Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out

Ok, the way he puts it is

Part 5: Platforms for Innovation

This is a very important, key concept.
In fact, let me say it again, with colour and size:

This is a very important, key concept.

This is absolutely foundational, in fact, to understand a lot of the issues that I talk about.

The core is as simple as simple can be: you get more from sharing than from secrecy.
But you have to understand the context of "secrecy".  In many cases, anything that is not published on the public Internet, might as well be in a locked box on a high shelf.  In fact, you might as well print it out, send it to the new Library of Alexandria, and burn down the new library.

The benefits of sharing are so enormous, and the extra overhead so tiny, that I have never quite understood why people don't post more information publically on the net.  My thinking has always been "if I do this for myself, maybe there is someone else out there it might be useful for".  Considering that a page I did for myself as a firewall sysadmin gets over a million hits per year, it appears this concept is valid.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, as reported (in passing) in The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester, they turned classification inside out.  Instead of saying "prove this should be declassified", they said "prove this should be secret".  That led to the author of the book getting a map of China that, I suspect, he would no longer be able to get today.

This is the challenge for your organization.  Don't ask yourself "what's the justification for sharing this information on the net".  Ask "can anyone strongly justify NOT sharing this on the net".

I see the most ridiculous stuff go on.  Librarians (and many others) take written notes at conferences, then labouriously transcribe them to a written report, which is then emailed to like two other people and immediately forgotten/lost.

People don't have crystal balls to see within your organization or within your mind.  If you don't share your information, you might as well be invisible.  How's that for a slogan?  "Share transparently or be Internet invisible".  Additionally, these are not the days of late-1994, early-1995 when I first put up a website.  Then an interesting effort was highly visible, because there were so few pages.

There are now billions of pages.  The good news is, you can still rise out of those "foothills".  The bad news is, if you have a search surface, an acreage (hectarage?) if you will, that is tiny, you have very little chance of being noticed.  If your land isn't continually being expanded and improved, in fact, it will probably get little (search engine) notice.  So here's another concept: "Sharing increases your search surface".  In security, we talk about making your "attack surface" or "vulnerability surface" as small as possible.  Internet presence is the opposite: you want to make your Internet surface as big as possible.

I know this is true, because my website and my blog bring me incredible contacts and opportunities that I could never have imagined, despite the fact that both Internet surfaces are often little more than "stuff that I wanted to research and think about anyway, which I'm sharing because there's no reason not to, and someone else may have similar interests".

Anyway, this posting has grown very long, but that is because it is of such critical importance.  Think beyond container to content.  Think beyond content to sharing content.  That is where everything is going to be happening.  That is going to be the new expectation.  If you've seen the controversy in Toronto and Ottawa about private municipal contracts and secret city meetings, that thinking is mired in the past.  Citizens, young and old, are going to be demanding the end to ridiculous, needless secrecy, from their governments and from all other organizations that they deal with.

So what is library Service-Oriented Architecture about?  It is about no more (and no less) than helping libraries collectively to build an open, shared platform, that enables sharing of containers (e.g. books) as well as sharing of content (e.g. articles).

Here's how Tapscott puts it

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call "platforms for innovation."

Because I am a prideful creature, I must say I wrote this entire posting after having read only the first few sentences of Tapscott's article today, it is therefore heartening synchronicity to read

Jeff Barr, who runs Amazon's Web services program says developers and marketplace sellers are "increasing the surface area of Amazon." They add more and more things to sell, in more and more places on the Web. All of this happens in a completely self-organizing fashion, which makes Amazon's already low overhead even lower.

So let's wrap it up with a final combination: library SOA will increase the Internet surface of all participating libraries.