More Than the Sum of Its Parts
We talk to our clients constantly about user related issues, specifically about the role of value-added in relation to users. Our basic approach involves learning about the users’ information ecosystem --- the details of how users work with information. Our methodology is designed to gather this information, analyze it, and design user services that facilitate the users’ information environment. This involves more than efforts to accommodate the users’ work patterns. It also involves finding ways to utilize the expertise of the professional information manager, in ways that add value for the user. But just as we try to capture professional expertise in service of the end-user, we also urge our clients to focus on ways to capture the expertise of their users (their target community of users for whom their information services are designed.) It is now possible to make a full-duplex (two way) channel of value-adding that follows the current trends of smart, portable, machine-processable data.
Weaving user contributions into information management system allows you to accomplish several things:
1) You add yet another type of value to the application or service. Users are very intelligent, have a wide range of experience and bring a great deal to the table when it comes to information systems and services. Their perspective alone can be invaluable.
2) Your users become invested in your application or service in ways that are not possible otherwise. A user who sees their own contributions reflected in the interface of an application or service becomes involved in a win-win situation. The application or service provides some needed processing or result, but it also acknowledges the value added by the user.
This ability to capture value added by users as an integral part of a large information application or service is sometimes referred to creating "network effect.”
I haven’t read a definitive statement about this, but I expect the term comes from or is based on Metcalfe’s Law. The work of Robert Metcalfe (often referred to as the inventor of Ethernet), Metcalfe’s Law states: “Usefulness of a network equals the square of the number of users.” For those of us who aren’t math majors, that roughly translates to: Networks get more useful as more users participate.”
In practical terms, the network effect describes an information system that captures the value-added by its users and as a result is greater than the simple sum of its parts. This is true even when the service or application is built on open source software. You can get the source code. What you can’t get is the contribution created by an informed and often huge community of invested users. The “network effect” of the users’ contribution is vital to the service's overall worth. (NOTE: You also can’t get the amazing horsepower used to drive such services or their market share – all of which means the source code alone does not a killer app make.)
We urge our clients to exploit the natural data aggregation points that occur in their information services and to leverage those points to create, facilitate or enable their community of users and to demonstrate this commitment in their service’s interface. Many of the trends related to Content and Processes/Services are in search of machine-processable ways to capture users’ knowledge and to semantically enable their services by using this knowledge. Who has more knowledgeable users than higher ed? Whose clients have more unique expertise? Regardless of their native media (book, blog, listserv, etc.), most discussions of current information management trends focus on business process and logic when discussing semantics. I understand the necessity of an IT-centric focus, but information managers from various branches of higher ed and non-profit endeavors, including those with a library and/or information science background, also bring a lot to the discussion. Bottomline: Adding value with regard to end-users should not continue to be a one-way street. Consider models that will allow you to build in network effect related to our targeted community of users.
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