Exploring dark data
Build your own graph. Or feed someone else’s graph. Or die.
This is part 2 of a double blogpost on metadata-morphosis of service and business development. I recommend reading the first blogpost, The graphitational pull, before reading this one.
I have recently been reflecting on the graphs, the machinery that fuels services like Apple, Google and Facebook. I came up with the concept of graphitation, a natural law of any value network in digital transformation. The interplay between useful services and valuable data will be the most important competitive advantage in the years to come. The growth of metadata-based business models represents the greatest threat and greatest opportunity for a large number of organisations. Not only in the media industry, but in practically any domain. Including the public sector.
Things happen really fast.
In a lot of fields we’ve seen emerging infrastructure-services come to life, in different forms. Many of them base their business model on algorithms, processing metadata. The platforms are useful exchange points for information. The biggest graphs are listening posts, potentially programmed in manipulative ways, and can be exploited for surveillance purposes. The smartest companies create fungus-like operations. They grow a complex system of roots that drains insights from the interactions and transactions within their own and third party services. They use this insight to improve their own services and thus strengthen their own power. The business logics? To charge money for privileges within the structure.
Many graphs can still be drawn
Traditional media has been through the blender. They are increasingly becoming digital smoothie, served with drinking straws for the global platforms. Media managers has for years been ignorant of the existence and workings of the graphs. They have been feeding the social graph with content, for free. They’ve allowed the tentacles of Facebook far into their own source code through integrations (like commentary fields and like-buttons). The media ecosystem has, as an ecosystem, been really bad at establishing standards and structuring their content semantically. This entropy is the main reason Google became a service we cannot live without, and over the years built a dark hole-like graphitational pull.
Most media organisations, at least in my homecountry Norway, have been reluctant to give their readers hyperlinks to competing news organisations. The result is a fragmented public sphere and a need for plattforms and aggregators to create context. Most media insist on developing new services within their own establish brandspace and ownership structure. Innovations in the industry happen to a large extent as introvert experiments, within the safely, walled gardens.
Result is two decades of lost opportunity. The cashflow is drying out.
The war seems lost. But it isn’t.
Dark data
Metadataland is currently a barren, dinosaurish place, but will probably and hopefully evolve to become a more diverse ecosystem. All organisations are, consciously or unconsciously, centered around some sort of datamodel. They act on information on the needs, capacity and actions of clients and partners. The use raw data, to create insights. Increasingly, the ability to act upon information in realtime will become a competive advantage.
The informations is out there. Gartner defines “dark data” to be “information assets that organizations collect, process and store in the course of their regular business activity, but generally fail to use for other purposes”. We are swimming in this stuff. Big or small: Size doesn’t matter.
It’s our ability to harness information in relevant structures that releases its potential energy. Many organisations should at this time explore the potential for extraction of information within existing and possible businessmodels, choose a data space, design a simple graph and associated services, and start to nurture and grow the structure.
It’s commonly expected that great digital services will release the power of the graph in many many value networks. But the value is not always easy to identify before the invisible patterns become visible. This is something all industries should reflect on. Information lives in systems, not in silos. There are many graphs in reality that are yet to be properly represented and enhanced virtually. But we have to invest in exploration. What data do we already have. What data can we extract? How should we organise the data?
And the most important question: Where and how can we add substantial value? There are plenty of real world information systems that should be enriched digitally. The local community graph, connects people within a neighbourhood — their needs, interests and abilities to contribute. The cultural graph, connects artistic projects, stages and their potential audience. The urban mobility graph connects transportational demand, capasity and physical places. The energy graph, will in the years to come be crucial for the service economy within consumption, storage and distributed local production of energy connected in smart grids. You may even have a curiosity and storytelling graph that connects the editorial capacity and the many unanswered and unmapped questions of their potential readers. The freight graph connects transporters, shippers of goods and people waiting for their parcel. The medical graph connects medical staff, the patient, the medical condition and the pharmaceutical industry.
All of these graphs are partly overlapping and deeply interconnected. The world is a complex place. There is, and will always be, a gap between the real world and the world of information. One perspective on business strategy is that it is about bridging these gaps.
Surplus insights
One of the interesting aspects of what i called metadata-morphosis is that it links two contemporary phenomenons. On one hand, the democratisation, distribution and reduced marginal costs of technology. On the other hand, the centralisation of insights. Digital systems change both value flows and user behaviour in most markets. It’s easy to acted strategically correct to immidiate changes, but get stuck on the wrong path that leads in the wrong direction.
Access to the some sort of surplus insight has become the most important competitive advantage. But to win this game does not start with access to big data or artificial intelligence. It starts with the ability to create useful services, that creates genuin value for the end user. Because the graph is not a dead data model, but a neural infrastructure, alive with real time, real life interactions.
There are countless new, yet-to-be-developed services that can improve the interaction between people and different businesses. The growth in the so-called sharing economy is a measure of graphitation. In the years to we will see a lot of seemingly simple services that, under the surface, will live from metadata-harvesting and knowledge-extraction.
The ability to establish and nurture graphs will become increasingly important. A key strategic question is what level you prefer in the food chain. Own the datamodel. Be a data point in the datamodel. Or disappear.
The need for rules to play by
Right now, everything graphitates, in every industry. It is a major threat, and a great opportunity. Both the knowledge graph and the social graph are useful and liberating. It connects us, to each other and to a larger reality of knowledge.
But there is unfreedom attached to this liberty: The plattforms sentralise power. It is the great paradox of digital freedom and an important trend in post industrial capitalism: Metadata, exploited from reality, fuels services and infrastructure that gets so much power that they change reality to their own advantage. Algorithmic lifeforms are programmed to strengthens their own life conditions.
We are still in the early ages of the graph. Just like the printed press made competition regulations and ethical standards necessary, there is a need to establish rules to play by for the new metadata reality. We trick ourselves if we start believing that there are simple answers on how to regain market balance and democratic control. The good old measures does not work like they used to. A lot of people, from politicians to media leaders to end users, need to see the bigger picture. Graphitational pull can both affect and be affected by business strategy, law making, taxation and public services.
All these reflections are rather raw and unmature. I share them in this form just to see if there are more people out having similar, or different, perspectives. The time has come for a deeper conversation on the service we choose to develop and the infrastructural framework they are becoming a part of. Both because it is business smart to talk about this before it is too late, and because it is important.
Who owns your graph matters.
