Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Thinking about ways to expand and improve the Society

The ISA (International Society of Automation) is facing a challenging time.  As I prepare to attend the Fall Leaders’ Meeting and ISA Expo in a few days, I know that major cuts and dramatic changes are in store.  Depending upon how you look at it, I am personally either blessed or cursed not be part of the most important and far reaching decisions that will be inevitably be announced in the coming weeks. I understand that many of these changes are necessary due to shortfalls in revenue resulting from the same economic conditions facing everyone.  However, I want to put forth a few ideas that will no doubt sound crazy to some and may even brand me as a “heretic.”  Incidentally, I would take that as a compliment and if you’re curious as to why, you should watch this Seth Godin video.  The ideas are too lengthy to include a single post, so I present them in summary here and will link them to sub-articles, where more detail is provided for those who are interested.

Sell Scarcity, Give Away Abundance

Many thanks to Jim Pinto for bringing this into focus for me with his recent InTech article, “Sell scarcities, not abundance.” I’ve taken the liberty of expanding on his thesis by leveraging the concepts of “freeconomics.” I am intrigued by the possibility of making ISA membership free. Yes, I said it – free.

I go into more detail in “Sell Scarcity, Give Away Abundance”

Build a free army equipped with web 2.0 tools

Build an Army Using the Long Tail

Making membership free will not, in and of itself, build an effective army. First, they must be recruited. This is where the long tail comes into play. Next, they must be equipped with the latest technology, afforded competent and inspiring leaders, and trained in effective tactics. The “Long Tail” is a phrase attributed to Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, who wrote an article in 2004 about “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” Engineers and economists would already be familiar with the numerical component of this phenomenon, known as the power law distribution curve or more colloquially the “80/20” rule. I think the current strategies are more focused on maintaining the 20% than pulling in the other 80%. Once free membership and the long tail begin filling the membership hopper, the next step is to “arm” them with the latest web 2.0 technologies.

I go into more detail in “Build an Army Using the Long Tail”

Switch from Filter/Distribute to Distribute/Filter

Content is the fuel for this new paradigm’s engine. A wide variety of interesting, thought provoking, authoritative, and even mundane content will increase member engagement and improve search engine results, driving more and more web search results to ISA. However, under the current publication infrastructure this is difficult if not impossible to realize. That’s because the current approach is to filter, then publish. The alternative is to distribute, then filter. In other words, the long tail of the membership should be enabled to become content providers.

I go into more detail in “Members as Content Providers”

Be Respectful in Our Marketing

Let’s talk about email. This has been a controversial subject for many years and for several reasons. The mistake here is that ISA has been wrestling with the best way to interrupt people, sort of like looking for the friendliest way to insult somebody. The solution is, once again, permission-based or opt-in marketing.

I go into more detail in “Be Respectful in Our Marketing”

The Elephant in the Room

This may sound like implementing these ideas requires the current web site to be blown up and rebuilt from scratch, which will cost a fortune. Yes and no. The current framework will not support these tools and tactics for a reasonable cost. However, the revolution in open source web content management systems (CMS) allows the rapid development of extremely powerful web sites by non-professionals for zero or little licensing cost. These CMS have enormous commercial third party add on markets that provide extensibility for very low cost – we’re talking less than $10k.

There is no getting around the fact that it would be a time consuming task to migrate all of the existing content to a new platform. However, it can be done by any mildly computer savvy user after about an hour’s worth of training. The job could be outsourced to the membership in large part and I am willing to bet the call to arms would be well received.

Don’t Panic!

These thoughts are meant to provide food for thought, not necessarily a road map. It is a momentary cross over from the way it was to the way it could be. The way it is unsustainable. Applying a tourniquet may stop the bleeding, but that is not a solution. I believe that ISA can not only survive but thrive if we can recognize and embrace the trends that will define how professional institutions organize their members for the next fifty years.

My hope is to provoke conversations that lead to innovation and positive change.  To that end, please use the comments section below and provide your thoughts.  As Linda Richman on Saturday Night Live’s “Coffee Talk” skit would say, “I’ve given you a topic. Talk amongst yourselves.”

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Note: This post is part 1 of 4 in a series of posts. The parent article is “ISA: One Member’s Vision.”

Many thanks to Jim Pinto for bringing this into focus for me with his recent InTech article, “Sell scarcities, not abundance.” I’ve taken the liberty of expanding on his thesis by leveraging the concepts of “freeconomics.” I am intrigued by the possibility of making ISA membership free. Yes, I said it – free. In 1945, it was extremely difficult to network with engineers 500 miles away, let alone 3,000. And it was costly for an organization to facilitate those networks. It made sense to charge members for that service and it was valuable enough for people to pay for it. It is based on a model that assumes that people could not simply self-assemble. Now they can. The transactions costs associated with facilitating conversations and sharing information have become “too cheap to meter.” They are, for all intents and purposes, free. ISA needs to recognize that it does not provide value by either organizing or facilitating those networks. They will organize themselves with or without our help (by the way, they already have begun). Stating the obvious, it would be better for us if it is “with.”

Obviously, the business model must change in order to accommodate this. It seems to me that it is currently backwards; scarcities like standards are free, while abundances like information and advertising are not.

Scarcities

• Industry standards
• Certification
• Peer recognition

Abundances

• Information
• Networking
• Advertising space

What if there were multiple membership levels or, in other words, a “freemium” model? Basic ISA membership is free, which provides access to the abundant resources of the new web site (to be discussed later), web seminars, technical library, mentoring, networking opportunities, and (perhaps) discounted fees for events, books, standards, etc… Premium membership may look more like the current model and its list of member benefits including “x” number of free standards. Membership in Divisions and Sections should always be free and unlimited. Proximity is no longer a prerequisite for participation and contribution.

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Making membership free will not, in and of itself, build an effective army. First, they must be recruited. This is where the long tail comes into play. Next, they must be equipped with the latest technology, afforded competent and inspiring leaders, and trained in effective tactics.

Recruitment

The “Long Tail” is a phrase attributed to Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, who wrote an article in 2004 about “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” Engineers and economists would already be familiar with the numerical component of this phenomenon, known as the power law distribution curve or more colloquially the “80/20” rule. The transaction costs historically associated with institutions’ ability to organize people required that the focus scarce resources (people and money) on the top 20% of people who would contribute 80% of the work, value, donations, revenue, content, etc…

I think the current strategies are more focused on maintaining the 20% than pulling in the other 80%. It can be done now, because (assuming a freemium model) the transaction costs to the organization and barriers to entry for the members is essentially nil. One example (though certainly not the only) is the reluctance to embrace strategies that rely exclusively on Internet-based technologies. The reasoning is that not all members have broadband access or are active enough, which may or may not be true (show me the numbers). But the point is that it doesn’t matter. I submit that losing a few thousand members in order to gain a hundred thousand is a good trade. Sometimes you need to fire your customer and go find better ones.

The benefits to a long tail may be self evident to anyone reading this, but in case they are not I will provide two anecdotes. The first is taken from Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” which is, incidentally, the most profound book you can read on the subject of the “power of organizing without organizations.” Shirky discusses the fundamental misunderstand of open source software by Microsoft. They long fought against the concept of open source, calling it a myth that it was developed by thousands of programmers because only a few hundred contributed more than a few lines of code. He goes on to say, “It’s easy to see, from McGrath’s [Microsoft U.K. executive] point of view, why the open source model is the wrong way to design an operating system: when you hire programmers, they drain your resources through everything from salary to health care to free Cokes in the break room.” Microsoft simply can’t afford to pay a programmer’s entire annual salary for a mere two dozen lines of code. But what if that code fixed a buffer overflow vulnerability that put millions of computers at risk? Borrowing from the cheesy world of informercials, now how much would you pay? The point here is that when the transaction costs of organizing are free, so are the failures. You can afford the hundreds or thousands of failures in exchange for one game-changing success.

The second anecdote is simply an interesting description of Amazon.com’s business model. As one employee described it, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” That one takes a few moments to digest, but it’s the quintessential differentiator between atoms and bits, scarcity and abundance, costly and free.

Equipment

Once free membership and the long tail begin filling the membership hopper, the next step is to “arm” them with the latest technology. Much like the weaponry for a particular soldier is dependent on his or her mission, so to must our tool sets match the mission.

• Listening – Our members must have state of the art tools for listening to ISA activity in their preferred communication channels. These may include any combination of RSS, email, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc… And by the way, these will change from year to year.
• Sharing – When members have news to share or interesting ideas, there need to be easy and efficient ways to share that information. Again, there is no single tool or technology but ISA must be connected with all of the common platforms. Automated social media channels could be set up to mash up mentions on various networks.
• Collaborating – Every Department, Division, and standards committee must have its own shared workspace for effective collaboration. This could be done today for free using sites like Ning. They are currently being assembled ad-hoc, which is obviously inefficient and alienates ISA from the process.
• Publishing – In order to leverage the contributions of the long tail, members must have a platform to easily publish their work, accomplishments, opinions, and (perhaps) open letters to ISA leaders. There are a multitude of technologies available to do this in extremely interesting and profound ways. One of the simpler tools is simply to enable a blogging platform where all members get to publish themselves in a common area, perhaps by subject area. This is not unlike traditional user forums with a few exceptions. Blogs allow complex content and multimedia (images, video, and presentations), they are more easily indexed by search engines, and they are an easier platform to monitor.

Leadership

It is important not to look at the membership as one big mob, but as a collection of interconnected networks. Member Sally may be a cybersecurity expert in HMI systems and wireless communication with zero interest in the finer points of flow measurement and calibration, while Sam may be a pump designer who does care about flow, while Dan is VP of marketing for a large automation distributor and needs to a little bit about everything. With the proper tools in place as already described, these small networks will organize themselves and the leaders will naturally rise to the challenge. ISA’s job will transition out of the planning and organization business and into the coordination business. It will be important to provide these leaders with the tools, support, and motivation to succeed at leading their respective tribes.

Tactics

Some members will be right at home in this new paradigm (they will be the first generation of leaders). Others will need some training, best practices, guidelines, tips, and hacks. The better ISA can train the leaders in effective tactics, the more value the members will be able to provide. It’s not unlike training office staff in using Word and Excel.

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