Out-of-the-box

Calibrating the future

As a futurologist, I have always been intrigued by the ways in which we, as humans, can accommodate change. Usually at futuristic conventions, the real conversations and insights are around people where, like Shakespeare’s work, the human condition endures. A favourite adage on this – that we overestimate technology over two years but underestimate it over 10 years – is remarkably prescient. The latest gizmo usually fails to deliver but the unrelenting shaping of our lives with technology continues unabated. In 2004, Apple’s iPod was reaching its zenith with the classic model yet now a decade later the line has been dropped from Apple. At the same time, the iPAQ (PocketPC_Compaq_iPAQ_3630) was the best handheld device and is still available now.

It seems fitting therefore to use as the skeleton for this Out-of-the-Box article my work with Sandra Ward: work which began when we were both in mid-career at Glaxo R&D in the early 1990s some 25 years ago. Twenty-five years has a special significance in change, it is fabled through the work of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift. In political terms, 25 years in the anniversary of the unification of Germany and in technology the Web is just over 25 years. The technological buzz at work was the introduction of DEC Alpha, Windows 386 and primitive PC networking. The Web had been introduced through the report ¹ on information management from Tim Berners-Lee to his boss, although we had another five years to wait before the first implementations of a mosaic ² front end.

Twenty-five years is another important metric in innovation. It is as Kuhn ³ points out in the paradigm shift the time required for the established classes, or the old fogies, to die off! A more kindly explanation involves the opportunity to learn and the time for any new technology to become commonplace. Today the tick of the technology clock is very much faster and we are constrained by our learning and how new experience can replace or complement old experience.

A short family history

Sandra has always worked on the information science (IS) side of the house and I have always worked in information technology (IT). At Glaxo, I first encountered the marriage, forced or otherwise, between the two information disciplines. I might add that the marriage can be variously very positive and progressive as I found at Glaxo or critical and dismissive as I found elsewhere. But my purpose here is not to praise Sandra (unduly) but to use her history to mirror that of our professional discipline.

The crossovers between IT and IS then and now continue to interweave the future. Although as information siblings the rivalry remains intense, challenges across the relationship were for IS to catch up and for IT to understand information better. The recent history of this relationship has been embedded in the management waves of new pseudo disciplines such as knowledge management or document management. It is too easy to forget the emergence of the company intranet or the mass adoption of email with Microsoft Exchange but presented to the board as knowledge management [and remember the shared folders introduced by IT…and the mess we got into].

My first article produced for Sandra was on the natural variability in scientific research – as a response to the much discussed failure of pharmaceutical R&D. As a technologist, I took a social viewpoint – about how the equipment [once hand built] was becoming standardized, about how once loyal employees were hopping between teams and organizations and about how the once hand-picked literature had been replaced by the blanketing of electronic information. Together these elements homogenized and equalized the research teams – little wonder perhaps then that pharmaceutical innovation has been so disappointing in the past 25 years.

At the same time, Sandra, as a pioneer in information use, was interested in a common interface for information retrieval and how the different learning curves between different literature sources and internal information could be simplified and harmonized. If this seems strange to remember, this was before the Web browser, yet remarkably what she was asking for was a full specification of the Web.

The long view

There is much more that has changed in recent years, and it is only through the benefit of hindsight that the pattern and progress of change becomes apparent. My formative education in technology came from an executive programme [Vanguard then owned by CSC and now as an independent venture]. The experience was designed to be excited by new technologies in the day and share experiences and philosophy in the social events. Some 25 years later, it is the stories and experience that persist in my memory with the technology lost and gone.

Nostalgia is almost always in fashion and in writing this I am listening to material on the First World War. My parents were born during the war and their parents fought in it. It is an experience seemingly distant but in reality very close. At Vanguard, one of the faculty, John Perry Barlow, talked about his mother living in Wyoming with oil lamps. My own mother never really understood my lifestyle with my monthly trips to the US as commonplace as her charabanc trips to Blackpool.

In society there has been the shift in our attitude towards the aged and experienced, we have diminished the role of the matriarch as the head of the extended family and in many cases exported the nurture of the aged to the state. In work, the value of experience too has been diminished, sometimes for good reasons – the ascendancy and significance of the hierarchy determined by seniority carried risks as well as benefits.

In some of my pieces for Out of the Box, I have argued for the reintroduction of skills that were pivotal through Sandra’s career but seem to be forgotten now. My most recent piece was on the need for simple, good records management in big data. ⁴ How then can these good disciplines be introduced when the generation of people familiar with them are lost to the workplace? It echoes the well-used quotation ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. The profession has many Sandras and we should ask whether the beacons are being carried forward for the new challenges coming from the new technologies.

Sadly both IT and IS have been subject to a false economy at work where overheads are cut in the quest for profit over value. BP had until the mid-1990s a fabled archive of correspondence in which a central registry filed reports of every external meeting. It was a requirement made on the employees and a discipline managed by the archivists. By 2000, I was involved in a discussion within BP where they asked how many communities of practice could they sustain, especially as the IT outsourcing contract demanded the cost base of 75p per megabyte (MB) of data stored. By 2010, BP was facing the oil spill in the Gulf. Clearly, records management alone could not have prevented the Gulf of Mexico spill, but the offhand remarks which started with the chairman and present in the untrammelled chaos that is their email archive could only damage their case in the cycles of litigation. I cannot but imagine their legal team only wishing there was a full and managed record of every such meeting. The economic argument for 75p per MB masked and allowed the shift away from good discipline and good records management, that is, technology here did the business no favours!

Lasting principles

As we look forward to our increasingly digital and data futures we are in need a new adage. Garbage in, garbage out is an oft-repeated warning – where poor quality control wastes the time of the analyst. Today data governance is working at a higher level and erroneous conclusions, which are increasingly coming from poor governance and provenance, waste the resources of a wider group of people, not just those involved in data preparation. The political firmament is increasingly using information arguments to justify its policies, yet the data and its conclusions seem to become wider and wider apart. Indeed we are close to a tipping point of malevolent ‘trending’ in which false information floods the Internet ways. The social models of panic induced by Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of HG Well’s War of the Worlds remain with us; it is just the technology that has changed.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Big Data – circa 1950.

I write this having just reviewed a specification for ‘big data’ in health care. It specifies a ‘data air-lock’, which is designed to prevent the unmanaged distribution and copying of key data sets. What is surprising is not the need for the feature but the terms in which the need is expressed. Clearly this comes from a technologist in the process of reinventing the world and work of the information scientist some 25 years after the time when IS groups were the only group in the enterprise that managed records.

25 Wasted years?

As an undergraduate, I had one term of lectures from Professor Charles Coulson (1910–1974), a pre-eminent theoretical chemist notable for an undergraduate textbook, Valence, and an early research career, focused on solving the atomic orbital of the hydrogen molecule. Putting the details aside, his calculations could now be done on your mobile phone in milliseconds; I recall a story about the need for good experimental methods. He showed a picture of his calculating machine, a room full of people with hand calculators, and his experimental design, a flowchart in which calculation results were passed as written numbers between people for different operations. Some six months into the calculation, that is, six months worth of 50 or so people, he and his co-investigator determined that they would not know if their result could be trusted or whether it would include errors. They abandoned the project and wasted some 25 person years.

Information productivity – from famine to feast

In our modern society we are passing the tipping point from information scarcity to data abundance. We are close to a new era of disposable information in which very great tranches of effort are wasted or nullified because the provenance and process of the work is not understood or managed. Where machines deliver this futile effort it does not matter; where humans do it as entertainment the waste is benign, but in our organized and scholastic lives it becomes a tragedy. There are many shared stories in this column and in our shared professional lives where we can illustrate the value of experience, and experience which I hope resonates across the professional lives of our readers. In the present cascade of information, the disciplines of IS and information management are more essential than ever! Sadly it’s a battle that we all still need to fight!

I close then by thanking Sandra and Val for appreciating my thinking and the opportunity to develop my ideas in this column. Looking forward, I hope the new editors will bring different experiences but equal depth and foresight. I hope also that my role here – looking backwards to see forwards will continue to inspire.