Which facets of the Era of Trust Networks can we research for you?

GISTICS pursues an open inquiry across a broad range of topics related to the Era of Trust Networks, applying open-systems research to the subjects listed below. We invite you to engage us in an open-end investigation with any of the thought-starter topics below or any that you consider strategic and aligned with our mission and approach.

Intangible assets now account for more than half of total market capitalization of all public firms. Brands and intellectual property constitute a large portion of the value for these intangible assets, as do leadership, innovation, and information technology. Yet we have no generally accepted practice for measuring material changes in the relative value of these intangible assets. Big problem. Big opportunity.

A deeper, more obscure issue related to the performance of intangible assets entails our very idea of knowledge. Many people believe (mistakenly, we assert) that knowledge consists of objects and artifacts. We suspect that useful knowledge may not yet exist in an objective form. John Sealy Brown in his very insightful book, The Social Life of Information, makes the case that the most useful knowledge lives in a social network, a community of practice. If indeed social networks create new knowledge, what’s your strategy for network knowledge creation?

This brings us to the nature of knowledge work—a subject pioneered by Peter Drucker. The Web and Internet brought us many surprises and discoveries, including the self-evident fact that every customer who goes online and interacts with a producer or reseller firm constitutes a special class of knowledge workers. Customers access portals, interact with various digital services, and integrate their workflows and business processes to ours. We continue to build the equivalent of “horseless carriages” called Web-enabled services; we embed some very outdated concepts of usability. Rather than focusing on usability, we should instead focus on customer end-user productivity. This entails the application of an explicit model for knowledge work and knowledge worker productivity to the desired and expected outputs that our customers call satisfaction. Do you have a general, applicable theory of knowledge work and knowledge worker productivity? Can you apply this theory to the desired and expected satisfactions of interactive customer relationships? If not, we can help.

Metadata describes other data. Just as the label on a package of food describes the contents of the food and its nutritional values, metadata describes the information-knowledge values of a photo, video, Web page, or document. Metadata enables the search function of Websites to retrieve relevant and timely materials. Metadata supports the personalization of Web pages and related rich-media content to the preferences of individual users. Metadata informs search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Ask which ad keywords to serve billions of users per day. Metadata catalogs the subject matter, rights, permissions, and publishing rules within a single media asset or digital asset. Metadata describes database schemas, IT service management policies, and configurations, settings, and cross-dependencies of all IT resources within a global IT operation. In the most global sense, metadata describes all the categories of desire, aspiration, preference, and need among customers and other stakeholders. Finally, did you know that a few transformational strategists consider metadata categories or types just another class of data within a database of metadata? Imagine: a simple query against that metadata database could produce all the metadata categories and taxonomy facets of serving an entire market or just one customer across multiple product lines, divisions, and international markets. If you consider metadata a strategic and underutilized resource and need assistance thinking through a metadata-driven business strategy, call us.

Discontinuities represent unknown but regular and predictable change in the pattern of life and business. Peter Drucker speaks of a number of discontinuities that redefine the context and foundation of business:

• Geology and climate
• Knowledge and information/li>
• Politics and government/li>
• Social innovations and institutions/li>
• Spirituality and religion/li>
• Technology and engineering/li>

We believe a number of discontinuities will rock the developed world over the course of the next five, ten, and twenty years. Peer learning in trusted social networks strikes us as the next tsunami. What’s your plan?

We believe that great marketing today entails making games worth playing. Great marketing today makes customer problems so interesting and their solutions so intuitive that everyone wants to play and see how it works. Every firm should have a gaming strategy. Playing well-designed games should produce truthful information about customers, their buying criteria, and their status as brand advocates. We call that gaming strategy smart promotion. Making games fun not only means making them socially engaging, but the breakthrough games should also educate, uplift, and enlighten the player. This will require games to become part of peer-practitioner networks—games played among peers for purposes that go beyond winning and losing. Peer learning networks describe the underlying social dynamic of user groups and solution evangelism. To better understand this social dynamic, we recommend the classic text on these types of games, Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. Great marketing now means fun games that expert users of your technology play with your novice or newbie customers. What’s your game plan?

Of all the games that we can think of provisioning and sponsoring, we cannot imagine a better one than the peer-based game of adult literacy. Do you know that more than 50 million adults in the United States cannot read the newspaper or understand an electoral ballot? Do you suppose helping them learn to read would earn lifelong loyalty and advocacy for your brand? We think so. Call us. We have some ideas about how to transform this trenchant problem into a breakout strategy.

Cultural diffusion describes how new ideas work their way into the mainstream. Geoff Moore in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, and Malcolm Gladwell in the brilliant book Tipping Point, outline the basic case for cultural diffusion. To what extent has your marketing team mapped the dynamics of cultural diffusion to market-making and business development? The Internet and trust networks will only widen the performance gap between those firms that have harnessed the dynamics of cultural diffusion and those that have not.

Neotribalism and kenships represent recent discontinuities. Marshall McLuhan predicted that ever-cooler media that induce higher levels of interaction and co-imagination will change the body politic and society. We will become much more tribal. We will become much more engaged with others who share our beliefs, values, and mindsets. The word ken connotes the idea of sharing an outlook, literally, to “see the world through the same set of eyes.” Your customers will continue building tribes and kenships. What’s your plan?

Do you have an idea about the Era of Trust Networks and need help investigating it? Call us.