Things are looking up

Recently the Facetious CIO updated his status on various social networking sites with the title of this blog entry, "Things are looking up". A simple and vague message that prompted many responses inquiring the specifics around why I was "down" and congratulations on the fact that things were turning in a positive direction. Going upwards (in my case) really only indicates that I am not where I want to be and intend on climbing further up. Who amongst us has no plans for moving upwards? The other reason for my message was a general trend that I have witnessed. 2009 sucked. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that 2009 was a great year for them. Most were happy to close the book on it and leave it behind. I have already (only 2 months in) started to see turnaround and see that 2010 will be a better year than 2009. The Facetious CIO would like to know from you, are things looking up for you as well?

This is NOT the Knowledge Age

In 1966, Peter Drucker described the knowledge worker in contrast to the manual worker. The knowledge worker is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. This type of worker is a product of the Knowledge Age described by Savage in 1995 as "the third wave of human socio-economic development". The first two being, the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age. This third wave points to a time when the majority of workers will deal in information. They will work with their minds more than their hands. In the Agricultural Age land meant power and in the Industrial Age, factories meant power. In the Knowledge Age, knowledge is power.

The fact is, the United States has been in the Knowledge Age since the 1950s. At this time the number of white collar workers began to exceed the number of blue collars workers. The Information Age (as it was known then) began. This is the decade that brought us the mainframe and many other business technologies that are still in some form used today.

If knowledge equals power in the Knowledge Age, how do the powerful give away knowledge to get more powerful? Many of the blogs that I read and the twits I follow freely give away the knowledge they have. When they do, they are considered experts and grow more powerful as their standing in the community is raised and their demand increased. We have grown beyond the Knowledge Age. Thanks to web 2.0, all knowledge is shared. Wether it is a blog, a tweet, or just a posting I can google, it's shared. Having the knowledge is no longer powerful. How to aggregate the data and use it to create new ideas is powerful. We are now entering the Creation Age. In the Creation Age, creativity is power.

If you are a knowledge worker, there are two things to do to reach the next level of career evolution.

1. Recognize that you may not be a knowledge worker: Just because you work with data does not automatically make you a knowledge worker. You may be acting as a manual laborer pushing paper instead of operating a wrench. Anybody can be taught to use a wrench, if what you do doesn't have a value add then you are the 21st century equvilant of a manual laborer. You too will be replaced by automation, just as factory workers were replaced at the end of the Industrial Age. Avoid this fate by differentiating your work from what other people can offer.
2. Give away the knowledge: Since knowledge is not power, give it away. The more you share the information, the more indispensable you become. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it's worked for many already. Giving away the knowledge lets people know you are the expert. Now instead of maintaining knowledge and educating each individual about pieces of your expertise, you can concentrate on growing your abilities and creating something new.
   

2008 was all about the mash-up. Writing the music is good. Combining it is genius.

The same wave will transcend art and be adopted by business and education in 2010.

Welcome to the Creation Age.

You know this, but your Mom doesn't

What's great about Twitter..
I've been using Twitter for a few months now and I like it. To me, twitter is like a crowd of people all talking around me. The crowd is always exactly the right mix of information and humor because I invited all of them. I hear snippets of conversations from all around me and I pick out the most relevant ones I wish to hear more about. It's also a great way to keep up with the most recent news about a new subject like cloud computing. The personal marketing opportunities are still great as twitter is still on a growing curve.

Twediquette:
Everyone I follow has been invited to my party. There is a certain etiquette that I expect of people who are in or can be invited to my party. Here's a quick list:

1. Don't tweet hello. I know who you are. I know you are out there. Tell me something useful.
2. Tell me something useful. You just got back from lunch is not useful to me. You just got back from lunch and would like to recommend your favorite dish is useful.
3. Don't tweet too often. Filling up my screen with messages forces me to sift for the good stuff. Less is more.
4. No Bodily functions. Nothing more to say about that.
   

Twitter improvements:
There are a few things I don't like about twitter. Please cache my address book and alert me when my contacts join twitter. I do this every couple of weeks to see who on my contact list has joined in, but LinkedIn does it for me automatically. Oh, and how about an auto-refresh option. Sometimes I leave Twitter open on a tab and realize, "What for?" I have to refresh the page anyway, might as well kill it and go back later.

Twitter cloud application:
If you've ever seen the 2D image of the sculpture above, then you know the fail whale. The fail whale appears when too many tweets overcome the twitter environment and the servers have difficulty keeping up with requests. I haven't seen it too often, but when it does appear hitting the refresh key usually provides immediate results. It did cause me to read the status bar and pay attention to where the hold-up was taking place. I was surprised to see AWS was the last request. So, twitter is using the power of elastic cloud computing to run this social network. Little or no capital investment in hardware necessary to run this popular service. Here's the kicker though, you don't care. All these terms (cloud, elastic, utility computing, etc..) are marketing terms that businesses use to speak to other businesses about IT. The end user (in or out of a business setting) just doesn't care how the service is delivered, they just want it to work. Speaking to most users about the cloud is like explaining how the electrical grid works. It's a utility and most people only care that when they hit the switch, the light comes on and who to call if it doesn't. Does the power you are using right now to read this come from hydro, coal, or nuclear? Can you even find out?