Clips from Thursday’s thought leaders
Telecom plumbers and interior designers — there’s still a gulf between hardware and software. It’s clear that the “over the top” software players are demonstrating that phones and, at some point, televisions, are about more than our traditional expectation for a dial tone or a live screen: people want equipment that will work anywhere, sound great and remain easy to use. This means the big telecoms must think of themselves as platforms that enable applications. Without an orientation to user oriented applications, their traditional business models will be eclipsed. Of course, telecoms must relinquish control of communication to the user. Perhaps the bridge across the gulf is the user since everyone wants access to the user base. Maybe telecoms and providers will create user segments around features instead of geography or use levels. The resulting paradigm shift would mean that the users who expect a rich experience from their phones will dictate the features they want — so telecoms and services alike must resolve the technical issues in the context of user expectations. This all begs the question: when will the service providers be perceived less as disrupters and more as a conduit to the user? Maybe after regulatory, political and legacy interests truly align with user preferences. And that may be a long time in coming.
Serious data and understanding the customer — you still have to create information in the context of the user. Destroying data is a touchy subject. Once it’s gone, so is access to potential information about product, service and user experience. Buried within the mounds of data clogging up systems are nuggets of information that define individual user movements, which can be aggregated to a level of knowledge not enjoyed in the past. And beyond the data itself, there are the questions of technique for deriving information and forging new connections within the customer relationship. The primary acts of data management — collection, storage, indexing, accessing, analyzing, inferring — require larger-scale computational ability and a point of view that prevents any one of these acts from becoming a research bottleneck. And companies must give up the illusion that they are in control of data; it’s got a life of its own. So if you look for opportunities to use data to ask more questions of the customer, you’ll find a path to knowing what to keep and what to toss.
The hypersocial organization — it lives beyond the tools and the tricks in a land with the customer. It’s back to Human 1.0. Successful companies think inclusively; instead of marketing and employee segments, it’s one tribe with different talents and features. Successful companies think about how knowledge flows, not claiming ownership to knowledge but to the networks and highways that move the knowledge. They do everything with the humanity of the customer at the center of the corporate focus. And successful companies embrace the messiness that comes with being social instead of hierarchical. Everyone in the company is a touchpoint to the user, who, to be part of the company culture, must be able to experience it as an insider, not an audience member.
In the final analysis, the Internet is human. That’s the takeaway of dozens of Supernova conversations, whether they happened on Twitter with folks miles away from the conference or with the person right next to you in the room. The Internet, in all its technology and technicality, is a tool for intimacy. We just have to carve out the boundaries that protect our privacy, our talents, our corporate competitive differentiation, our social interaction, our governing systems. The thing is, we don’t have the luxury of waiting for the Internet to pause. Like people, the Internet keeps flowing and leading us to new discoveries about ourselves and the data we produce. With luck, our closer proximity will generate and sustain the kind of trust only humans can do.
