The beginning of the end of Serendipity

Almost everyone has experienced serendipity at some point in their lives. As a culture we have attached a romantic connotation to it, as evidenced by the romantic comedy of the same name. So it is with no great satisfaction that I suggest that we have now reached the beginning of the end of serendipity.

According to Wikipedia Serendipity means:

a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it.

Consider for a moment the following scenario. I am working late in my office with a colleague, planning for an upcoming project. We are discussing possible candidates for one of the critical technical roles. At just that moment the perfect candidate, a colleague that neither of us knows directly, walks by on their way out of the building. Miraculously, my iPad notifies me just-in-time for me to jump out of my chair and chase them down.

How did this happen?

No, it was not one of the happy accidents of The Three Princes of Serendip.

The convergence of four emerging technologies, including; social, local, mobile, big data (analytics), enabled by the cloud, is rapidly changing the information landscape. As I suggested in my earlier posting, Too Much Buzz?, it may soon be the case that all that is known can be easily accessed on demand by anyone, anywhere, at any time – for free.

In fact, it was a context engine that allowed me to capitalize on the fortuitous arrival of the perfect candidate. It knows about me and my needs - my location, the project that I am working on and the roles that I need to fill. It also knows possible ways to meet my needs, including my network of colleagues and their network of connections, the skills and expertise of this extended network, and their real-time location.

All of this information is currently available or will be in the near future. Social platforms, such as Google+ or LinkedIn provide information about skills, networks and projects. Local and mobile tools, such as foursquare or Google Latitude on a smartphone, can provide real-time location information. A software agent could use big data capabilities to leverage this information and establish the context needed to alert me to act at just the right time.

Yesterday's announcement by Google of Search, plus Your World is a big step in this direction.

Before you bemoan the end of serendipity, consider the number of times when events failed to conspire to create a "happy accident" and you were left wanting.

Let me know what you think. I can't wait for a few pleasant surprises.

The context engine

I recently read a terrific book about translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, that has inspired me to think about social business collaboration (SBC) in a new way. Amongst the wide range of topics covered by the author, David Bellos, is the relationship of words, context and meaning. He states something that we often take for granted "… For translation, and for us all, meaning is context." David goes on to say:

"The expression "One double macchiato to go" – an expression I utter most days, around 8 a.m. – means what it means when uttered in a coffee shop by a customer to a barista. The situation (the coffee shop) and the participants (customer and barista) are indispensable, inseparable parts of the meaning of the utterance. Imagine saying the same thing at 2 a.m., in bed, to your partner. … The words would be the same, but the meaning of their being said would be entirely different."

I believe that it is possible to relate David's assertion on the relationship of context and meaning to the world of information technology and social business collaboration with my own assertion that context is the bridge between data and information.

In my blog posting, Too Much Buzz?, I referred to a piece on Social Media that appeared in The Economist on December 31, 2011. They concluded the article with the following:

"As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz."

There has been talk of late of the convergence of three separate but related emerging technologies – Social, Local and Mobile (SoLoMo). It is my contention that a fourth component, Big Data, will join with the other three to form "SoLoMoDat". By combining contextual information, such as who, what, where, when, why and how, SoLoMoDat will provide the basis for a context engine that will enable us to easily "…extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz".

We are already seeing commercial examples of this type of capability. Consider the value generated by intelligent recommendations made by services such as Pandora, Netflix, Amazon, Google Translate and Eureqa. If the context engine knows all about me – my skills, my interests, my projects, and my network of colleagues (and their skills etc.) then how far away is the capability to consider context when generating a social business activity stream that is meaningful to me?

For example, if I have the task of planning a project to solve a particular customer's business problem, then wouldn't a context engine be able to recommend the people to reach out to that have solved this problem before? My stream would become much more relevant and collaboration would become more agile and effective.

This may sound like fantasy, but I think that given the accelerating rate of technological advancement we will be working with these types of tools in a few short years if not months.

The real question is not the technology, it is the human element. Are you ready to do things differently?