Is the pace of science setting us back?
There are three thoughts which I have been mulling around in my head for the past weeks which I am sure are worth combining. They all share a common denominator; old world approaches and their incompatibility to new world realities. First of all, when working on social media strategy for a client I once again felt the gut feeling that our inclination to use traditional strategy formulation, vision-mission-objectives-kpi's-plans and measurements, just do not cut it anymore when talking about a new field such as social media. Sure, it is the most understandable approach, sure the client already thinks along these lines, and you will most certainly not steer wrong when rationally thinking about matching social media objectives to your business strategy to actually maximize impact. But on a deeper level, such a linear approach to strategy is not in line with the worldview which underlies social media. To my opinion a hybrid form between the excellent but somewhat unpractical approach towards emergent strategy and the traditional linear approach seems a much better fit.
I had the same thoughts when reading MIS's call for papers on what they describe as the "Digital Business Strategy". MIS provides an excellent rationale for this call, I have not read a finer and more to the point description of the rift between Business and IT than in this paper. However, it is the execution of how they want to go about coming to a special issue on this topic that bothers me. In short, MIS proposes to go through a timeline of more than 1.5 years for writing, submitting, reviewing, revising and again reviewing before probably publishing in the first half of 2012. In this "new digital era" MIS is describing, surely this proces is too long and too rigid to provide any articles written today to still be valid by 2012?
Thirdly, when reading an excellent article in Wired on Sergei Brin's quest for a Parkinson's cure I was triggered by dr. Gray's fourth paradigm. In short it's the interpretation of scientific evolution where we now have the ability to analyse immense datasets (mr. Gray used the term "exafloods" of data) and draw conclusions from the combinations and comparisons of this data enabled by the vast and decentralised computing power currently available to us in this new digital era. I am sure, I am not doing Dr, Gray any justice here but you get the general idea.
So what is the intersection between these ideas? social media is currently in the state where it is moving from pioneering to being implemented by the business community and actually starting to add value. And I am a firm believer that it will add value. But how should it be implemented to allow for emergence? To enable business to react not only by listening to communities but also by empowering their own communities to take action on these signals, business strategy must enable emergence. The way we are incorporating this new thinking and new models into our business requires research, we need the feedback loop from results and cases, we need the articles of success and failure, we need to collectively learn but based on a valid approach of drawing conclusions. This approach must not hamper progress or trail behind reality; in this new world we cannot allow ourselves to always be one step behind. We need access to information and we need it now. I am sure the fourth paradigm, though it now seems primarily focussed on natural and medical research, will provide the means to provide this information. Life is not planned, life happens.
