Collective Intelligence – we do this

A growing international market is there to be won by creative ... businesses that are able to innovate and do not see any inherent conflict between creative excellence and commercial success.

This quote from a NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) report, Creating Growth, 2006 started our first chapter in Managing Interactive Media in 2007. We wondered what this "independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative" was covering now, so we took a look at them at: www.nesta.org.uk

This proved to be timely as they are spawning some interesting events for the UK iMedia Industry now under the Silicon Valley comes to the UK 2011 16th-19th November with many speakers including representatives from Google, Linkedin, Nokia, MySpace, and venture capital firms. (Note the social media and open information site bias)

This is a strategic-focused UK company that hasn't really taken on the wider iMedia Industry difficulties as we have struggled in the past and continue to do so with recognition of the technology-led, inter-disciplinary nature of what we do, but they have latched onto interactive segments like social media and gaming. We're glad to see they are beginning to broaden their perspective.

They have a draft report online where they invite comments. See Draft Discussion paper on Collective Intelligence October 2011.

We have to admit that the draft paper is VERY HEAVY STUFF. Don't think you can just skim it at all; you get nothing that way. It isn't web-friendly reading and obeys none of the tacit rules we know offer better absorbtion rates for electronic information. (They are actually wanting to study the effects of large amounts of data on "entrepreneurial cognition and creativity" ... Page 26). But, if you persevere, in bite-sized pieces over some time, some of the paper might begin to make sense. Their hearts are in the right place, probably. Please contribute for our industry's sake.

Collective Intelligence is seen as a strong contributory factor to the success of innovative companies who are driven by technology. It is defined tentatively as an attribute of groups and systems of people that enables them to employ their distributed intellectual faculties to behave more as if they were a single agent, thus generating outcomes beyond what could be achieved by their participants. Actually it seems to characterise the popularised Star Trek 'Borg' behaviour more than anything else, don't you think.

Getting serious here, we reckon that we have had to listen and learn from our diverse group of specialists – interface designers, programmers, graphics designers, interactive marketers, learning technologists, users, and so on - depending on the type of interactive project and technology platforms we have had to deal with. We've been doing this for years and have had to recognise each wave of tech-savvy response from the 'collective' user to affect our design and interaction models just to keep ahead. This intelligence hasn't been gleaned from traditional educational methods but from close contact and street-wise (web-wise or interactive-wise?) gut-feel initially, followed up by digital market statistics later.

There is some recognition of a team's and organisation's role in this 'collective intelligence' analysis on Page 17 of the NESTA document where what we're doing features as visible at the micro level. There's a meso level applied to industries, regions and communities, and the macro level of whole economies and societies, mankind (hello flowers, hello trees!).

Then there is a light-bulb moment on Page 18 where they ask some fundamental questions that we know some of the answers to, don't we?

• "How do you run an effective innovation team?"
• "How do you organise an institution or cluster to improve its Collective Intelligence for innovation?"

But they don't want to rate some of our comments because we may be sullied by a bias out of the need to apply innovation to make money: 'commercial' seems to be a dirty word for some of this document which is strange given that collective intelligence is meant to lead to innovative, creative companies that venture capitalists want to back. Maybe they need to be a bit more explicit about the type of companies they mean by these next comments:

“Finally, there is the work carried out by management consultants and technology providers who design, implement and support organisational models and technologies supposed to enhance aspects of Collective Intelligence. Their work is eminently practical, but the knowledge that they generate is not generally available publicly, and where it is should be taken with a grain of salt because of their commercial interest in this area.” (Page 20)

Complex this paper is. But, at least it shows thought for where we are heading in the technological maelstrom. We've often pointed out that we lack the time to think any more. The type of intelligence has changed with the territory. Can and should we continue to apply the old models of analysis/intelligence? Now there's a thought.

Change on the way for Digital Project Management?

As the last posting of the year, it is traditional to step back, review the past and try to project into the future. So here we are. Is digital project management at a crossroads? Should it be? Where does it serve us and where does it fail us? Pretty strategic questions, in keeping with that backward/forward look, don't you think?

We could feel a bit complacent because we've championed Agile software development methods where traditional waterfall methods of software development were found lacking. Agile engages changes, moves iteratively in small development cycles, incorporates more feedback from the client and users and so on. Yes, it did have a few glitches like how to cost the process so that a company didn't just address the old problems without getting paid for the work. But the important thing was that the software development process changed fundamentally.

Now there is chatter about employing such software development processes wider in business processes. Imagine that. The implications are huge. The keys in the process are the faster response to perceived need and small, incremental steps. Others in business want these too. It isn't just a large percentage of IT projects that fail; many business projects fail to achieve their objectives. So business analysts have been assessing the situation and have become attracted to the concepts of agile. Various new names have emerged to define the business processes but we'll be able to recognise the origin. Neil Perkin, New Media Age 2nd December in, 'Digital could give firms the agility to change', equates the need for agile processes with a coupling for companies to accept failure in a cycle of revision where the failure is fed back quickly and remedied. This is rather like the fast release of agile code, the checking on its feasibility of use and the revision of the code accordingly. Change has to be embraced in companies in a culture of innovation and 'well structured experiments'. He quotes McKinsey (2005) about putting 75-80% of a budget into proven media but the rest into these experiments. (You need to register for the full article)

Other advocates of applying such processes to other business problems can be found at:

• Kevin Smith, Get Agile: Applying the lessons from software development to business process design. December 2009
• Jorge Dominguez, Agile Project Management: AFP, September 2009

Maybe all this will have impact on the way we scope projects for new clients. Perhaps we'll have to educate them in which processes they might want to employ to dictate the way they want their project managed. They may need to consider what strategies their company wants to use in general business and which they want in project management as a result? Complex stuff - but what dreams used to be made of!