particularly sophisticated approach to statistical analysis and then cited one of my favorite sources for critical review of the limitations of statistical theory, Friedrich Hayek. This is the passage I quoted:

Far from dealing with structures of relationships, statistics deliberately and systematically disregard the relationships between the individual elements. It is, to repeat, concerned with the properties of the elements of the "collective", though not with the properties of particular elements, but with the frequency with which elements with certain properties occur among the total. And, what is more, it assumes that these properties are not systematically connected with the different ways in which the elements are related to each other.

This is what Safeway's current approach to inventory does not "get." There is no doubting that their customer base is a "collective;" and I am sure that there is an abundance of useful knowledge about the properties of that collective. None of that knowledge, however, addresses those "properties of particular elements;" and those "particular elements" are both the individuals who have decided to shop at Safeway and the reasons for their all making the same decision (which are not likely to be the same reasons). The problem with looking only at the forest and ignoring the trees, so to speak, is that "feeling like an individual" is often one of the reasons why a customer chooses to shop at a particular store. So Safeway may be undermining the criteria according to which customers choose to come to their stores.

From a technology point of view, the Kool-Aid that is poisoning the well of Safeway's "customer relationships" may very well be that of data mining. This particular brew of Kool-Aid became very appealing on the basis of a cute anecdote about coincidental purchases of Pampers and beer that had been discovered by a data mining technique. On the other hand I remember an old Car 54 Where Are You? episode that demonstrated both clearly and humorously that what you learn from a survey is not necessarily the same thing you learn by having conversations with the folks on the street; and that particular narrative played out again in the far more serious setting of controlling drug crime during the fourth season of The Wire. Where Safeway is concerned, we are not talking about folks on the street; we are talking about customers in the aisles. The Kool-Aid of data mining clouds the brain into believing that all you need to know about those customers can be inferred from digital records of sales transactions. Will the senior managers responsible for those warehouses ever realize that it is time to go into the stores and see what the customers are actually doing, rather than treat them all as abstractions in a massive database?

Putting a Price on "Free" Information

Those who have decided that they have heard the information-wants-to-be-free barbarism too many times will probably enjoy a report by Jo Wade on the BBC News Web site under the title "Paying the price for a free web." In many ways this report reflects the spirit of Robert Greenwald's documentary about Wal-Mart, whose subtitle was The High Cost of Low Price. The IMDb page for this 2005 film summarizes it with the tagline, "It will change the way you think, feel - and shop…." Wade clearly believes that it is about time we change the way we think and feel about how we use the Internet. The basic argument is the usual one: Most Internet users do not realize how much personal information they are revealing to others. The value of Wade's report is the way in which its conclusion reduces this situation to terms as clear as those Greenwald had invoked in making his case against Wal-Mart:

Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.

Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.

Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.

So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed.

The currency is now information - your information. Businesses can use that information to make big money.

Daily we hand over the minutiae of our lives in return for a convenient and free web.

As an observer of technology, I have railed for some time against the way in which Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology has turned "desubjectivized" customers by turning them into objects that are manipulated and processed by software. Wade has framed the conclusion of this report in a way that takes this argument to the next level: The Internet user is no longer "just" an object; the user is a commodity. Now for some time there are have arguments about the extent to which the ruling class has turned the rest of the world into a slave class through mechanisms such as that of a "consciousness industry;" but a commoditized individual is nothing more than a slave. One no longer needs a consciousness industry to keep that individual from failing to recognize his/her enslaved state. One need only dole out some kind of gratification, such as "free information!"

Sidekick Recovery News

The latest word on the aftermath of the Sidekick data-loss incident seems to have come out early this morning on the Hardware 2.0 blog, maintained by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes for ZDNet. Given that the last report I cited, provided by Ina Fried for CNET News, concerned a response from T-Mobile that left more than a little to be desired, the important thing about the Kingsley-Hughes post is that the broken pottery now appears to be in Microsoft hands:

Roz Ho, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Premium Mobile Experiences division apologizes for the recent upheaval experienced by Sidekick users and also offers the good news that “most, if not all” of the lost Sidekick data has been recovered.

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

In other words Microsoft acknowledges that they broke it and that they are now fixing it. Note that the language is pretty vague when it come to how long the repair will take, but at least they have a plan for the process. Personally, I would have thought that the data for the calendar and tasks would take priority over personal contacts; so, at the very least, this raises the question as to whether or not those responsible for maintaining this technology actually use it. As I observed on Tuesday, the T-Mobile approach to customer relationship in this matter bordered on the insulting, if it did not actually cross the line. The idea that the Microsoft people responsible for this technology do not eat their own dog food should be as much of a red flag to Sidekick customers as the outage itself.

More interesting, however, is Kingsley-Hughes' effort to give an account of how this problem arose in the first place:

We also get the first indication as to what went wrong, and it points to something being terribly wrong with the way Danger/Microsoft was handling Sidekick data:

We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data. [emphasis added]

So a single system failure took out the main database and the backup. Seriously, what bone-headed backup system had to be in place to allow that to happen? Was the data just copies to another folder on the same drive? Likely not that simple, but something equally grossly incompetent had to have happened.

On the basis of his photograph, I would guess that Kingsley-Hughes is too young to have experienced the Northeast Blackout of 1965 and is probably part of the prevailing culture that no longer sees the value of history in a strategy for crisis management. In this case, as the Wikipedia entry explains, the cause was human error:

The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario. The safety relay, which is set to trip if the current exceeds the capacity of the transmission line, was set too low.

On the other hand the ability of this one action to trigger the blackout can be attributed to a single fault in the design of the power system:

As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York's Robert Moses generating plant caused the misset relay to trip at far below the line's rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Instantly, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.

With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into "islands". Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down. The affected power areas were the Ontario Hydro System, St Lawrence-Oswego, Western New York, Upstate New York, New England, and Maine. With only limited electrical connection southwards, power was not affected to the Southern States. The only part of the Ontario Hydro System not affected was the Fort Erie area next to Buffalo which was still powered by the old 25 Hz generators. Residents in Fort Erie were able to pick up a TV broadcast from New York where a local backup generator was being used for transmission purposes.

Note that use of the word "trigger." The underlying problem is a tendency to examine individual actions in isolation, rather than in terms of the consequences that may ensue. This is the broader question of engineering system design and implementation that I raised when the Sidekick story first broke. At the time I attributed this problem to an unhealthy relationship between engineering and marketing, but this may have its own underlying cause. A culture in which entrepreneurism has become firmly established as part of the engineering curriculum can easily become a culture in which marketing does too much talking without listening. In such a culture we may expect to read many more stories about highly promoted gadgets that first cultivate our dependence and then leave us stranded with the first (and inevitable) system failure.

Insulting the Victim?

Ina Fried has continued to track the Sidekick data-loss story for CNET News. However, as I tried to indicate on Sunday, this is a case where we need to go beyond the "facts of the story," so to speak, and interpret those facts in an effort to derive useful lessons-learned. Such interpretation is often facilitated by trying to align the evidence we have with models from the past (along the lines of the "thinking in time" strategy of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May); so we can then draw upon those models to draw inferences and make decisions. I proposed two such models on Sunday, the narrative of Robert Heinlein's 1940 story "Blowups Happen" and the Northeast Blackout of 1965. The former was a fictitious account of how to deal with the problem of a technology failure having catastrophic consequences for an unexpectedly large number of people. The second involved a failure that affected 25 million people but probably not on the catastrophic scale that Heinlein had considered. I neglected to mention 9/11 as a possible model, primarily because, from a narrative point of view, this is still very much a narrative-in-progress; so it would be hazardous to reason from a model that has not yet reached a point of closure.

Nevertheless, our experiences since 9/11 may help us focus on the sorts of questions we should be asking in planning our actions. Two questions stand out as worthy of consideration:

1. How do we compensate for the physical damage to "get things working again?"
2. How do we compensate for the personal damage to the victims of the physical damage?

Last night Fried ran a follow-up report, which indicates that these questions are being addressed by T-Mobile, if not by Microsoft. Regarding the first question:

T-Mobile said late on Monday that it may yet be able to recover Sidekick users' information that it had previously thought was lost as part of a massive server failure by Microsoft's Danger subsidiary.

"Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible," it said.

As Fried observes, this "marks a significant change in tone." I would characterize that change as a shift from "What's done is done" to "We're working on it." From the point of view of recognizing that "customer relationship" is a social, rather than technical, matter, this is definitely a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of how the second question has been addressed:

Those who do suffer permanent data loss will get a $100 "customer appreciation card" good toward T-Mobile service or products, the carrier said in a statement.

"For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days - there is no action needed on the part of these customers," T-Mobile said. "We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered."

Granted that it is never easy to put a price on pain and suffering, $100 sounds like a pretty cheap way to deal with personal reactions to this problem; and providing that compensation through a "customer appreciation card" just rubs salt in a wound whose pain is highly subjective. One can imagine that there are going to be customers who would like nothing better that to sever entirely their connections to T-Mobile, and it is hard to imagine their opinion being changed by the prospect of doing another $100 worth of business with the carrier at that carrier's expense.

The intrusion of impersonal technology into making decisions about people has been the latest swing of the pendulum in business attitudes towards customers. We have seen the two extremes of "the customer is always right" and "the customer be damned;" and we know that the pendulum will continue to swing. These days the basic attitude it that dealing with customers is no longer a matter of skill, because training procedures now tend to presume that all relevant activities may now be facilitated, if not entirely assumed, by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This is not to suggest that CRM technology puts a price on buying back the favor of an offended customer, but the technology does encourage the mindset that any personal problem can be solved by writing a check. There are probably many irate customers out there who would like nothing more than to see T-Mobile crash and burn, not realizing (or not caring) that none of the alternatives are likely to be any better (or, for that matter, worse). The best we can hope is that this whole affair will kick the pendulum back in the direction of treating the customer as "subject, rather than object;" but this seems about as unlikely as the prospect of engineering practices that design for recovery as much as for functionality!

Anyone Remember when Retailing WAS Social?

The trouble with reading CNET News is that it makes me feel my age. Consider the following crux of today's report by Don Reisinger on prevailing attitudes towards social media in the retail sector:

The E-tailing Group, which specializes in retail sector trends, surveyed 117 companies--from small to large--to assess how retailers and brands view the social Web.

The biggest concern among respondents is that consumers will "trash their products in front of a large audience," according to E-tailing Group. At the same time, companies very much want to partake in the social Web.

Am I the only one to see the eating-your-cake-and-having-it-too irony in these results? The whole idea of selling through the Internet was one of those classic instances of "disintermediation." The fundamental premise was that all that mattered was the "relationship" (scare quotes intended) between customer and product. Anything else was extraneous.

As is so often the case when technology intervenes to "make things better" (more scare quotes), the result was a system that tended to work to the customer's satisfaction most of the time. When the system did not work, however, it became a source of major (if not extreme) aggravation. However, because the system persisted, our natural tendency to forget history obscured any recollection of the "good old days," when, if you were not satisfied, you took the product "back to the shop" and dealt with your lack of satisfaction through a human being. If that person was good at his/her job, that interaction might even allow you some time to blow off steam before getting down to resolving the problem. In this brave new world that the Internet has made, that whole back-to-the-shop scenario has gone out the window, particularly the part about dealing with someone who may actually be interested in resolving your problem. So, if you need to blow off that steam, you go to the Internet to do it and use what you feel is a suitable forum to "trash their products in front of a large audience." This rarely solves the problem, and it may not always provide the desired emotional release.

The problem seems to be that much, if not most, of the retail sector is now so addled by the Kool-Aid of technology evangelism that individual retailers can no longer recognize the problems that are most serious for any efforts to do better business. Social media may be the ideal platform for cooperative problem solving; but cooperative problem solving is no longer part of our culture (as even the slightest glance at political reporting should make painfully obvious). The technology promoted as making us more "social" has, in reality, made us more adversarial. If we are not careful, those adversarial confrontations will spin out of control, as they did in Eugene Field's poem, "The Duel," about a fight between a gingham dog and a calico cat:

Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!

Then we shall no longer have to worry about whether or not the Internet is good for the retail sector!

The Curse of Overqualification

I may be writing from Maine, but I am keeping my San Francisco Chronicle RSS feeds active. Thus, being on Eastern Time, I got the jump on this morning's piece about the job crisis by Jill Tucker. Her basic point concerns an aspect of the unemployment crisis that seems to have received little attention in Washington:

When Robert Stovall applied for a job Sunday, he hid something from his past.

It wasn't an arrest, a firing or an outstanding warrant. It was a doctorate in public administration.

He really wanted the job at Kohl's department store.

Out of work more than a year, and with hundreds of resumes unanswered, the 58-year-old in the pale blue suit and thin black tie was among the more than 1,000 people expected to apply this week in a Burlingame hotel conference room for the 150 or so jobs at the chain's new department store opening soon in Millbrae.

And he didn't want to appear overqualified.

After a long career working in the nonprofit world of youth and foster care and with a master's degree in counseling (still on his resume), he gave himself long odds for a Kohl's job, resigned to paying his mortgage with a home equity line of credit instead of a paycheck.

So just what qualifications are at stake for this particular job? The official line from Kohl's is that they are not asking for very much:

"If you can smile and say hello, we can teach you all the other facets of working in a Kohl's store," said district manager Jason Bittner. "But we can't teach you how to smile and how to want to help customers."

Presumably, then, counseling would be an asset, while the general attitude of reflective inquiry associated with a doctorate would be a liability. My guess is that the liability has less to do with whether or not Stovall can engage with others helpfully and more to do with the risk that he might ask too many questions during his training. In other words Kohl's, along with just about every retail outlet like them, now operates under a training regimen that basically deskills the nature of customer relationships. As a corollary, a business process that takes the skill out of engaging with the customer also takes the humanity out of the customer. Thus, where once "any successful salesman could tell you the quickest path to failure was to treat the customer as an object, rather than a subject," the "objectification of the subject," now taken for granted in the Customer Relationship Management world of telemarketing and the Internet, has become business-as-usual in the world of face-to-face retailing. From that point of view, Kohl's is probably right in assuming that Stovall is overqualified to engage with customers the way they want him to; and that does not bode well for those of us who are likely to be retail customers at any establishment that follows the same model that Kohl's does.

"Skilled" Labor?

Last January I accused Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, of "telling a story" at the Davos World Economic Forum in order to convince himself "of propositions without bothering over whether or not they are true." Last night Reuters filed a report of the latest story Stephenson is telling:

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

What are the propositions in this case, and how likely are they to be true?

Perhaps the most important concerns the "skill set" (scare quotes intended) for those customer service jobs. It is hardly a secret that most customer service engagements are handled by a representative who does little more than read from a script through a process that is usually enabled by current CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology. Thus the necessary skills come down to using the technology to find the right script and then following it by delivering the lines in a clear voice that the customer understands. Not only is this not a very demanding skill set; but also it almost seems to be designed to anticipate a time when voice-recognition and speech-synthesis technologies have improved to the point that humans will no longer be necessary to do the job.

Having established, then, that "skilled" may be a euphemistic adjective, we come to the more important proposition behind Stephenson's story:

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

These propositions may well be true, and they certainly demand examination. My guess is that candidates for those customer service jobs are tested for both script selection and script delivery. If they are failing on the minimal comprehension required to identify a script and on reading text in a clear voice, then this may be some of the most painful evidence we have of how pathetic our education system is. On the other hand, if we are also celebrating the skills with which high school students now communicate through the Internet, then something is out of whack, because these two observations are inconsistent.

The inconsistency may have to do with that euphemistic use of the adjective "skilled." Internet-savvy high school graduates are, indeed, highly skilled and thus may be too skilled for what AT&T expects for a customer service job, which is more of a "McJob" (to invoke that entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that so offended McDonald's). The question then becomes one of how AT&T is recruiting its candidates and how it screens the recruits. Perhaps they should own up to their euphemism, set a lower bar, and then select candidates who can be trained in script selection of clear reading. They probably would not even need high school graduates to make such a strategy work. This would not solve the education problem; but it might solve a broader problem, which is the risk of so many young people in this country going to waste as such young ages. This might then serve to realign our "sense of reality" about the institution of education; and, informed by that sense of reality, we might be better informed to do something about the underlying problems.

Knowledge Management and Social Software: The Clash of the Over-Inflated Midgets

The discussion over Facebook and the enterprise over at confused of calcutta not only continues but has now moved into the domain of knowledge management. This could be a good thing to the extent that it would provide an opportunity to find something solid for anchoring down the concept of the sociology of knowledge. Unfortunately, I have already argued that, from the enterprise point of view, Facebook is hardly a good place to drop anchor. However, JP Rangaswamy has proposed "three simple examples" of Facebook attributes that purport to serve the objectives of knowledge management:

One, relationships. Facebook has a rich array of relationships, from Friend to Group Member to Network Member and even Cause Supporter, all the way to Event Participant. And they’re all non-hierarchical and nonexclusive. This is very powerful, since it mimics real-life relationships far better than organisation charts and hierarchies. Furthermore, it allows you to “subscribe” to your interests with reasonable precision.

Two, conversations. Facebook allows a wide range of conversation types, from Poke to Send Message to Write On Wall to Chuck Book to Hug to Give a Gift to Dedicate a Song. It also features a number of conversation styles, from text to video (and surely audio cannot be far behind) and a whole plethora of ways to attach stuff and comment on stuff, both bilaterally as well as multilaterally. Again, this mimics organisational real life far more than the straitjackets of email-only deprivation zones.

Three, transactions. Every event in Facebook is a transaction, and every transaction you do in Facebook can be an event. A news feed is nothing more than a transaction ticker. You get status updates on a number of things as well. And notifications. The entire alert process is promising and more flexible than traditional enterprise approaches.

For my part I see this is an opportunity to do what I do best, which is to unpack the text and see whether the stable actually contains a pony or is just filled with the pony's calling cards! This is basically did with the three words in "Customer Relationship Management," revealing that, in the reality of enterprise operations, all three were linguistically impoverished. This provides a useful context, since the first of the above three examples is, again, "relationships."

1. My point is that there is just as much linguistic poverty in the Facebook approach to relationships as there is in CRM. A rich array of labels does not make for a rich array of relationships! Indeed, when you start to tease apart the nature of "real-life relationships" the way, for example, Erving Goffman has done, you quickly discover an amorphous mass that does not yield readily to perceptual categorization. This is not to say that "organization charts and hierarchies" are any closer to "real-life relationships." Rather it is to say that, when the social subtleties of human relationship are at stake, there is little to be gained from arguing over the lesser of two evils!
2. The same goes for conversations, which is another one of Goffman's prime areas of study. As a matter of fact, one collection of his essays is entitled Forms of Talk. This is, by no means, an "easy read;" but I cannot imagine having anything intelligent to say about "knowledge sharing" without first having taken a whack at the first essay in the collection, "Replies and Responses." If nothing else, it is sure to change your thoughts about Google! Once again, it is not a matter of labeling things with type or attaching stuff. It is about multilateral exchanges, but the reader quickly sees that Goffman's take on multilateralism goes way beyond that of Facebook.
3. The reason I can state that last sentence so definitively is that the whole point of "Replies and Responses" is that the events of such talk are not transactions. Goffman weaves a rather elaborate argumentative web to make this point; and I am not going to reproduce it (because I still do not understand it well enough to synopsize it). However, where the argument leads is that Goffman analyzes a conversation in terms of moves (in the metaphor of a chess game, which is basically the operative metaphor behind Wittgenstein's language-game concept); and moves are far more elaborate than the simpler give-and-take foundation of a transaction.

Needless to say, this analysis goes far beyond the limitations of Facebook. Rather, it is a wart-revealing lens that can be applied to examine just about anything out there that claims to be "social software." The moral of the story is that, once again, we should be looking at "real life," rather than at software. Every enterprise is rich with relationships and conversations. Rather than trying to impoverish it with a consumer toy like Facebook, we should be looking for software that recognizes the wealth that is already there, facilitates it, and ultimately enhances it.

Structurational Cognition

Between my revisiting (once again) questions of "knowledge management" and finding myself in arguments about Noam Chomsky over at Truthdig, I realize that it may be time for me to return to more fundamental questions of the nature of cognition. This time around, however, I think I can now the enjoy the advantage of all the time I have put into reading Anthony Giddens and my efforts to feel more comfortable with his theory of structuration. This is a theory of how social systems can replicate themselves that is based on a dialectical relationship between the structural and behavioral properties of the system. This is an approach that Giddens himself acknowledges as being heavily informed by recent hermeneutic thinking. Hermeneutics had its origins in the decoding of obscure Biblical texts; but, over the last two centuries, it has expanded to encompass the more general body of texts. More recently, Paul Ricœur expanded even further to encompass actions, as well as texts; so it is not too much of a stretch to take a hermeneutic stance in thinking about general cognition.

The "Chomsky connection" comes from the question of whether cognitive behavior (in Chomsky's case the capacity for using language) can be grounded in structures, particularly structures that are innate in humans by virtue of their genetic makeup. One of Chomsky's early bursts of polemic was an attack on B. F. Skinner's book, Linguistic Behavior, which was grounded in the premise that all behaviors were conditioned by experiences and had nothing to do with any a priori structures in the "body" doing the experiencing. Giddens' dialectical stance toward the reproduction of social systems argues that neither of structure and behavior is in any way prior to the other. Rather, structuration is the ongoing process through which each induces change in the other. Giddens sees the structure of a social system as an organization of rules and resources. That structure provides a framework within which actors, both individually and in groups, cultivate and exercise "regular social practices." Those practices, however, can induce changes in the framework of rules and resources; and, by the same token, those changes can induce changes in the "regular social practices." So, in the spirit of dialectical synthesis, structure and behavior "feed" each other, rather than opposing each other.

Consider, now, how we exercise our capacity for cognition (a turn of phrase that I find far more apposite than "manage our knowledge"); and, since I came into this by reviewing Chomsky, let us concentrate on linguistic capacity. Chomsky is probably still the strongest card in the hand of structuralist positivism. When I heard him lecture at UCLA about twenty years ago, he made it clear that he believe that, sooner or later, all questions of semantics would eventually be reduced to questions about syntactic structures, the discipline he devoted most of his career to exploring (when he was not writing about politics). This amounted to a flat-our rejection of Wittgenstein's behavioral premise that we can only understand a word in the context of its use; and, to this day, the disciples of these two schools of thought continue to go at it head-to-head.

In the face of such a sharp opposition, one cannot resist the dialectical urge to seek out synthesis; and Giddens may be the one to point us in the right direction. Beginning from the "other side of the coin," so to speak, this time, we could say that Wittgenstein argues that we need to examine the "regular social practices" that arise through the ways in which we use language. To appropriate J. L. Austin's turn of phrase, we need to examine how we "do things with words;" and Habermas tried to extend that strategy to a more general view of social practice with his theory of "communicative action." However, as Giddens knew full well, one cannot talk about any practice without situating it in a structural framework; so the path that leads us from Wittgenstein through Austin into Habermas is one that gradually assembles such a framework of resources and rules that govern those resources. The framework we know best is the one we use to parse sentences, but these days it is hard to maintain Chomsky's strong conviction that syntactic structures can carry all the weight. Furthermore, the more we know about the plasticity of cortical behavior, the easier it is for us to accept Giddens' proposition that this framework is always changing in response to the practices that take place within in, which brings us back to the premise that changes in the framework also induce changes in the practices.

For those of us who live in the "real world" (or, perhaps worse, the "world of business"), the opposition of Chomsky and Wittgenstein may seem like an academic exercise; but the ongoing intrusion of the word "knowledge" in the way we now talk about work is another matter. This exercise does nothing more than reinforce yesterday's argument that using this word does not serve us very well, then I can take some satisfaction in the "journey" I have just conducted. I may not like it; but I am realistic enough to know that we all now live in a techno-centric world. Techno-centrism survives and sustains itself by focusing on structures, usually to the extent that we try to abstract our very "sense of reality" (appropriating this time from Isaiah Berlin) into structural representations. However, when we deep-end on those abstractions to the extent that we lose touch with the social practices, we run the risk of also abstracting away the human nature of the people who are supposed to be served by our technologies. If this means that we lose touch with what I have previously called "the human side of doing business," then it may be time to step back and ask why we are doing business at all or, to sound even more extreme, what right we have to lay claim to our own existence.

Whither (Wither?) Reuters?

BBC NEWS has now confirmed the what and the why of the Reuters buyout:

News and information group Reuters has agreed to be bought out by Canadian financial data provider Thomson in a deal worth about £8.7bn ($17bn).

The tie-up will create the world's biggest financial news and data firm, allowing the new company to leapfrog its main rival, US-based Bloomberg.

The second paragraph is the important one: This deal has nothing to do with the business of running a wire service for media concerned with reporting the news. As the BBC pointed out, the competition is in a much more limited, but also financially more lucrative, space:

Thomson, whose publishing interests include law, tax and scientific research, has been expanding its non-data business.

Reuters will complement its news operations in the US and AFX in Europe, analysts said.

They added that a merged Thomson and Reuters would be in a stronger position to compete with Bloomberg.

The three companies are rivals in the "terminal" market, providing news and financial data on stocks, currencies and bonds to banks, traders and brokerages.

In other words the news service does not signify in this equation, and the Reuters journalists are already feeling doom. As BBC business editor Robert Preston put it:

There will be concerns that over time Reuters general news operations will become marginalised within an outfit that sees its future as supplying intelligence and tools to those who operate in global financial markets.

My only concern is with Mr. Preston's use of the future tense. As I have pointed out, news operations at Reuters are already hurting; and, as far as I can tell, the problems have to do with their global approach to outsourcing. While I have not been researching this systematically, through my own casual reading I have already accumulated (and reported here) two data points:

1. A "breaking story" about George Soros and AIPAC that was actually about half a month old
2. A report about the domestic problem with contaminated pet food filed form Bangalore

From my vantage point I do not feel I can judge whether or not Reuters does a better job with their financial reporting. The rest of their news, however, appears to be on a downward slope that is unlikely to be changed under the new Thomson regime.

Confronting the Ghost of Knowledge Management Past

Regular readers should know by now how I indulge myself by taking samples of text and unpacking them to figure out whether they make any sense and whether the sense they make is the one the author actually intended. Some may recall that back in January I decided to do this for CRM, my point being that, as far as the technology products were concerned, all three of the "components nouns"—"customer," "relationship," and "management"—had been (in bowdlerized form) fouled up beyond all recognition. By the time I came to the final noun, I had built up enough evidence to argue "that technology providers have no idea what they are managing or why they are managing it."

Today Lou Paglia wrote a post for his CoRrElate blog about how knowledge management is still a "pain point." It should be no surprise that my argument about "management" in CRM is just as valid when it comes to knowledge management. The difference is that, now that knowledge management is on the down-side of the Gartner hype curve, its failure to address the two questions Lou used to lead his post is now generally recognized! Those questions were:

1. What are people trying to solve?
2. What is their pain point?

To some extent the "knowledge management mess" was a product of technology providers getting hung up on the word knowledge when they should have been worrying about talking about it in productive ways. Part (but hardly all) of the blame can be laid on Nonaka and Takeuchi, whose introductory chapter about "knowledge" is so shot through with holes that even a "gentleman's C" college freshman can find some of them! However, a more important problem probably resided with all the different researchers who saw knowledge management as an opportunity to promote a personal agenda, whether it involved better data bases, communities of practice, Socratic dialogue, Marxist emancipation, or Heideggerian phenomenology. At least, in the old joke, the elephant only had three blind men groping at it!

So, if we carve off all of this fat, is there any meat left on the bone? One important fact that may still need to be recognized is that, for all of their promotion, Google and Wikipedia are not "solutions to the knowledge problem" and are as much part of the fat as the more elevated disciplines I cited in the preceding paragraph. I tried to explore this observation back in February in my response to the announcement the Middlebury College history college would not accept Wikipedia as an "acceptable citation." The title of that post was "Research is not about the Answers!;" and neither is knowledge management.

Let me try to reinforce this claim by going back to Lou's first question: What are people trying to solve? As I see it, every organization, whatever its size, is a collection of people who know things. If we then take, as a premise, that the "business" of the organization is to satisfy one or more goals, then the most important problem in managing the organization is to conduct day-to-day operations in such a way that the people who know things are contributing to satisfying the goals. (I know that sounds simplistic, but that's what happens when you start carving off the fat!) The very phrase "knowledge management" disclosed the problem that this was not happening: The things that people were doing were not always leveraging what they knew; and the organization was paying for it with unsatisfied or poorly satisfied goals. Now I am too much of an anti-positivist to accept this as the whole story; but at least it provides a framework in which the broader story can be told.

One part of that broader story that is missing is that whole question of "knowledge sharing," which became a focal point of knowledge management technology and ultimately led many to ask whether or not Google (and/or Wikipedia) was doing a better job. This is where positivism loses its punch, because sharing is something that takes place among human agents and therefore belongs in the social world, rather than the objective world. Personally, I subscribe to a motto coined by one of my former colleagues who is now teaching philosophy at San Jose State: Knowledge cannot be shared, but it can be made sharable. It is not a question of whether or not knowledge is being "poured" into repositories such as databases or even Web pages crawled by search engines. It is a question of the social engagements that take place within the organization and the ways in which those engagements facilitate or impede the "flow" of knowledge. In other words it is all about "talk" (which can take place through digital, as well as physical, channels); and, if we read our Plato better than Nonaka and Takeuchi did, we discover very quickly that much of that talk is ultimately descriptive in nature. It is through such descriptive talk that the scope of who knows what "diffuses" (a favorite work in knowledge management circles) through the organization; and often that descriptive talk is best reinforced in contexts of demonstrably effective actions. In other words it's all about both what you say and what you do!

At this point we can loop back to the sentence Lou used to wrap up his post:

KM solutions must help people find relevant information, help people find where to look, help people find respective experts in the organization, help people discover relevant information that they wouldn’t know to look for and help people so they spend their time doing their jobs, not searching.

I would argue that, once you couple people doing things that lead to satisfying goals with a social climate that encourages descriptive talk reinforced by demonstrably effective actions, you have a KM solution! I apologize if this was a long trip; but, to paraphrase the old saw, there is no "royal road" to knowledge management. Personally, I still feel that knowledge management has more to offer than CRM does, but only because it has the potential to honor the human side of doing business much better than CRM, in its current incarnation, ever can.

Earth to Reuters: What Took you so Long?

Reuters Special Correspondent Bernd Debusmann seems to think he had a hot new breaking story; and, apparently, the Reuters editors agreed with this. He certainly wrote a good lead:

The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel's powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy in a way critics say hurts U.S. national interests and stifles debate.

However, it is the second paragraph that is problematic:

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The problem is that this article is not in the current issue. While it is true that the issue with the article is dated April 12, the current issue is dated April 26! The Soros article has been on the New York Review Web site for (probably) about half a month; and the Web site usually precedes the print issue by a matter of days.

So just how to these "Special Correspondents" do their job; and, what may be more relevant, where do they do it. If Mr. Debusmann is filing copy for United States news from Bangalore, like his colleague Sweta Singh, then it may very well be that he only saw the Soros article in print over this past weekend. Why he was unaware that the content had been on the Web for some time is between him and his managers at Reuters. It is all very well and good to assume that the Internet makes it possible to track United States news from any location in the world, but I would think that Reuters is still obliged to maintain their reputation for tracking it in a timely manner!

"O brave new world, That has such people in it!"

This afternoon Reuters filed the latest story on another recall of pet food from Menu Foods. I found this through my Reuters: US News feed (as I expected I would). I read these stories because of the concern of my cat's welfare (whatever my cat may have to say about the matter). None of this constitutes anything out of the ordinary; but at the bottom of this particular (brief) filing was the statement that it was reported "by Sweta Singh in Bangalore!" The Internet does indeed change everything. It would appear that I get at least some (if not most) of my news of the United States from Bangalore.

This reminds me of one of my first experiences with an outsourced help desk. It involved the DSL service I was getting in my house back in Palo Alto, which was provided by (what was then) SBC. Back in those early days we early adopters discovered a correlation between rain and a reduction in quality of service. One day I was experiencing such a reduction while looking out the window at a clear sky, so I figured I had better notify SBC. After going through the usual routine questions that did not help the operator, I asked, "Is in raining anywhere in the vicinity?" The reply was, "I don't know; where are you?" The operator knew my area code but had no idea what it meant or what I meant by "vicinity?" This was the first time I had come to grips with having to deal with a "help service" that was half-way around the world; and I was not happy about it! If local weather was a factor in quality of service, how could I get help from someone who had no idea what the local weather was?

Now I understand that news services, like newspapers and radio stations, monitor the wire services and select the items they feel are most important; but it had not occurred to me to question the source of the wire reports. I had just taken for granted that a story about Ontario would come from Ontario, but I guess that is not the case. Presumably, Menu Foods used the Internet to send a press release to Reuters; and that press release was picked up by Sweta Singh. Whether or not Sweta Singh then did any follow-up activities is anybody's guess. It seems unlikely that someone in Bangalore would pick up the phone and call Ontario to check up on the source, but perhaps that is what happened. Who knows?

McDonald's Declares War on a Dictionary

The Financial Times is not known for writing the sort of texts that send you to the dictionary, particularly since most of its readers probably do not have a dictionary close at hand when they are reading it. Nevertheless, after reading yesterday's piece by Stefan Stern and Jenny Wiggins under the headline "McDonald's seeks to redefine 'McJob," I could not resist pulling out my Fifth Edition Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, there it was, between "McIntosh" (the preferred British spelling for the apple variety) and "McKenzie" (whose definition had nothing to do with Bob and Doug). I rather like their definition, perhaps because the final phrase of the text is likely to raise eyebrows for all the right reasons:

An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one creating by the expansion of the service sector.

Of equal interest is the etymological analysis:

from Mc- (in the name of the McDonald's chain of fast-food restaurants, popularly regarded as a source of such employment) + job noun

This brings us to the crux of the Stern-Wiggins report:

The UK arm of the fast food chain is starting a campaign to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word “McJob”, a term the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”.

The word first emerged in the US in the 1980s to describe low-skilled jobs in the fast food industry but was popularised by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his 1991 novel Generation X. It appeared in the online version of the OED in March 2001. McDonald’s plans a “high-profile public petition” this year to get it changed.

“We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day,” wrote David Fairhurst, chief people officer in northern Europe for McDonald’s, in a letter seen by the Financial Times seeking support for the petition. “It’s time the dictionary definition of “McJob” changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

This story can be pursued in a variety of directions. First, I would make it clear that I, personally, have never used the noun "McJob," nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I encountered it elsewhere. From this readers can conclude that I have never read Generation X (although I have read plenty of other source material about the Generation X phenomenon). On the other hand I have (with great relish) Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future Into the Factory of the Past, which first appeared in 1988 and whose basic arguments are no less valid today than they were when the book first appeared. Indeed, I suspect it would be very hard for Garson to refrain from reacting to what I have called "The Big Lie of Customer Relationship Management" by saying, "I told you so!" Garson's basic narrative is best summarize by the titles of the three major sections of her book:

1. Automating the Clerks
2. Turning Professionals into Clerks
3. Automating the Boss

In other words, if you want to understand the office of the future, start by looking at the clerks of today. (Did Kevin Smith ever read this book?) She does this in two chapters, the first of which is devoted to (you guessed it) McDonald's.

The next point I would like to make is that David Fairhurst, who seems to be spokesperson for McDonald's indignation (is that part of the job description for "chief people officer?") does not appear to be particularly familiar with the OED. At least he seems to be aware of the first page, which bears the original published title:

A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis

Those last two words bear all the weight. This is a reference source that is, above all else, a historical document. Every definition is based on documentation of usage that carries enough weight to justify its entry. If that documentation did not extend south of our border with Canada, it may still have pervaded the Commonwealth, which would be sufficient to justify its inclusion in what is probably the Commonwealth's primary dictionary reference. (I bought my first Shorter Oxford English Dictionary when I was living in Singapore.) The point is that Fairhurst has it all backwards. People do not take the OED definition for "McJob" as the meaning of the word because the OED has sanctioned it; the OED published the definition because that is consistent with how people are using the word. If McDonald's wants that definition changed, they should be paying closer attention to what the English-speaking public thinks about them (which sounds like a good thing for a "chief people officer" to be doing), rather than picking a fight with Oxford University Press (not to mention threatening legal action).

Does the definition need to be changed? To the extent that McDonald's has tried to contest it with a substantive argument, they seem to have concentrated on the "prospects" aspect:

McDonald’s says it has an excellent record of promoting female workers and entry level staff to senior executive positions. In the UK, half the executive team started on the shop floor and 25 per cent are women.

Personally, I find this a pretty lame effort at refutation (and I can only imagine what the female population things of it). On the other hand McDonald's seems to have recognized that argumentation is not always the best strategy. Instead, one can invoke Emery Roe's principle that the only way to undermine a narrative is with a counternarrative:

A McDonald’s recruitment campaign in the UK last year featured slogans such as “McProspects – over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob.”

This then transfers the onus to the reader, who has decided which narrative to believe. Personally, I embrace the OED strategy of keeping the definitions consistent with the life-world. I rarely go into McDonald's, and there is one right across the street from where I live. However, my last venture came on my way back to San Francisco after having delivered a seminar talk at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and I wanted to grab a quick bite before getting back on the road. Nothing had changed since Garson wrote her chapter. If anything thing, the clerks were even more bewildered by the technology, which now had to support more customer options than when Garson made her study. If things are different in the Commonwealth, I would be happy to hear about it!

Remembering Jean Baudrillard

I just read the wire service report of the death of Jean Baudrillard at Al Jazeera English. I hope that it will not be long before I see more extended obituaries; but I may as well set down my own thoughts on the basis of the "raw data." Basically, my reaction was not that different to how I received the news of the death of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: I went into my files to see what sorts of notes I had taken of what I had read.

I was first drawn to Baudrillard in the summer of 1989, when the English translation of America sent Robert Hughes into a apoplectic frenzy. I had always felt that Hughes was one of those blowhards whose opinion of himself was vastly overrated (and therefore should have been right at home at Time magazine); so I figured that anyone who annoyed him that much had to be worth reading. However, unless I am mistaken, I did not actually knuckle down at buy any Baudrillard until over five years later, when I found French editions of both Amérique and Le Système des Objets in a bookstore in Basle. Then, I have to confess, it took more than another five years before I finally took the time to give him a serious read, concentrating on Le Système des Objets.

The Al Jazeera report describes Baudrillard as "the French sociologist and philosopher and critic of globalisation and consumerism;" and Le Système des Objets is definitely a good place to get his take on consumerism. However, it seemed to me at the time that he was not so much going after the obsessive need to buy and the role of the media, particularly advertising, in cultivating that obsession as he was trying to get at why so much of life had become an (obsessive?) matter of collecting things (i.e. objects). Here is a bullet list of points I made after reading his chapter about collection in Le Système des Objets:

• Collecting is ultimately discourse with one’s self.
• As such it is fundamentally infantile.
• This distinguishes it from science (the collection of facts) and memory (the collection of knowledge).
• Anyone obsessed with collection is impoverished and inhuman.

Writing as one who collects music (CDs, sheet music, and orchestral scores for study) and books, I found this pretty stern stuff. On the other hand it may also have gotten under my skin enough to be useful. If nothing else, it probably eased the trauma of my having to get rid of all my vinyl recordings when I had to adjust to a radical reduction of space in moving from a house in Palo Alto to a condominium in San Francisco. Ironically, given how much critical ink Baudrillard spilled over our obsessions with the virtual, that trauma was also eased by a belief that any object I gave up would eventually be at my disposal through the resources of some digital library. In any event I reproduce that summary here because I feel it is as valid today as it was when Le Système des Objets first appeared in1968.

In my Schlesinger post I made it a point to honor the man with his own words. I would like to do that with another passage from Le Système des Objets. Since I never bothered to look into whether the book was translated into English, this passage is my own translation; so I have to apologize in advance if my effort comes off as too amateurish. However, I wanted to reproduce the content here, because the topic is automation:

Therefore, to render a machine automatic, it is indeed necessary to sacrifice possibilities of operation. To render a practical object automatic, it is necessary to stereotype its functionality and weaken it. Far from having its own technical signification, automation always carries a risk of technological arrest: to the extent that an object is not automated, it is susceptible to reconfiguration, to advancement as a larger functional set. If it becomes automated, its function is achieved, but is also finished: it becomes exclusive. Automation is thus like a closure, a functional redundancy, expelling man into the irresponsibility of a spectator. It is the dream of a subjugated world, of a technology formally accomplished in the service of an inert and dreaming humanity.

I suppose that it was writing like this that ultimately drove me to start writing my first blog on the theme of "Reflections Beyond Technology." The extent to which technocentric thinking is still "expelling man into the irresponsibility of a spectator" continues to haunt me, whether it has to do with the ways in which "CRM thinking" have eroded our humanity or with the consequences of that erosion on our response to natural disasters such as Katrina.

In his later years Baudrillard shifted his attacks from consumerism to globalization; but, at the end of the day, he was still writing about a world that was a product of excessive technocentrism. As far as I am concerned, one cannot write too much about this topic. Given the current state of that world, he should be missed, even if those most in need of his insights are least aware of him.

The Nostalgia of Service Science

I recently accused CRM technology of "a desperate nostalgia to make the service economy look like a production economy." I now realize that this is related to another nostalgia, which is for Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. This latter nostalgia seems, for me at least, to be the best explanation for why the phrase "service science" seems to be insinuating itself into our working vocabulary. As I wrote in my previous blog:

Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail.

Taylor's principles were not intended to be applied to anything other than production, yet efforts to make the provision of service look like the manufacturing of a product are not as recent as we might thing. One has only to examine the book, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. As I wrote in one of my earliest blog entries:

Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education.

Since education is not just a service profession but also "the second oldest profession" (which makes it interesting that "the oldest profession" is also a service profession), this confusion of service and product can be traced back at least as far as the appearance of Taylor's book.

This leads me to think about one of the more inspiring papers I read that provides an articulate opposition to Taylorism, an article by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that appeared in 1991 in Organization Science entitled, "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice." What most impressed me about this paper was the way, in the words of their subtitle, Brown and Duguid tried to develop "a unified view of working, learning, and innovation." In the context of the argument I have been trying to develop here, I now see that this unified view may actually be viewed as necessary to the service economy, while in a production economy one would be hard pressed to find many who would advocate it as even desirable. This may have to do with my own reasons for supporting Callahan so enthusiastically: In a production economy, your highest priority is the efficient use of your capital in the production of more capital. Education, on the other hand, does not accord such priority to capital or to its efficient use. Rather, it is concerned with the effectiveness of a process of engagement, the relationship that is formed between teacher and student. This returns me to the theme that our bias towards transactions runs the risk of abstracting away the concept of engagement until nothing is left to it. Unfortunately, this kind of transaction-based thinking is invading the world of education with a destructive force even greater than that of Taylorism. In the community of eLearning, we now have a whole community that wishes to reduce the "educational engagement" (if you can still call it that) to the management of "learning objects," while Ray Kurzweil would have us believe that education is just another form of goal satisfaction.

Where will all this lead? I have already suggested that we are well on the path to losing all confidence in our service providers, but then did not the shift to service come about in response to consumers losing confidence in products manufactured in the United States? Perhaps this is why we now turn to both the products and services as the only place left to place our confidence, trying to ignore, as long as we can, just how impoverished those offerings really are. Then, when the shock of recognizing that impoverishment hits us, while shall succumb to that boredom that will turn us into "mindless and ineffective Eloi!"

Another Big Lie: Customer Relationship Management

In my last blog I devoted a lot of attention to the continuing development of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology and the dangerous consequences of its growing use. I first started writing about this when I encountered a report of "user-hostile" customer service associated with changing an airline reservation. I realized that, while it was definitely right to attack the airline industry about such service, the problem could probably be traced to the industry's dependence on CRM software, most likely being run at an outsourced call center. Ironically, this was all prompted by my reading an article in E-Commerce Times/CRM Buyer; and the double irony is that this article now seems to have been expunged from their archive.

However, the beat goes on, as they say; and last October CRM Buyer ran a report about the fact that call centers were now spending $400 million annually on recently-developed "emotion detection" technology. Again, this story is no longer in the archive; but I was able to recover a comment I made at the time it appeared. Today we got a story that is basically promoting one of the providers of this "emotion detection" technology, Autonomy. I have decided that the only explanation (excuse?) for throwing this kind of technology at a situation that keeps going from bad to worse is a desperate nostalgia to make the service economy look like a production economy. In the spirit of the kind of analytic methodology I have been employing in this new blog, the best way to examine the underlying pathology of CRM is to take apart the terminology word-by-word:

CUSTOMER: Back in the days when it was a production economy and there was no Internet, any successful salesman could tell you the quickest path to failure was to treat the customer as an object, rather than a subject. CRM has perverted this principle on both sides of the coin. Not only has the customer been objectified, but anyone the customer ever contacts is also objectified! This is why stories about "user-hostile" customer service, such as the one cited above, will continue to appear. Of course the ultimate nightmare story about this kind of objectification was actually not a technology story. This was the story that Spike Lee told in When the Levees Broke, where we saw the "objectification of the subject" at its worst. While we may not be able to blame CRM technology, itself, for the mishandling of the Katrina disaster, the mentality behind that mishandling is certainly a reflection of the mentality behind the technology.

RELATIONSHIP: The distinction here is between transactions and engagements. A relationship between two subjects is an engagement, an ongoing process in which awareness (including listening) is as important as delivery. Transactions abstract the concept of relationship by reducing it to relations between objects. Awareness, of course, involves more than the semantics of text. If you cannot hold a conversation and sense (without the assistance of technology) that the person you are talking to is angry, then there is something wrong with your psychological makeup. That is the sort of awareness that makes us human and enables relationships on a subject-to-subject basis.

MANAGEMENT: The bottom line here is that technology providers have no idea what they are managing or why they are managing it. All that seems to matter are productivity statistics, which are far from the best indicator that a business is doing a good job. Of course, if the concept of "customer" has been perverted, then the concept of "customer satisfaction" has been banished to an exile in ultima Thule! The business has thus liberated itself from worrying about customer satisfaction, and customer anger mounts to the point where the customer finally takes action to the disadvantage of the business.

So this is the world that technology has made, and it seems as if the Internet has both necessitated and proliferated its distribution. We might ask users of the technology if they are satisfied with it, but how can we ask a question about a concept they have banished from their working vocabulary? This seems to be a case where the Lie is so big that most of us no longer recognize it as a lie (which is precisely that "force of credibility" that Hitler had in mind)!