Apr

15

Looking Back on the Future

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Pity the poor consultant! What happens when the list of changes you have predicted for the next decade largely take place inside a fortnight? I heard Richard Susskind (NetLaw Media. 14 April) describe this dilemma this week as he indicated progress towards taking UK courts of law online, and the way it has suddenly accelerated. I had lived comfortably with a matrix of predictions that I thought would not expire within my working, or indeed temporal, life. Now I feel like a player – who had not anticipated the possibility – suddenly being called upon to play Extra Time!

None of us can doubt that the Covid 19 pandemic is accelerating change. Netflix has doubled its subscriptions and overtaken Disney. Zoom has moved from 10 million participants a day to 200 million. It is easy to say that habits acquired in an emergency will never be lost, and that the wider exposure of business and professional workers to the tools of automated workflow will create value and save time and money in ways that will never be subsequently reversed. But what does that look like in lay terms? Here is an excerpt from a real estate agent’s report (Knight Frank and Rutley) on what is happening in lockdown to UK planning/ zoning enquiries:

“Looking to the future, we may subsequently see councils and planning agents using technology in a more sophisticated way.

Local authorities were already poised to benefit eventually from the roll out of virtual reality development tours and the use of drones.

Already, technical engineers are sending out drones to do surveys and site visits. The ability to do this was available before the virus, but it is becoming more prevalent, particularly now that being on site is not possible currently.

There was also a lot of work being done to create virtual reality models rather than relying on two dimensional drawings for planning decision making. While it was not ready to be rolled out, now that councils have experienced adopting new technology, plans like this could be accelerated.

Currently, a lot of planning meetings focus on 2D drawings of new developments but in the future, they will have access to 3D visualisations that allow officials and interested parties to explore schemes from all sorts of different perspectives. This would have a significant impact on the planning process, particularly for public engagement. It would allow planners to reach a much broader audience …” 

So here we see a group of workflow technologies, already in use but not widely penetrated, suddenly becoming the only way in which the work can be accomplished. And the realisation that this releases additional value to the process (3D instead of 2D) means that it becomes very hard to go back. 

A similar story can be told around the automation of the judicial system in the UK. Professor Richard Susskind, the UK’s resident expert on the the future of law, (his latest book is “Online Courts and the Future of Justice”) digs deep into the issues behind the move to online judicial systems. If the courts are a service, rather than an institution, then they need to be accessible and efficient. The backlogs of India (30 million cases) and Brazil (100 million) are the opposite. Last week 80% of the business done in British courts suddenly went virtual, either as “paper” hearings merely exchanging and agreeing documents, or as oral hearings, or, most successfully, as video sessions. Suddenly access to the courts is transformed. And while new inequalities come to light  in terms of the technical abilities of lawyers and clients, Richard’s persuasive vision of the lawyer emerging as a knowledge engineer fits the pattern in other spheres of professional life as we move to a data intensive society using intelligent decision support tools. 

Something like this is happening in every sector of business society. This does not mean that there will not be reaction. Just this week, as Cambridge University Press announced that it was ceasing to produce in print its academic journals – “for the duration”- some conservative commentators were saying that some librarians will always want print. This is very true. But their numbers decline every year, new journals are created all the time that have never seen print, and while conservation and curation remain issues, they are not the issues which will make change falter. 

So really the advisory task before us is much simpler than envisaging change beyond the bounds of current predictions. It will be much more useful to look hard at the forced change of the here and now, then imagine those changes factored into the circumstances of a post-pandemic world trying to recover from an economic recession. We need to do it job by job, workflow by workflow, sector by sector until we really understand the accelerated networked society being formulated in the ashes of the “real” world which we have been forced to relinquish. The task now is not to try to predict change, but to get our heads into a place where we can look back and envisage a society that has changed. Only then will be be able to see the gaps and discontinuities, the commercial and social opportunities, which will drive the information marketplaces of tomorrow. 

Mar

23

Audiences, Community and Online Events

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“You can write about Online Events all you like”, said my friendly but critical Events industry client, over a decade ago. “But nothing will change in the slightest while margins for real events are where they are”. And he was quite right. I went on writing and very little did change (perhaps not so unusual!). Every now and then an online seminar or lead-in presentation was added. Or some one made a speech about the digital future of events. I made one in Seoul some years ago to a Ufi. (the trade body of the events industry) annual convention. Every one was very polite afterwards. All of them emphasised that tracking future developments was important to them. However, like St Augustine’s prayer on celibacy they wanted to reach that glorious future – “but not yet, Oh Lord.” 

The present pandemic, many very knowledgeable people tell me, may shake us free of this complacency. Certainly that was the view at an excellent seminar last week run by Zapnito. There Susanna Kempe, with her huge experience in the UK at events marketing, was at pains to point out that we should be clear about the functions of events and about the way in which they were experienced. Taking a more forensic approach to the motivations of people attending real events is probably needed in my view to get behind the misleading fog created by tick box satisfaction surveys and into the driving requirement that makes people come to the same city year after year, often to see the same people. The Zapnito founders, Charles Thiede and Jon Beer, together with Susanna and Maggie McGary, debated the differences between audience and community in a way which seems to me vital to the way in which we approach the next stages. The seminar is here: https://the100-live.zapnito.com/users/1-jon-beer/videos/63724-zapnito-advisor-webinar-recording. You can also check out the dummy online event modelling they have been doing.

But let’s think a moment about that distinction. Getting an audience of unrelated people to an event is of course very different to assembling a community of precisely aligned interests. A competitive community (publishers) is different again from a supply chain (author/publisher/delivery and storage technology/ librarian/reader). But after 52 consecutive trips to the Frankfurt Book Fair (until my knees understandably gave out) I noted that purpose and function had shifted radically. The Fair as the only place where you could negotiate rights and translation contracts gave way to the place where you signed what had been negotiated online and eventually to the place where you orchestrated P.R and made new contacts. If the Börsenverein and the Frankfurt Messe were to create a 24/7, 365 day a year online dealing room with seminars, training, translation, book able video rooms, secure transactions and document exchange – and I  am amongst many who wonder why they have never done this – it would still not prevent hordes of publishers arriving to greet each other every October and making it impossible to get a drink in the bar of the Hessicher Hof Hotel. But less would come from each company, it would all get very much more focussed, and of course very much cheaper. 

Zapnito is very much about proliferating the tools that enable community inter-action. This is vital at the present time, and communities of interest (those who have a financial or intellectual reason for wanting or needing to share the same virtual space) are very much the easy target. Audience is harder, but the major film companies and their distributors will come back with evidence as soon as they start, as they now plan, to release films for online streaming premiere whilst cinemas are not available. The launch of a new car does not rely only on the Geneva Motor Show, but is already a multiple media event, and will soon be driven and organised around its virtual positioning. 

And there will be advantages too. Ever been to an event carrying with you a list of people you wanted to meet? The apologies of the assistant with the stand diary.? “I told him you would be here at three but he’s not back from lunch.” Now, if mutually agreeable, you can have a video appointment in a virtual meeting room, or a group discussion. You will always have the right documents whatever turn the discussion takes. And the community network application can bring you news, research, job changes and promotions, jobs classifieds, results, rankings and valuations. Working within the community application will have real efficiency gains. Ufi estimate the economic impact of closing the worlds trade fairs as follows:

Related to the exhibition industry, €81.6 billion (USD 88.2 billion) of total economic output will not be generated by the end of Q2. Broken down into regions, the respective total economic impact that will not be generated is:

Sounds as if getting those digital alternatives in place has moved sharply up the priority list!

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