Greater Choice Equals Less Efficiency?

This evening, I attended the monthly Microsoft Business Intelligence Community event held at their office in the Dallas-area suburb of Irving. Drew Minkin, a former Microsoft employee-turned-consultant, gave a wonderful talk on the benefits and pitfalls of BI solutions from the perspective of pricing analysis. His employer, Zilliant Corporation, specializes in helping large organizations shift their pricing strategy from an off-the-cuff intuitive guess to knowledge-driven precision derived from both internal and industry-wide data sources.

The content of his talk began whirling around my mind during the drive home afterward. I found myself forming why questions: Why is there such inefficiency in pricing? Why don’t more decision-makers actively search for solutions, such as Zilliant offers, that are driven by data instead of gut feeling? I then I hit upon something, seemingly trivial, that completely astonished me: Human choices drive inefficiency. I recognize forces beyond human control, and personally believe in God as the absolute authority, but the indirect relationship between human action and efficiency makes sense. Remember Henry Ford? He’s quoted as saying, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Ford recognized that limiting superfluous options, such as color, and focusing on essential factors, such as usability and production cost, would provide a competitive advantage against the classier auto manufacturers of his day who prided themselves on customization, low volume, and high prices.

The implications for business decision makers, and thus the case for better BI solutions, is an entire series of posts in itself. By the end of my trip home, my thoughts focused in on the effect of this relationship between choice and efficiency upon our beloved social web.

As a card-carrying member of the social graph, a single node among millions, I see more clearly now than ever the need to strip away superfluous choices. Let’s focus in on what I’m terming structured choice. A quick Googling of the term found some legal and health care-related references to the term, so I don’t plan on applying for a trademark anytime soon, but my desire is this: Let’s conceptualize what it truly means to co-create context with each other. Perhaps we can use several well-defined metrics to strike a healthy balance between choice (we don’t want to starve or gorge ourselves) and efficiency (we all have things to do). From the perspective of social innovation, how do we create a network of funnels, pipes, drains, and spigots to invert the choice/efficiency relationship before things get out of hand?

There’s something significant here, and I hardly claim originality, but there must be a way to reconcile the ever-increasing number of choices presented to us within our increasingly inter-connected social graph with the critical need to accomplish something of higher value than tossing another sheep. How can we create a better context, or environment, for structuring the choices around us? Examples of metrics that will drive the definition of context already exist, such as activity, personality, interests, friends, location, goals, etc. I hope this fires your imagination as much as it does mine. Let’s start by defining these metrics in clearer terms, and in so doing define what context means in terms of the social web. I’m sure much of the answer we seek is already out there, waiting for us to discover it. Let’s dig.

And now for a brief word from my sponsor…

Just kidding about the sponsorship, but oh-so-serious about the brevity. I’m currently learning C# to complement my VB.NET skills, so I’m dedicating my non-wife, non-twitter, non-work time an hour per day to the task. While I already have a couple of books on the subject, they are a bit on the dry side. So, in the spirit of livening up my educational endeavor, I discovered and purchased Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene. The Head First book series, published by O’Reilly, is similar in premise to the Dummies and Idiots and Absolute Beginners books (oh my!), but is far superior to them in execution. Here’s my perspective on why:

1) Pretty pictures. Yes, all of the other series have illustrations and screen shots, but the Head First C# book kicks things up to an entirely different level. It’s the first technical book I’m willing to place on my coffee table for all my non-developer friends to flip through when they’re over for dinner. Judging from what I’ve seen of the other books, this feeling is common for all books in the series.

2) Keeps my attention. The book is funny, entertaining, and educational all at the same time. The content isn’t watered down as it is in the other series. I greatly respect the infortainment as a seasoned developer who’s branching out into other languages at the behest of friends and recruiters. I don’t feel like an idiot or a dummy when I’m reading HF C# because the authors treat me, their audience, with respect. Double kudos for making me feel like a genius upon placing a picture box control on the form and tying it to a messsage box.

3) Finally, the educational content is open-ended. Like any good learning resource, the book raises topics of interest for future study and creates many deeper questions for each simple one it answers. No fluff here, folks. Reminds me of my college experience: I walked in knowing everything, and walked out realizing I knew practically nothing.

So that’s it for my brief interruption of the irregularly-scheduled programming going on here at Idea Maven. You’ll be glad to know that blogging is now a priority for me as I plan commitments each week. I’ve even created a shiny new notebook in OneNote just for the blog.

P.S. I’m testing Zemanta’s Firefox plug-in for the next few posts to see it work in action. Zemanta is a tool that suggests content, links, and tags for your posts as you type them. It’s fun, free, and oh-so Web 2.0! I highly recommend you give it a whirl.

Realizing the Blogging Church

Having spent the greater part of March on work-related projects and my ever-decreasing free time on facebook app concepts, the Idea Maven hit the bottom of the priority list. Yet, I’m back with more. I’ve been reading Brian Bailey’s The Blogging Church, and am happy to report that his book makes blogging approachable to the less-tech savvy. I’ve been reading it for the dual purpose of 1) personal inspiration to grow and nurture this site, and 2) begin to influence my church toward using blogs and podcasts as methods to extend community and life-change beyond our weekly on-site services. Almost on queue, my pastor asked me to review a “media center” service called SermonConnect. Haven’t checked them out yet, but their ad mentions “unlimited storage, streaming audio/video, podcasting, blogging, and broadcast e-mail.” Needless to say I’m thankful that he’s already thinking about blogs and podcasts, since it makes my job much easier. I’m really looking forward to establishing a consistent, genuine, high-quality (in that order) online presence for the church. One of my near-term goals is to meet Brian Bailey in person to thank him for the book and his ability to represent Christianity with excellence inside the blogosphere. Kudos to you, sir.

BTW, thanks for the kind encouragement, especially to Jeremy “The Product Guy” Horn. He’s been an inspiration to me and I hope this blog achieves the level of thought-provoking depth and utility he’s achieved over at tpgblog.com.

I’m really beginning to like the “Maven” title

While searching for information on Cognitive Psychology, Social Networks, and Social Network Analysis, I stumbled across an old (circa 2002) yet informative page on Social Network Analysis. The author, Peter Morville, focused in on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point characters, namely Connectors and Mavens. Interested to read Gladwell’s take on Mavens once again, I immediately jumped up from my desk, dusted off my copy of Tipping Point, and flipped to page 59. It was refreshing to remember that Mavens not only collect information, but act upon social motivation to distribute their collective knowledge to the non-Mavens in the marketplace. Gladwell describes several anecdotes to carry his point, but the basic premise stands on its own: Mavens act as a balancing force in the marketplace. An eye for detail; unquenchable thirst for knowledge, “best practices”, and processes; and fundamental desire to benefit their society motivate their behavior. I have a feeling the motivation behind the term “Idea Maven” for this blog originally germinated from Gladwell’s work.

Perhaps this is a small revelation, but it solidifies in my mind that the vision of this blog is the aggregation and dissemination of knowledge. Thank you, Peter and Malcolm. My search for information continues; I can’t wait to share my findings with you in due time. Still working on the Cog. Psych. meets Social Networking post; also have raw facts for a post I’m doing this week on my personal experiences with Kluster, the crowd-sourcing up-start start-up run by Ben Kaufman. Having participated in their 72 Hour Project for the TED conference, I have some feedback to share that desperately deserves marked criticism.

I’m Guilty of Momentary Vision Loss

Summary: I created this blog, chickened out shortly thereafter, and have finally developed the wherewithal to write my first post.

“And so begins the journey.” How’s that for the first sentence of the first post? A quick glance at my About page should fill you in on the what and why of this blog (if not, comments are nice). I’ve been sitting on this blog for over a month now, as the edit date on my About page should attest, and the reason I have only begun to produce some content is simple: I’m a victim of self-inflicted momentary vision loss. Before you escape to WebMD, I’m waxing philosophical and am referring to the loss of internal vision that prompted my desire to start up the Idea Maven blog in the first place. I’m my humbly clueless opinion, MVL is a malady that claims more creative moments from people than anyone would like to admit.

When was the last time you wanted to do something, thought about it, started out on the path, and decided to back track all in the same day? That was my January 22nd, 2008. A brisk, cool day outside, I was reading Jeremy Horn’s Product Guy blog from the comfort of my work notebook during lunch when the thought hit me like a bolt of lightning. “It’s time to create something, and give back to the web community that has give me so much.” More or less. In a few moments it was finished; I had created the Idea Maven, edited the About page, and then felt a sense of overwhelming dread. I realized at that moment, as I stared at the stub post created by WordPress, that this blog would be my personal space to dream big, clarify my thoughts, and embrace the community beyond my network of “real” friends and family. So, with that in mind, I closed Firefox and pushed away from my desk. I’ve only now developed the guts to start writing.

Why? Simple. The Idea Maven is who I want to become, not necessarily who I am now. While that may seem a bit transparent for a blog that will incorporate posts that present the real-world benefits of a better-connected social web, I’m admitting to you and myself right now that I’m no expert. What I lack in experience now I will substitute for a technologist’s zeal (hmm… writing that down as a future post title), a willingness to learn, and a commitment to resilience in accepting well-intentioned criticism.

But for many, that won’t be enough, which is the reason I’ve hesitated to officially start the blog. I’m an avid Twitter fan, so as a follower of Stanislav Shalunov, this tweet hit me between the eyes:

“Blogs are so clueless because people like to write about what they are figuring out, not about what they already know…”

He’s right. I admit my cluelessness and the fact that I’m writing about stuff I’m still figuring out. How can I call myself “The Idea Maven” (Maven: one who is experienced or knowledgeable) when I’m more actively involved in the process of building my own experience/knowledge base than spreading experience/knowledge around? For me, though, that’s the magic blend offered by RSS feeds and blogs. You don’t have to wait for me to get my act together, craft a strong network of contacts who validate that I have my act together, and then publish the take-away thoughts of my act as a book so you can pick it up at Borders. While I hope to season well with age, I’m not in the position to offer timeless truths just yet, and I’m honest enough to admit it. Instead, you can join me on the learning experience. Whether I rise or fall, succeed or fail, win or lose, I will always be learning and growing in the process.

Almost done for now. My goal is eight-hundred words for the post, and I’m almost there. My normal method for archiving interesting content is to give it a thumbs up on Stumble Upon, which adds it to my list of favorites on SU, and then bookmark it using Foxmarks so I can get back to it from any of my computers. Now, in addition to those two steps, I’ll start blogging on the items that catch my eye and discover my own voice in the process. I challenge anyone who reads this post to take a hard look at what you want to do versus what you’re doing, cut out the junk, and dig your heels in deep on whatever it is that lights your fire. Maybe a blog of your own, a software idea, business concept, or whatever leaves you happier than you were before the fact. Regardless of the outcome, you’ll relish the pursuit.

Next up: I want to write about what happens when Cognitive Psychology and the Social Web go out for a date. The chemistry is worth writing about.