Faction and fiction - some of my absolute favorites:

Bengtsson Frans G; Röde Orm

Bryson, Bill; Neither here nor there, Mother Tongue, A Short Story of Nearly Everything, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Ballard, J.G.; Empire of the Sun

Coetzee, J.M; Elizabeth Costello,

Fry, Stephen; Paperweight

Grey, Anthony; Peking, Saigon

Ishiguro, Kazuo; When we were Orphans

Kneale, Matthew; English Passengers

Kjaerstad, Jan; Erövraren, Förföraren

Lewis, Michael; Liars Poker

Lewycka, Marina; A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Saga Award for Wit 2005

Lindgren, Torgny; Pölsan

Lundell, Ulf; Jack

Lodge, David; Nice Work, Small World and many more

Lurie Alison; Foreign Affairs

Mitchell, David; Cloud Atlas

Morris,Jan; A Writers World

Naipaul, V.S.; Magic Seeds

Niemi, Mikael; Populärmusik från Vittula

Roberts, Gregory, David; Shantaram

Robinson, Marilynne; Gilead

Roy, Arundhati; The God of Small Things

Theroux, Paul; Dark Star Safari

Townsend Sue; The Queen and I

Tunström Göran; Berömda män som varit i Sunne

Wolfe, Tom; The Bonfires of Vanities and many more

Updike, John; Villages

Nothing matters

Nothing matters - all technology investments are made in vain, if the enduser does not take up a new service. In some cases there can be a godsend fashion that makes it happen and then the challenge is to find a relevant way to build on the new user habit. But in most cases it has to build on something the user already is doing - becoming a part of their everyday life - like Google or e-banking. The best description of this I found in Oskar Korkman's blog http://practicedesign.blogspot.com:

"THE ECONOMY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
1. People are foremost practitioners of their everyday lives
2. People want to maintain structures, and habits, and see many times technology and services as disruptive
3. People also innovate their everyday life, and find it valuable to create new forms of living
4. Companies can support their customers everyday life, but are not in most cases centralized, and important
5. Companies take the everyday life of people as the starting point for their business, and aim to “normalize” themselves to fit into it.
6. Current market logic is not adapted to serve the economy of everyday life.
7. A market logic that takes practice of everyday life as the unit of analysis, and object for activities is needed.
8. The economy of everyday life can be the basis for voluminous, stable and faster income, but also for more well-being and democracy. "

Then it is only up to progressive and agile enterprises and public sectors to hook up - provide economy of repetition, benefit from economy of re-use, get a free ride from economy of scope in the selling process and economy of scale in processing etc. No time to loose and no space for solutions not connecting to the customer's contect.

work1. Remember to network - examples from e-banking

Starting to go deeper into the list below, I recall the earliest networking experience from e-banking - dating back to 1984 (private e-banking was launched in 1982 - corporate in 1979 in Union Bank of Finland - now Nordea Bank). In those days PCs were not that widely in use at home and modems even less common. So the bank agreed with employers that it is in everybody's interest (time saved) when employees who use PCs at work (usually linked to external telenetworks) could use them also for their private e-banking. This networking led to a very much faster uptake and customer value than would otherwise have been possible and created an early e-habit and e-trust platform that now is the base for a worldleading position for example in the public sector (reuse of e-banking tools).

The next networking example from the e-banking history came 1992 when customers could log in to the bank and continue to all major insurance companies - big savings for them as they did not need to build own strong identification. This meant that banking became embedded in insurance services and vice versa.

This reuse of bank e-id (also for signing third party contracts as is the case with loan agreements in the banks' services) took a big step forward when the Finnish Ministry of Finance in 2002 recommended the use or bank-id for the public sector as an equally strong method as the state issued PKI smart card (which has failed to gain usage). Estonia in 2005 is an even more striking example of what citizens prefer: 363 000 Estonians used e-banking id (800 000 have them) when filing tax return - 904 used the state issued smart card (1 000 000 distributed). This use of bank-id has probably taken Estonia's tax service and public sector at large to a global lead position.

Accenture's High Performance in Government report (p35 figure7) shows the results of the co-operation with the banking sector - Finnish citizens are very clear global leaders in eGovernment use and eGovernment enthusiasm. Of course it is easy to understand - what could be more conveniant than reuse of bank-id which is so often used and familiar (one-time codes since 1982)? True economy of repetition for the citizen, economy of reuse for the government (massive investment if all citizens would have to be equipped with smart cards and card readers - and a waste as single sector tools will not be used - and ties to one PC, does not work on mobiles etc) and economy of scope and scale for all. Accenture did not quite pick this up but cited some for me unknown anonymous press coverage that would have questioned the role of banks - ie questioning networking..

I could list a good number of similar networking examples from e-banking - payments-integrated e-invoicing is the most recent example - the cost saving potential from e-invoicing for EU has been estimated (by EU) to exceed 100bn€ per year - something REAL for Lisbon.

The leading theme is of course to understand how the citizen's practice of handling all aspects of banking can so very naturally become an essential part of his practice in using for example public sector services. Responsible civil servants are of course taking every opportunity to save tax payers' money - but also to make it possible for them to benefit early from e-services without any need to invest in or learn to use new devices. This service of practices is very much connecting to what Oskar states in his Practice Design blog. "This helps companies to bec0me less fragmented in the operations. Customers are very different, whereas practices can in many cases be universal." In this particular case cross-organisations and both for the citizen's private and employee role in a world-leading private-public partnership.

More examples later.

Many angles to progress in networked economy.

I will gradually dive deeper into this fascinating phase of transformation of business, public sector services, learning, relationship building, democracy and transparency, corporate governance etcetc. Just to list a few points when wanting to speed up the move - which surely must be in everybody's interest:

1. Remember to network - nobody can deliver it alone
2. Understand how the enduser´s practise can be served in a way that makes him move faster - no progress happens without him taking his first or next e-step (resuse familiar tools)
3. Understand the power of social production - how a billion users are producing content that a billion users prefer to read - no monopoly for corporate bullshit any more
4. How a networked world by necessity means that software should be interoperable by design
5. How exponentially cheaper processing, storing and transport of data has turned the picture upside down - what used to be too expensive because of IT is now the only cheap enough way of doing things - because of IT
6. How IT and business managers must join forces - so that we understand what new technology can do and how much and how customers can take in - before we decide not to change business models and before we invest
7. How IT must be made agile and loosely coupled to enable much more agile business
8. How WEB2.0 has connected the best minds and passes on crystallised thoughts to the next level in real time - globally crossing all sorts of borders - is intra-enterprise working equally well? - surely not - now it is time for Enterprise2.0
9. How it is time to start simplifying offerings and corporate structure - complexity must be eliminated to free up resources for creative work and better personal services
10. How interoperable software and common standards for messaging together is improving productivity big time - and freeing up resources for more value adding work