Maze 2.0: Differentiating Business Value from Fashions

There's always a bewildering maze of terms and trends in the technology world: like the entertainment industry, the million dollar question is which ones will wind up meaning anything, which will be one hit wonders and which ones will stick and sustain. For many people of course the whole idea of fashion is anathema, and they are oblivious to the whole circus.

For those focused on realizing business benefit from modern web technologies, these 'movements' and terms can be useful in order to focus minds. All to often though the sheer volume of  terminologies and suggested use cases make for a vernacular language which can be widely misspoken, distorted and otherwise mangled.

For those taking some time to try and get some sense around a particular technology area, the sheer volume of online information, commentary and opinion, informed or otherwise, can actually leave you feeling more confused than when you started your research.

It's ironic that the ever increasing volume of information available to you online is becoming harder and harder to filter, with movements and ideas mutating at bewildering speed. Even if you wanted to put a stake in the ground and put some budget into a promising looking technology to solve a given business problem, the pace of change can make those of us who don't have a good grasp of the 'scene' reluctant to take the plunge.

The evangelical fervor for movements can seem embarrassing in hindsight: you don't have to look far online to find irrational exuberance about the dot com boom and more recently the 2.0 movement which seem charmingly naive in the rear view mirror, or less charitably in some cases, plain stupid.

Unless you're living and breathing the excitement of being involved in a 'movement' of some sort, the giddy latest news is about as exciting as this 'Music trends in 2010: What's Hot and What's Not' who's in and who's out list from HitFix. It's worth remembering that people steeped in their business specialization who decide to investigate a computing area tend to see the techie fashion scene less charitably and with less passion than the enthusiasts.

There's significant issues around anyone outside the tech bubble understanding the endless sub cultures around browser based technologies, which tend to be driven by self interest. From the original six year old Web 2.0 movement for example we have various sub genres. Simplistically, marketing and PR types agendas are very focused on defining everything around 'Social Media' and 'Social Customer Relationship Management' (Social CRM), and frame much of their thinking around mutations of the 'Clue Train Manifesto' to describe 'conversations' with customers, clients, crowd sourcing and innovation capture.

Government 2.0 takes the concepts of transparency and making information which is available in theory publicly accessible and interconnected, while promoting the principles of participation, collaboration and efficiency.

Enterprise 2.0 is essentially finding effective and efficient ways to use Web 2.0 technologies within a large scale business setting, often in combination with other  enterprise class software.  There are all sorts of other groups adding a 2.0 suffix to their aspirations, groups and businesses beyond these brief examples.

All of these movements and categories make the uninitiated dizzy and the larger challenge,  like the entertainment industry analogy first paragraph of this post, is in finding terminology that captures the imagination and sticks, principally because people find value and use for what is being described.

Everyone operates under the simple thought 'what's in it for me?' including not only potential end users but also vendors, analysts, consultants, bloggers and competitors. These different voices inevitably distort, reinvent and mutate terminology to meet their own offerings and goals- to those following the fashion circus this can seem exciting and buzzy but often makes things all the more incomprehensible to the average Joe or Josephine.

Providing a jargon free, comprehensible rationale and use case for anything is the first step in being able to sell whatever it is, yet despite the poor economic situation there appear to be legions of folks intent on contradicting and second guessing each other in countless areas of the technology world, particularly online.  The result are larger legions of bemused and bewildered potential customers who took a look but were baffled by what they saw and went away again.

Ten years ago the knowledge management movement managed to implode itself by failing to agree on common terminology; the cloud computing world - all things to all people right now - is having trouble in some cases coming in to land with tangible benefits that can be acted on and realized.

Providing and executing business value is a pretty old fashioned idea that just about anyone can understand, so why do so many people chose to confuse with an online moveable feast of giddy debate, futuristic predictions, naive proclamations and regurgitation of ideas they've found which they'd like to associate with?