Blogs | design mind

Netbooks: the Saviour of Healthcare IT?

DesignWell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:58:18 -0500

It's a banality to state that Healthcare IT is hopelessly out-of-date. Actually, hospitals are often full of gleaming new equipment and are constantly upgrading their infrastructure. The problem is that while the assorted blocks of hardware and software in a healthcare system are often very sophisticated in themselves, they typically don't connect to each other, or to their users, in a very effective manner. Printers, faxes, and paper filing cabinets form the real backbone of the system.

To date, much of the industry focus on addressing this has been to:
1. painstakingly join together the existing pieces, in a never-ending integration project
2. create a new, overarching backbone which all pieces connect to (NHIS, Microsoft Vault, etc)

On the sidelines of these behemoth activities, however, are some smart companies with a different approach, taking ubiquitous connectivity as a starting point and offering simple SaaS solutions to the healthcare industry.

What does this really change?
- The flexibility of the web allows an ease of continuous improvement to functionality and user experience that is otherwise impossible
- You still have lots of specialist blocks of functionality to join together, but they're all in the cloud already. Connect them once, and they're connected for all users. Update them once, and they're updated for all users.
- Healthcare professionals can collaborate by working on the SAME data, not different copies of it
- Every connected device can become a health IT entry point. With 3.5B cellphones and 1B+ PCs out there, that's just huge.

So where do Netbooks come in?
Well, basically Netbooks have two characteristics:
1. They're really, really cheap
2. They're made for doing everything online (and aren't really powerful enough to do anything locally)

The positive reinforcement loop I hope for from these 2 characteristics are:
1. Healthcare institutions start buying netbooks as a cheap POC computing solution
2. Due to the inherent nature of the netbook, SaaS and cloud computing solutions will be preferred for them
3. Users will discover, accidentally, the other advantages of SaaS solutions and start to demand them also on other computing platforms
4. Solution providers will discover an endless variety of innovation opportunities that spring from data being available on the internet and easily sharable with standard security protocols
5. We finally get the long dreamed-of 'medical mash-up': systems that pull together relevant health and non-health data from a plethora of sources and present it in a way that is meaningful for a given user, for purposes ranging from clinical decision-making to behavioural motivation, education to epidemiological analysis

The resulting potential to reduce error, improve collaboration, and drive efficiency needs a much longer and more learned analysis than I can provide: but I am convinced it can be measured not only in billions of dollars, but also thousands of lives.

- Thomas Sutton

The Sound Of Our Own Voices Talking Back At Us

Fabio Sergio — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:47:09 -0500

Remember the days when people got all excited as soon as anyone mentioned the Semantic Web?
Well, that's still a promising future evolution of our beloved digital playground, but in the meantime other semantic goodness has already come into the world.

People are talking.
The One Machine has started answering back in Furby-like memes gleaned from the conversations it's been eavesdropping on.

Here are three projects I love that point the way by word-mining human internet chatter to reveal patterns.

Shownar returns the shape of unidentified flying conversations hovering above and around BBC shows.

Twistory (inspired by the wonderful We Feel Fine) explores what people love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish.

Sick City listens for words like "sore throat" or " flu" to infer about the state of health of urban locations from around the world.

Self-reflection By Numbers

Fabio Sergio — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:52:04 -0500

The July 09 U.S. edition of Wired magazine has an interesting set of articles dealing with what happens once the body goes electric and becomes a beaming node on The Network, pulsating bits with its every heartbeat:

"And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers, the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance."

As you might know I've long been fascinated by the evolution of many Connectedland products and services into "tools of self-reflection" (brighter minds have talked about "self-knowledge through numbers", but the idea is the same). We are typically moved to profound reflection by the odd black swan event affecting us, whether good or bad: falling in love, the birth of a baby, the death of a loved one, a brush with disaster. Similar events can often turn out to be life-changing experiences, and we write books about them to make sure others can benefit from our sudden enlightenment.

Of course that seldom happens. Why? Because on the other hand we typically suck at detecting the subtle patterns in our lives, the meaning hidden deep under layers of ordinary, often repetitive activities that constitute the thin scaffolding holding up our daily stroll through time.

As we have all experienced at one point or another it's very hard to decide to change one's habits based on - well - awareness about those very habits, simply because we often put attention on mute when it comes to them, and we let muscle memory and cognitive autopilot take care of things, while our mind drifts away into its own self-generated stream of un-consciousness. In other words we don't notice what needs changing, simply because we don't even know it's taking place, or we have a misguided sense of what we do and how we do it and how often, so unfocused awareness gets lost in the realm of the possible and uncertain, and we're left with a numb finger to pull the trigger of decision and action.That's why many self-help courses start with keeping a diary, the archetypal pre-digital tool of self-reflection.

What has changed in recent times is that we have built digital devices that hold forever and never forget the bits we feed them, and the same tools also turn out to be great at enabling us to dig both wide and deep into the data we accrue over time. Such tools help us detect those precious invisible patterns, enabling us to extract meaning and sense by washing away the mnemonic detritus and leaving our behaviors clean in the open for us to observe and reflect upon, individually and collectively. Tools of self-reflection.

The discipline that has raised to answer the call to map the invisible threads connecting our traces is called Information Visualization, and companies like Stamen have been showing the world how data can be made to generate images that often straddle the fine line between informative usefulness and sheer beauty. This emerging area pushing the intersection of graphic and interaction design might also be another angle onto the stimulating debate recently fueled by frog design's own Robert Fabricant on the intentional impact design can or should have on human behavior.

We are increasingly surrounded by tools that can trigger change by enabling and facilitating self-reflection. How to design them poses new challenges, of course.

Make no mistake, trying to distill knowledge and meaning out of raw data through the creation of compelling visual representations is first and foremost an act of interpretation, not to mention an added layer of information in itself of course. From this perspective it does not matter if the end result it's just a simple bar graph showing the progress in your running performance, or a complex multi-nodal representation of your social network as it evolved over time, the chosen graphic expression is - using the term at large - a political decision, just like any other design decision. In other words, it comes with a point of view, that of the designer.

If you think about it even simply deciding to show progress in someone's running performance - positive or negative - ultimately underlies a clear goal: get you to run longer, or faster, or more often. The overt service is to provide you with a tool to track your performance, the less evident intent is to have you reflect upon and change your habits by having an objective reference of your accomplishments over time.

Here's also where interactivity comes into play, and a key role it should indeed play, giving end-users the ability to manipulate the data via its digital graphic representation. It should be the designer's responsibility to shape tools that can give people the ability to change and even contradict the visual point of view offered as the default. Enough. For now.

As a pretty irrelevant personal footnote I have to admit that whenever these topics come around I cannot not recall Cuban Council's Moodstats, early 2000 pixelated graphics and all. Probably just an experiment intended to test what Shockwave (Shockwave!) could do back then, but still a valuable intuition with the proverbial 20/20 hindsight.

On Travel (including Journeys around the Room)

tedglobal — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:26:07 -0500

On board a KLM 747 to Amsterdam, I’m reading Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as a preparation exercise for the TEDGlobal conference in two weeks (frog is a sponsor and the conference theme, "The Substance of Things Not Seen," is the theme of this group blog).

De Botton's musings on travel are the required reading for a frequent traveler like me – a collection of mundane “running to stand still” moments, filled with memorable lines that affect you exactly the way traveling does: they are glimpses of greater meaning, a rejuvenating exposure to “otherness” that not only expands your horizon but also makes you believe again in the naïve assumption that the skies are friendly. It is a book about seeing the unseen (which is not necessarily the unknown). John Ruskin, the painter, is portrayed in a chapter on “Possessing Beauty,” and he chastises the hastiness of modern travelers: “The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he truly be a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

The most remarkable paragraph in the book, however, introduces Xavier de Maistre and his novel A Journey around My Room, the detailed account of a miniature travel experience from sofa to bed and back (with some notable digressions), and a defiant attempt to take Pascal’s famous adage ad absurdum: “The source of all of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Maistre does not know either but at least he is capable of keeping his itinerary limited to an absolute minimum. There are “those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much,” de Botton quotes Nietzsche, before concluding: “Satisfied with the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”

Anti-Social Search

Nick de la Mare — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:10:31 -0500

Before we get started, I have three confessions:

First, I'm not on Facebook. As the social cost of not being part of that community becomes higher and higher, I struggle to recall why I'm not on board. Second, much of my understanding of what people are doing when I'm not with them comes from my wife and friends who filter events and track each others' lives through Facebook and then pass the relevant morsels over to me in the real world to digest. Third, I'm completely intrigued by the concept of social search, and the inclusion of the Aardvark social search engine into the huge Facebook network is enough to make me reconsider my anti-Facebook stance. I'm almost inclined to sign up just to start asking questions and see what I get back.

For those unfamiliar, Aardvark is a social search service that aims to leverage the wisdom of connected groups—a user can ask a question of their Facebook friends and get, presumably, relevant answers because they share location, interest, careers, and a variety of other things that made them a network in the first place. As the Aardvark blog says:

"Consider this: I have about 200 friends on Facebook, and they each have about 200 friends. Altogether I have over 10,000 friends and friends-of-friends in my extended network. These 10,000 people have a lot in common with me: many share my school and work affiliations and my cultural reference points. I'm interested in the choices they make and the experiences they have — they are usually more relevant to me than the opinions expressed by anonymous strangers on the web."

I certainly want to tap the wisdom of my foodie friends, find the best bike shops, events to attend and movies to see. And I can easily see the benefit of asking friends for help versus endlessly trawling the internet for answers, only to wonder if the answers I get are ones that I trust to be correct. As the Aardvark blog points out in a roundabout way, the tricky thing is subjectivity: "Social Search is especially great for subjective questions, and questions where context is important to getting the information I want." Social Search is also "complementary to Web Search, which is still great for objective information that can be found on a specific web page."

We all rely on specific people for information on certain topics; I have go-to friends I ask for restaurant or cooking advice, cycling friends who share my passion for not being treated like dirt in bike shops, others who share my taste in music and still others who like the movies I do. Unfortunately, I've learned from painful experience that people I trust in one area are not necessarily the best judges of my taste in others.

Aardvark tries to get around this issue of subjectivity by qualifying the answerers via their profiles, allowing users to ask questions "through instant messaging or email and the service will get to work searching your contacts and their contacts depending on their qualification to answer said question. The qualification is determined based on their profiles, which list their expertise and the likes." In a sense, by relying on a system of self-administered expertise, Aardvark is trying to make their subjective answers as objective and "true" as possible.

So what happens to people like me when search becomes social? To start with, I'll not have access to the scale of Facebook's proposed social search network. But I'm not convinced that the kind of answers I need are best handled on this kind of platform anyway. I know that a lot of the subjective questions I ask of others are more conversational and require more depth than a simple comment exchange offers. There's also a high probability that a small number of people will bear the weight of a large amount of the information sharing. Few of us are willing to devote large amounts of time answering questions that don't provide us any benefit; those that are will become hubs of knowledge and miniature Wiki's, their online behaviors shifting from social equal to information dispensary. Will the answers that I glean from real-life queries become more privileged precisely because they are out-of-network?

Here's a test for the theory of social search: What do you think?

_{(This article also appeared in Creativity-Online's OnDesign)}

Hartmut Esslinger: A Fine Line - How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business

Tim Leberecht — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:19:14 -0500

frog design founder and former CEO Hartmut Esslinger has written his first book, and it is available in stores now: A Fine Line – How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business. Part autobiography, part how-to innovation guide, part outlook to the future of design, A Fine Line is "a must-read for designers and business people alike" (Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president, Hewlett-Packard).

A Fine Line offers a step-by-step overview of the innovation process — from targeting goals to shepherding new products and services to the marketplace — in order to reveal how to arrive at an authentic human design that connects strongly with consumers. With a unique perspective, rich stories, and a global mindset, Esslinger explores business solutions that are environmentally sustainable and contribute to an enduring global economy.

Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital, in his foreword, said it all: "Hartmut's book contains the ruminations of a man who has devoted his life to the challenge of marrying the aesthetic with the functional while standing firm against the deadening forces of mediocrity. His work shows that taste can triumph, design and production can be soul-mates, and the eye of an individual can shape a product and a company. The idea that finely designed products can change the fate of companies while also becoming our indispensable companions is a message that millions of us owe to Hartmut."

You can find the table of contents, sample chapters, testimonials, and videos on http://www.afinelinebook.com

And here are some excerpts from a video interview with Esslinger:

frog and the Federal Republic of Germany

Tim Leberecht — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:47:32 -0500

Earlier this year, frog had the honor of participating in a series of expert hearings or what the Germans call "Zukunftswerkstatt" – a special think tank dedicated to envisioning and discussing the future of the country (or at least the next two decades). Jointly hosted by four leading German trend research institutes, the Innovation Council of the Endowment Foundation of German Sciences, the Bohnen Kallmorgen & Partners political consultancy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the initiative was launched on the occasion of the Federal Republic of Germany's 60th anniversary to enable an interdisciplinary dialogue with civil society and develop a guiding vision for Germany in the year 2030.

The hearings took place between February and April at the Federal Chancellery in Berlin and brought together academics and practitioners from a variety of sectors. On behalf of frog, I took part in a session on quality of life and welfare, and a few weeks later in a roundtable with the "Bundeskanzleramtsminister" (don't you love the German language?), the Minister of the Federal Chancellery, Thomas de Maiziere (I guess the US equivalent would be Rahm Emanuel).

The results of the hearings and workshops are documented in a book titled Deutschland's nächste Jahre - Wohin unsere Reise geht ("Germany's next years – where we're going from here") that is available now in stores and on Amazon (in German only).

The Conversation Wars

Tim Leberecht — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:32:25 -0500

Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And now the world’s hottest advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), has done it, too: the NY outfit has re-launched its corporate web site as a conversational social hub that curates what is being said about CPB rather than staging what CPB has to say. Some may scoff at this move and denigrate it as “sooooo six months ago,” but I agree with Paul Isakson when he heralds the influence of the new CPB site on the rest of the industry as potentially paradigm-shifting.

The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early adopter: CPG is the latter, no doubt, and while there’s nothing really innovative about the new site, it is nonetheless still radical relative to the vast majority of corporate web sites out there. Bringing CPB’s client portfolio to life by marrying the Kantian “You are what you do” with the Twitterian “You are what they say about you,” it certainly sets a new standard for the online presentation of creative industry brands. And – the proof is in the pudding – it accomplishes the ultimate goal of any conversational site: it is the talk of the town (or at least that of Madison Avenue).

However, as I was browsing through the plethora of content on the new (beta) CPB.com, an unsettling feeling came over me. It occurred to me that the trend of conversational corporate web sites going mainstream might trigger an unexpected, inadvertent effect. With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf.

Similar to Google’s profiting from original content on the backs of original publishers, brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of original brands’ social universe. In other words, what if Skittles faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than Skittles.com itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and XING, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web.

This scenario will hardly be a conflict that brands can legally solve, and it may therefore present a troubling blind spot in the social media ecosystem. Sure, brands can claim their corporate URLs and even their Facebook profiles (not always their Twitter feeds, as you can see exemplified by http:/twitter.com/ted – “I got it first, I win.”). Aggregators, however, operate in social web’s no man’s land, in indisputable territory.

Brand value, extremely volatile anyway, would then become completely unmanageable for the original brand owner. The very transcendence that is emblematic of powerful brands, may become their curse: brand loyalty is not so much loyalty towards a certain company; rather it is – as the name implies – loyalty towards a brand, wherever it lives and however it appears, both of which not limited to the confines of the official representation on the brand owner’s properties. It is the conundrum of successful brand builders that the bigger their brand becomes, the more likely their risk that they lose it to the social commons. Skittles and CPB have recognized that the main threat for their brands is not coming from competitors at the center of their industry but from outliers at the fringes –and they have preempted it, at least so far. My advice for all the others, the late adopters: Take action quickly and launch your own branded aggregation portals before third parties beat you to the punch!

While third-parties might try to benefit from curating branded conversations, Twitter produces the reverse trend as well: brands acting as parasites of existing third-party conversations. UK furniture retailer Habitat had to apologize for referencing the popular hashtag #iranelection in its Twitter feeds. (Over)-eager to drive eyeballs to its feed, it had committed the ultimate sin of social brands: it had stolen a collective currency that no one brand could possibly own.

Another scenario is brands initiating Twitter conversations that are essentially solipsistic. Web-site building company Moonfruit conducted a campiagn offering10 free MacBook Pros as prizes randomly awarded to Twitterers who would use the hashtag #moonfruit. The result: #moonfruit became a trending topic, attracting 400 tweets a minute, more than 10,000 times per hour, and 200,000 per day. Moonfruit’s Twitter followers rose to 23,000, and according to a Moonfruit spokesperson, visits to its site were up 600% on day two of the campaign. Some bemoan it as a "tragedy of the commons" or caution that "unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam." I'm not so worried. The different responses to Habitat's and Moonfruit's campaign show that the Twitterverse can self-regulate attention-hijacking attempts and tell the cool from the not-so-cool. Let Twitter do what Twitter can do. All is fair in the conversation wars.

[Picture credit: Werkmann]

Overloaded, Under-informed

Nick de la Mare — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:43:23 -0500

In 1893 the Newark Ohio Daily Advocate ran a series of articles predicting what the world would look like in a hundred years.

"Every person" they said, "of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual enfranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable."

Their vision for the future of media is one that we're living with today. Simply replace book with blog, Facebook, MySpace, text message or tweet, and we've clearly reached a point where the amount of media we generate has surpassed our capacity to absorb it all. We're still producing a vast number of printed books, but lamenting the death of print; while cheaper and quicker media streams continue to skyrocket. Naturally people are conflicted, many feeling overwhelmed with the shear variety and velocity of media, but also empowered; "Everybody wants to say something" is a reality and a promise.

When the article says "Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say," I see the present day. We're at an inflection point, a moment in time unlike any before, where we've assimilated the cacophony and are now forced to decide whether to forge ahead and manually process massive amounts of data for gems, or to preemptively cut out the least likely or relevant streams. The former direction is overwhelming and the latter returns us to a world not unlike the 1890s, where our ability to get the word out was governed by the limitations of time and space and the desire of people to engage with us.

Now time and place are elastic, but our interests may be less so. We need intimate communities to sustain us and reflect our values back at us, and relevant, locational information to provide us with that comfortable feeling of place and time.

So what comes after this information explosion? The assumption is that we're now entering another age where curation, down-selection and relevance become the buzzwords; a world where we have to be careful that the streams we follow don't cease to enrich us and instead create prison walls around our curiosity. The huge number of information streams before us gives the power to choose only those that are agreeable, to reinforce our culture and values at the exclusion of the new and uncomfortable. One of the nice things about standing under a waterfall of information is that you are forced to engage with viewpoints and perspectives you wouldn't have chosen on your own.

The paradox is clear: the danger in choice is that we choose too narrowly.

_{(This article also appeared in Creativity-Online's OnDesign)}

Get Social Now!

Tim Leberecht — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 08:57:54 -0500

Several blog posts this week, combined, pinpoint what are arguably the two most influential trajectories for the impact of communication technologies on business these days: from real-time web to real-time business, and from social media to social business design.

Let’s start with the former. Referring to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his presentation at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco last week, DigitalBeat claims that the real-time web is not only shaping the future of all computing but also that of business overall: “In business it’s real-time or it’s no time.” It goes on by quoting Benioff: “Customers (…) expect everything to happen right away— if they update their data, they expect those changes to appear immediately, not an hour or two in the future. (…) Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. (…) Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.”

Sure, you may say, customers always want it faster and cheaper, that’s not news. But the implications Benioff talks about are more profound and affect the way organizations operate and adapt their business models to the new and ever-changing demands of immediacy. Some examples: Zara, the Spanish clothing chain, uses customer feedback to develop new clothes, in near real-time. TCHO, the San Francisco-based chocolatier, relies on continuous flavor development and customer feedback to drive constantly evolving versions of its dark chocolate, with variations emerging as often as every 36 hours. Status updates, embedded news feeds, and Twitter apps have injected some “real-time-ism” into professional online social networks such as LinkedIn and XING, converting them from address books to conversational circles, from networking forums to collaboration platforms. Zappos, the online retailer, successfully combines real-time customer service on Twitter with near-real-time delivery – having established a powerful, dynamic brand before letting its customers decide what business it was actually in. And Skittles, the candy brand, ingeniously replaced its corporate homepage with the 'Interweb,' a collage of real-time social web conversations not by but about Skittles – essentially recreating itself as the first ever real-time brand. All these models show that the news industry’s big conundrum applies to every other business, too: It used to be that there’s nothing more boring that yesterday’s newspaper. Now there’s nothing more boring than today’s. When you relaunch your business model, product, brand identity, web site – it’s already too late. Real-time beats planning to the punch.

Real-time businesses therefore must get rid of long-term strategy plans, product road maps, goals and objectives, and all the other superfluous documents that distract organizations from focusing on their true mission – the here and now. Most of these documents are inward anyway and can be easily replaced with one strong and permanent mission statement (which, if your company culture is intact, does not even need to be verbalized).

Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social. The more businesses open up their organizations and invite external voices into their inner sanctum, the more real-time they will become. Getting social will help companies gather customer intelligence in real-time and use it to move faster. In the future, real-time businesses may deliver before their customers even articulate their needs. And they will provide immediate value without immediate return, in other words they will over-deliver – free for now but with a material or immaterial return later. What is the inadvertent business model for media might be a fulcrum for companies that manage to achieve a brand premium through customer participation as a part of real-time product development: “building a plane in the air,” together with their customers.

"The process is the product,” as Trendwatching writes in its latest report, in which it also claims that the real-time the web is breeding a new quest for longevity or “Foreverism”: “the new popularity of technology that allows consumers to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.” It’s not as paradoxical as it may sound. Living real-time means living in the ongoing – forever. If everything happens in real-time, nothing is ever final and always in permanent beta. Conversely, if everything lasts forever on the Google web (your emails, networks, conversations) and your digital presence is only as good as your latest search results and Twitter updates, you better utter some digital impressions NOW.

And yet, what’s required is a shift in thinking and ultimately a new organizational model that goes beyond feeding the social media beast on the real-time web: “If the big picture is business transformation, it's going to take more than a few tweets to get there,” David Armano writes in his post on ‘social business design,’ and argues that ““Social Businesses are those which are designed from top to bottom as a reflection of the world we all live in online today. A business where everyone is connected and able to contribute but also where the right tools are available to them to do all of this with business intent from the beginning.”

For centuries, organizations have considered it their task to conquer chaos and manage people, now they have to embrace the sudden chaos instigated by unmanageable throngs of instantly and elegantly self-organized individuals. Whether that will lead to the end of organizations remains to be seen; it will definitely lead to the end of organizations as we know them.