::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/09/04 ::

Faster Knowledge

New "Message is the Medium" column at Knowledge Management magazine, called Faster Knowledge. Extends the observations of David Reed about the value of networks, into the real-time communication era.

"Boyd's Law, or the Law of Synchronization Amplification:

As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.

This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners -- passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities -- and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.

This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to take action on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates to higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation that David Reed was getting at.

In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. Its not quasi mystical chaos theory -- it's just practical."

:: Stowe Boyd 9/4/2003 10:23:55 AM [link] ::
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Comcast Email is being "Managed"

Had an email snafu today. All of a sudden, I was getting Outlook errors that I had never seen before, suggesting that I was hitting a limit on the number of conncections I was making to Comcast, my service provider.

After a live chat session with one of their support people, it turns out that Comcast has instituted an email "management" program which will limit all users to 20 outgoing emails/hour.

Since I can generate much more than this number of emails per hour, I was incensed, and twice as mad because they did this without informing me.

Time to start looking for a different email service provider.

:: Stowe Boyd 9/3/2003 01:47:06 PM [link] ::
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Cracking the Social Code

New "Social Commentary" column at Darwin, entitled Cracking the Social Code, where I profile VisiblePath, a very focused relationship management application.

"I think VisiblePath has cracked the code for enterprise adoption of social networking technology, which gets down to business basics and leaves the social altruism aside. It's not just building a better Rolodex: it's keeping your network happy, and at the same time making your partners' wallets fatter when they throw you a lead."

:: Stowe Boyd 9/3/2003 12:26:28 PM [link] ::
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