KnowledgeBlog

I’m always trying to find the time to go to industry events, read interesting blogs and papers but increasingly I’ve started to get that feeling of fragmentation. What do I mean? I mean, in our business we value and promote information technology and complimentary organisational change. However to get one’s message across – to be convincing – we need to be consistent. And why is being consistent difficult? Well I’ll list a few terms here that have been, or are being, promoted by our industry:

From a cynical (or perhaps realistic) point of view the proliferation of terminology could be associated with the drive for individual or organisational reputation. There’s definitely a cachet associated with coining a term and so therefore people are motivated to do so. Take for example the need for academics to publish. When fellow academics measure the contribution of a paper they often consider whether it has added something novel to our way of thinking. Novel means something new and often that new thing is coined with a name. That’s why many papers are “Towards…” something. They’re towards a new meme, a new concept. Also take for example Jive’s promotion of Social Business Software. I’m writing about it, and so are others, that’s a win for their marketing department. Perhaps in the future it will be added to Allen’s evolution of social software page? In the same vein I like the quote that Allen has on his evolution of social software page from Adina Levin where she says: “But we’re children of the enlightenment, we want progress, and in order to get the (deserved) attention for new generations of real innovation, we need to use new terms.” I believe the sentiment to be a little vacuous and having the word ‘deserved’ parenthesised seems to support my belief.In fact I think you could look at the English language as a kind of market. There’s competitive forces out there. It’s very similar to Shapiro & Varian’s Standard Wars – who’s term will win supreme? If I were to get into the game I might call it the Meme Market (but unfortunately someone else has already used the term… though that doesn’t stop everyone… see next para).But what is the cost of terminology proliferation? I guess from a business perspective it is a little more difficult to tear away the layers to find value. This is especially true if you must spend so much time trying to understand what a term means. It is even more difficult when those who coin the term do not take into account the fact that it may have already been used for other purposes thereby making it even more difficult to gain understanding. This is just the case with the use of the word ‘social’. If I were to go to a Web Standards Group meeting and chat to someone about Social Technology they would, most likely, believe that I am referring to instant messaging, blogging, wikis and the like. However the term could also mean our national parliamentary system. For someone in the industry it would be easy to disentangle the meaning but what if someone has a degree in law and I wish to convince them of the merits of social technology? We would first need to agree on what we mean.Definitions are not the only problem. With so many concepts how do we effectively corral our thought processes into one area? That is a strength of human capital, the ability to collaborate and produce great works. However if we are fragmented in our focus does that mean that we are also losing the advantages of scale?Now, to cross over and consider the other side of the argument. Firstly, and most importantly, it would be wrong to for anyone to artificially muzzle themselves of new ideas just on the basis that there are too many terms. That’s true but one would hope that they thought before they lept. That is, they had considered the history of their chosen terms to avoid, as far as possible, definition clashes, and further that they had categorically come up with legitimate reasons why other previously coined terms did not satisfy their ideas.Another argument is that the number of terms is simply a consequence of our new sophistication. Our society is more educated and the Internet provides the world’s biggest platform of connected minds and ideas. Therefore memes are going to be conceived more rapidly and disseminated at greater speed. And as with any human endeavour, as more people get involved there is a requirement that we diversify. In essence an opposing motivation to the “let’s all focus on one thing” argument above. These drivers are inevitable and it follows that our job is to thoughtfully select those terms that make sense, interpret their value and advise our clients.