No Smartphone, No Life

So we are utterly and helplessly dependent on our smartphones and mobile communications.

If our enemies strike our communications networks, we are as good as dead. 

Can you imagine the panic and chaos that would ensue?

Cut off from family, friends, and colleagues.

Unable to get unto the Internet!

No eCommerce. 

No online Banking. 

No social networking.

No easily and readily available information.

No online music, videos, or gaming.

No online (fake) news. 

As you see in the photo, under the smashed smartphone…it says, “Disaster”!

We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. 

And we wouldn’t know how to conduct ourselves by ourself. 

We are completely dependent on mobile communications and connectivity to each other.

Without, we wither and die. 

And G-d created the marvels of the Heaven and Earth in 6 days. 

But we have become so tethered and dependent on our technology, we are toast in just a split second. 

If we don’t get serious about cybersecurity, and fast, there is going to be hell on Earth to pay. 

And not a single shot needs to be fired. 😉

(Source Photo: Rebecca Blumenthal)

Panda Love Express

This was interesting on the sign in Washington, D.C.

An advertisement for a dating site with a picture of a panda bear apparently with love in it’s eyes.

(Note: I don’t know what Panda.com site is as it wasn’t working when I tested it–hopefully, nothing bad.)

Juxtaposed with the sun glaring off the window on the building next to it, made it seem like it was just calling out to the singles–who are looking to meet Mr./Mrs. Right–for a new beginning. 

Bees do it. Birds do it. Of course, even panda bears do it. 

Everyone should have a chance to find their soulmate and live happily ever after. 

Social sites, gatherings, or personal introductions, whatever brings people together–it’s a beautiful thing. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Challenging The Dunbar 150

Today, Facebook announced it’s new search tool called Graph Search for locating information on people, places, interests, photos, music, restaurants, and more. 

Graph Search is still in beta, so you have to sign up in Facebook to get on the waiting list to use it. 

But Facebook is throwing down the gauntlet to Google by using natural language queries to search by just asking the question in plain language like: “my friends that like Rocky” and up comes those smart ladies and gents. 

But Graph Search is not just a challenge to Google, but to other social media tools and recommendation engines like Yelp and Foursquare, and even LinkedIn, which is now widely used for corporate recruiting. 

Graph Search uses the Bing search engine and it’s secret sauce according to CNN is that is culls information from over 1 billion Facebook accounts, 24 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections–so there is an enormous and growing database to pull from. 

So while the average Facebook user has about 190 connections, some people have as many as 5,000 and like the now antiquated business card file or Rolodex, all the people in your social network can provide important opportunities to learn and share. And while in the aggregate six degrees of separation, none of us are too far removed from everyone else anyway, we can still only Graph Search people and content in our network.

Interestingly enough, while Facebook rolls out Graph Search to try to capitalize on its treasure trove personal data and seemingly infinite connections, Bloomberg BusinessWeek (10 January 2013) ran an article called “The Dunbar Number” about how the human brain can only handle up to “150 meaningful relationships.”

Whether hunter-gather clans, military units, corporate divisions, or an individual’s network of family, friends, and colleagues–our brain “has limits” and 150 is it when it comes to substantial real world or virtual relationships–our brains have to process all the facets involved in social interactions from working together against outside “predators” to guarding against “bullies and cheats” from within the network. 

According to Dunbar, digital technologies like the Internet and social media, while enabling people to grow their virtual Rolodex, does not really increase our social relationships in the real meaning of the word. 

So with Graph Search, while you can mine your network for great talent, interesting places to visit, or restaurants to eat at, you are still fundamentally interacting with your core 150 when it comes to sharing the joys and challenges of everyday life. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Social Media, Fulfilling Our Every Need?

One of my daughters sent me this article for my blog and said “you”ll like this,” and she was right.

The article is called 10 Things You Don’t Know About Teens And Social Networking–it was eye opening.

I read about kids’ (ages 13-15) experiences with going online and their utter fascination and addiction to social media.

As I started to analyze and categorize these, I realized the power of social media is anchored in every layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: from physiological to self-actualization – not only for kids but also adults, as follows:

1) Physiological Needs–Foster social networks online, which is a powerful factor in developing productive and profitable life opportunities–as the old adage goes “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”  As Hannah, age 13, states: “There is more life happening online than offline.”

2) Safety Needs–Despite all the fears about people preying on others online and cyber bullying, people tend to feel safer behind their computer than not. Call it the anonymity factor or the distance of not being within range of a punch in a the nose. As Sadie, age 14, states: “I feel safer online, than I do offline.”

3) Social Needs–They don’t call it “social media” for nothing. Yes, it’s all about reaching out to others from email to chat and from blogs to wikis, we’re connecting with each other all virtually all the time. As Jasmine, age 13, states: “My friendships are really affected by social networking.”

4) Esteem Needs–Your online image or brand matters a lot to people where they either get ego-boosted or deflated. People desperately want to be “liked,” “friended,” “mentioned,” and “commented” about.  As Samantha, age 14, states: “It affects our image and self-confidence.”

5) Self-Actualization Needs–At the end of the day, we all want to realize our full potential and social media provide powerful tools to engage, be heard, influence, and ultimately make a difference.

As many of the kids self-report, the compulsion to be online is so strong for two reasons:

1) Personal Addiction–The satisfaction of our needs by doing social media creates an addiction that must be fulfilled or else like a drug addict, you experience the dire pain of withdrawal–as one girl, Nina, age 15 reported, “I feel like I’m losing control.  I want my parents to tell me to get off the computer. Actually, they would need to literally take the computer away because I can’t stop myself.”

2) Peer Pressure–There is a social addiction that results in peer pressure to be online and participate or else. As Jasmine, age 13, states: “So you have to be online all the time, just to keep track, so you don’t upset anyone.”

While clearly much good comes from social media (in terms of human need fulfillment), anything that becomes an addiction–personal and societal–can be dangerous and a cause for concern.

As with all tools to satisfy human needs, we need to control the tools, rather than be controlled by them.

With social media, people should use it if and when it meets their needs and balance that with other important tools for fulfilling those needs, such as school, work, in-person relationships, real activities and so on.

We should never become so consumed by social media that we neglect other vital life activities, but rather we need to exert self-control and teach our children the same–to become well-rounded, functional people online and off.

>The iWatch Does It All

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>Social Networking, Blogging, and Tweeting in Plain English

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Here are some great little videos that explain Social Networking, Blogging, and Tweeting in Plain English:

1) Social Networking

2) Blogging

3) Tweeting

Check out these and other social media learning resources, policies and procedures, discussion forums and more at the Department of Defense (DoD) Social Media Hub.

>Reality Trumps Virtuality

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What a crazy news story (reported through South Korean news media)—and true. This South Korean couple, addicted to a video game, ends up starving their 3-month old child to death.

The video game that the couple was addicted to happened to be about raising a virtual child—of all things.

The couple—a 41 year old father and 25 year old mother were both unemployed—and fed their child only once a day, while they spent 4-6 hours a day playing games at the Internet café.

When the child died, the couple was playing video games all night long.

This is an unbelievably tragic story that defies logic, where troubled parents caught in the web of the virtual world, abrogate their responsibilities to themselves and their child in the real world.

So are these two parents just a bunch of whack jobs…an oddity that we shake our heads at disapproving or is this something more?

While the American Medical Association has so far declined to include Internet Addiction Disorder in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, pending further study, we know that we as a society have become in a sense obsessed (although maybe not yet clinically) with everything online—getting information, communicating, networking, shopping, and gaming—and for the most part, we love it!

Some programs like Second Life even go so far as to create virtual worlds where people interact with each other through avatars. They meet, socialize, and participate in activities in a world of only composed of 3-D models—where reality is what programmers make of it—in a coding sense.

Social networks, like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and numerous specialized online communities—for all sorts of shared interests from books to music, dating to investing, and philanthropy to travel—are available to chose from and are widely popular destinations.

It seems truly that many people have become more comfortable living in the IP address on the World Wide Web than at their street address within their true day-to-day realities. Their chosen avatars, pseudo-names, and online profiles often far more exciting then the persons, occupations, and lifestyle they physically inhabit. The virtual world has become an escape for many, and a place many are all too happy to engross themselves in 2, 4, 6 or more hours a day.

What happens to the occupants of our real world, when we choose to retreat to virtual worlds?

Well at the extreme is the fate of the 3-month old baby who died of neglect and hunger. More common are spouses and children, and others—family, friends and associates—who are increasingly physically and emotionally distant.

Our connection to people in real life—around us—are traded in for long-distance, abstract, and virtual relationships with people we often hardly know on the Internet.

We routinely trade emails, instant messages, tweets, and blog comments, with people who we hardly know—often do not even know people’s real names and cannot pronounce their presumed cities of residence.

While the Internet is in many ways miraculous in its ability to bring us together—across time and space, in other ways it can potentially substitute the surreal for the real, the meaningless for the meaningful, and empty chatter with people we barely know and never really will for true giving with people we absolutely care about.

At the extreme, we cannot let real children die because we are hiding in cyberspace feeding our virtual addiction. In more common terms, we must not trade our most important real world relationships and activities for those that are phantom experiences in cyberspace.

It is great to extend our reach with the Internet, but it is not okay to do so at the expense of those that are truly at arms reach. We must find a balance between the two worlds we now live in—real and virtual!

While there is every reason to love the Internet—communication, connection, and convenience—it has also become a retreat from people’s very real world problems.

When Online, people are not hungry, not sick, not unemployed, not lonely, not judged—instead they are in a sense one with everybody else in a common pool of bite and bytes—where no one knows them or their situations. Online, they are anonymous, no ones and at the same time anyone they want to be.

The Internet is a great place to be—to escape to—sort of the like the Holodeck on the Star Trek. Choose your program—and you can be in any time and at any place—interacting with anybody. It is not real, but it feels real when you are there.

I remember when I used to watch Star Trek and be fascinated by the experiences the characters had when they went into the Holodeck’s alternate reality. At the same time (and I think this was the intention of the show), after awhile I found myself wanting the characters to get back to reality and deal with the issues that they truly had to face. Somehow watching them escape “too much” wasn’t very satisfying.

To me, real relationships, even with and maybe because of their inherent challenges and tests, is more satisfying than virtuality, because of the deeper impact of the actions and interactions. Cyberspace is a great augmented reality, but it cannot replace reality.

In the end, being online is a nice place to visit (and there are a lot of benefits to being there), but I wouldn’t want to live there all the time and miss the real fun.

>Health Care Reform is Technologically Deficient

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The debate on the news, in the streets, and on the Hill these days is health care reform—getting insurance coverage for those who lack it. And while this is an important and noble pursuit, there is something extraordinary absent from the health care reform discussion—and that is technology—in terms of how we get better care to everyone, the uninsured and insured alike?

We are living with a health care system that is functioning devoid of the most basic technology aids—such as electronic medical records, electronic scheduling, e-appointments with doctors using IM or video, electronic prescription handling, and much more.

If the finance industry is at the advanced end of the technology spectrum, the medical industry is at the extreme low end—and how sad a commentary is that: is our money more important to us than our health?

An article in Fast Company in May 2009 called “The Doctor of the Future” states: “This is a $2.4 trillion industry run on handwritten notes. We’re using 3,000 year-old tools to deliver health care in the richest country on the planet.”

The health care system is broken for sure, but it goes way beyond the 45 million American’s that lack insurance.

• “Health care accounts for $1 in every $6 spent in the United States.”
• “Costs are climbing at twice the rate of inflation.”
• “Every year, an estimated 1.5 million families lose their homes because of medical bills.”
• “Although we have the word’s most expensive health-care system, 24 counties have a longer life expectancy and 34 have a lower infant-mortality rate.”

Based on these numbers, the medical industry in this country is overcharging and under-delivering, and part of the reason for this–as Fast Company states is the lack of technological innovation: “one of the paradoxes of modern medicine is that it demands continual innovation yet often resists change.”

New medical technology programs are available that provide for a vastly improved patient experience.

For example, using the Myca platform the user-experience is simpler, faster, and cheaper. Here’s a view of how it would work: “your profile shows your medical team…to make an appointment, you look at the doctors schedule, select a time slot or at least half an hour and the type of appointment (in-person, video, IM), and fill out a text box describing your ailment so the doctor can start thinking about treatment. Typically follow ups are e-visits. A timeline doted with icons representing appointments lets you review the doctors comments, read the IM thread, watch the video of an earlier electronic house call or link t test results.”

Using other technological advances, we could also benefit the patient by being able to:

• Send electronic prescriptions to the pharmacy and automatically check for drug interaction.
• Enter a patient’s symptoms and test results and get a comprehensive software generated diagnosis along with the probability of each result as well as other pertinent tests for the doctor to consider.
• Provide electronic medical records that can be shared securely with medical providers including medical history, exam notes, tests ordered and results, and drugs prescribed.
• Utilize telemedicine for consultation with medical providers anywhere and anytime.
• And even apply robots to surgical procedures that result in less invasive, more effective, quicker recovery rates, and with less chance of infection.

None of this is science fiction…and this is all possible today.

Therefore, if we are going to call for a revamp to our health care system, let’s go beyond the coverage issue and address the logjam on quality of care for all Americans.

Absolutely we need to address the 18% uninsured in this country, but while we do that and figure out how to pay for it, let’s also deal with providing 21st century care to all our citizens through the modernization of our medical industry benefitting both the patients and medical providers through more efficient and effective care-giving.

>Chief Interaction Officer — Architecting Social Networking

>See my CIO Magazine article: Encourage Social Networking, Without Discouraging In-Person Meetings

Appreciate any comments.

>Toyota and Enterprise Architecture

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MSNBC on 24 April 2007 reported: “through a shrewd combination of investing in environment-friendly vehicles, offering sharp new models and wooing drivers with brand power, Toyota has toppled GM from the top global sales spot for the first time ever.”

Harvard Business Review, June 2008, reports on “Contradictions that Drive Toyota’s Success.” (by Hirotaka Tekeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu) “Toyota Motor Corporation has become one of the world’s greatest companies because of Toyota Production System (TPS)…enables the Japanese giant to make the planet’s best automobiles at the lowest cost and to develop new products quickly.”

What is Toyota’s secret?

Reaching for the stars—Toyota sets “near-unattainable goals.” For example, “consider the company’s strategy: Meet every customer need and provide a full line in every market.” This runs counter to Michael Porter’s strategy of “choosing what not to do.” Additionally, Toyota’s goals are “purposely vague” to force exploration, innovation, and collaboration to meet them.

Consider the goals stated by Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe:

“Build a car that makes the air clean [not just less dirty], prevents accidents [not just reduces accident’s], makes people healthier and happier when they drive it [not just a car that gets you from place to place], and gets you from coast to coast on one task of gas [not just incrementally improving gas mileage].”

Have you ever seen anything like these goals in your organization’s strategic plans?

I highly doubt it. But imagine how your enterprise would change culturally and competitively overnight if you did!

Of course, Toyota’s strategy of Kaizen—continuous improvement—is part of their unending desire to succeed and not be satisfied. They view improvement as not something you achieve, but as something you continuously strive for.

We can apply Toyota’s reach goals and Kaizen philosophy to making enterprise architecture planning more effective too. We need to stop conveniently “planning” on things we are working on now or for which we have a head-up that are just around the corner. Sure it’s easy to plan with 20-20 hindsight and it helps us to achieve our unit and individual performance plans and gets inappropriately recognized and rewarded, but this is really a short term outlook and not one that will drive organizational success. Instead, like Toyota, we need to set goals that are stretch goals for the organization, and which make us go beyond our comfort zones, so that we can truly work to break out of the box and differentiate ourselves and our organization from the status quo and the limits of our imagination. Setting the bar truly high and then not settling for anything less than continual improvement is a long term strategy for success and one that needs to be genuinely encouraged and rewarded.

Here’s another important aspect of Toyota’s success:

Employees are highly valued— “Toyota views employees not just as pairs of hands, but as knowledge workers.” Ideas are welcome from everyone up and down the organization. “Employees have to operate in a culture where they constantly grapple with challenges and problems and must come up with fresh ideas…when people grapple with opposing insights, they understand and come up with effective solutions.” In fact, at Toyota, “employees feel safe, even empowered to voice contrary opinions and contradict superiors.” There is a culture of open communications, and a tremendous value is placed on personal relationships and networking. Additionally, value is placed not on results, but for “how much trust and respect the manager has earned from others,” and “refusing to listen to others is a serious offense.”

This concept of valuing employees and listening to them can shed light on how we need to develop effective enterprise architecture and sound governance; whereby, we provide all major stakeholders a voice at the table–to participate in and influence planning, decision making, and innovation. This is the way to achieve higher returns and lower risks. We need to stop planning and making decisions on the whims of the few or based on gut, intuition, and politics. We must cultivate information sharing, collaboration, and elevate people as the quintessential element of our enterprise’s success.

“Toyota’s culture…places humans, not machines, at the center of the company. As such, the company will be imperfect, and there will always be room for improvement.”

People are flawed, but our endeavors make us great!