Flow is Meaningful

“When facts are commoditised, understanding follows...In the miscellaneous world the task is to build meaning.”                                                       
                                                               David Weinberger, Chapter 10, Everything Is Miscellaneous

When defining Flow as ‘meaningful’, a number of words suggested themselves as alternatives; understandable, conversationalist, valuable, connective, coherent, cohesive, salient, relevant, informative.... 

Flow is all of these things, but the quote above sums it up best of all; Flow allows understanding to be derived from data.

Simply categorising data is useful for finding what you want, so allowing users to choose, say, the categories under which a piece of data should be logged has some use is a basic, one dimensional form of metadata; your users are augmenting the raw data with more information that allows the company to make use of it.

Flow goes beyond this, allowing users to highlight and tag data at will, in any combination they like. This meaningfully enhances data by generating metadata and is transforming. It allows the data to be found, shared, and placed into context for others. And the best metadata generator any organisation has is its people, because they have the expertise.

Knowledge Management was very popular in the late ‘90s but it failed as a concept in its execution; there was no way to get all the tacit information out of people’s heads. Perhaps the Knowledge Management vendors of the time expected resident experts to write a book? What happened in practice is that forums and wikis found their way onto some corporate intranets but that was about it; no solution has the immediacy of Flow, where conversations and metadata are tied to particular source data points.

So if an expert looks at a manufacturing process and sees a correlation between two trend lines, then they should be able to tag that, adding their expertise and insight for others to draw on. Everything of interest that happens could be tagged, building up a huge repository of information that was previously held in expert’s heads.

Facts are commodities; and streams of facts, of data, are being produced by organisations at a huge rate - too fast to handle. By aggregating this data into something meaningful, then providing a platform which allows users to add their knowledge to the raw data, the data can begin to be understood and the understanding shared.

Flow offers a platform that helps organisations realise the value of their hidden knowledge. It provides a platform for extending this capability worldwide; expertise shared on a global scale.

Flow is Social

Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) describes an alternative view of an organisation in “What Would Google Do?”; he proposes that it is drawn as a network diagram rather than a hierarchical chart. This would include all the suppliers, customers, members of the public and so on that interact with it, working out why each relationship existed; goods, services, revenue, knowledge.  It would show that the exponential growth in influence of an organisation lies not with looking inwards, rather growth would be maximised by identifying new network nodes and working with them. Light up lots more nodes, get lots more influence.

That’s why the network is crucial. You could think of Flow as taking social networking principles and applying it to actually doing work. You could say “it’s like Facebook, but you’re actually doing work” and not be too far off; Flow exploits the exponential value of networks (as described by Metcalfe’s Law).

Inter-organisation networks therefore add huge value and Flow can allow an organisation to take advantage of the network effect without a huge implementation or culture change effort; Flow will just take advantage of the communities that already exist unrecognised, as users define working groups.

Flow will bring what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called ‘elegant organisation’ to the way organisations do things already; in terms of an application platform, it’s de-obstructing the process of working with partners – it’s facilitating, then ‘getting out of the way’ as discussed here.

Each organisation is already part of numerous external communities. Flow is unique because it can bring those communities together in one place. Instead of building a bespoke database, engaging a third party to host it and then working out how to update it, we believe it should be a simple case of designing a process and – click – sharing it with those users who share a community.

The key is to give the power to the users by making it easy to form useful cross-functional groups. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny or big, with a couple of users or a thousand; in fact, in terms of contributing to the community conversation the smaller might well be more productive. Communities are free; create one when you need it. Projects are great examples of short term communities.

There are many places that communities may add value; a supply chain can truly be a chain of partners working together; peer organisations can work together on common problems; suppliers can service or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. 

Communities are at the heart of Flow and conversations are at the heart of your business - and sharing a widget, or a process, is the start of a conversation. Your organisation is made up of users that already share, discuss and collaborate and Flow will capitalise on that by making conversations easy, then capturing them in a central place where they knowledge they contain can add value to the organisation.

Your organisation is full of conversations right now, none of which is being captured. Those conversations may be about the canteen, the weather, a crucial line of business problem, football, late running projects and so on...Flow makes it easy to discuss elements of your business and every time this happens, someone in your organisation is adding value to that data; they’re turning it into knowledge.

Flow is Personal

“Get out of the way”                   
                                         Craig Newmark, craigslist.com

Flow’s underlying philosophy is permissive; business knows what it has to do and the role of IT systems is to make it as easy as possible – to remove the obstructions.

This particularly applies to the user interface for Flow. The user experience should be dictated by role, data and the processes that make up day to day work, not by the interaction with the system.

So, the UI needs to get out of the way; it needs to be conducive to performance not obstructive of it. What this translates to in practice is an interface that is;

• Clear; no hidden functions
• Configurable; users can configure it to work for them.

The user interface is a key component of the platform and adopts it’s principles; it can be easily extended to meet the business needs. After all, your business is made up of people, it needs to be personal; sensitive to each indidividual’s individual published and not so published roles and tasks; not only suitable for large corporates but also extensible to their not so large freelancers and SME partners.

We see Flow as the way that everyone gets everything they need to do their work. That might mean everything required is within the platform, or might mean linking to other platforms.

Flow is everything a magazine style intranet isn’t; personal doesn’t equate to a top down broadcast mentality. Rather each user has their own voice; Flow allows users to engage with each other about things on the shop floor. It’s going to be a key innovation tool, linking together people and data in new ways.

Flow is Viral

Information is usually distributed by email, print, discussion or intranet.

Our position is that none of these is ideal.

Email is a conversational tool that hides the conversation, probably losing it forever; you’re probably reliant on a search through proprietary format archive file that’s might well be based on your own hard drive. Not ideal.

Email is also insecure. It’s very easy to email data to third parties. Indeed, email is perhaps more insecure than print for this reason, though printed copies are more likely to be left lying around, or printed out and posted on a notice board.

Both email and print encourage discussion. These conversations are where expertise is exchanged and data is made sense of; this is where knowledge is created.

As soon as the conversation is lost to a wider audience, its usefulness is diminished. The final exchange of that conversation, where a decision is made, or an understanding is reached, is lost and with it, the knowledge gained and value added. When those involved leave the company, that knowledge goes with them. Their emails for example are unlikely to be trawled for information – even if they were, they’d have no context.

Many intranets don't have a conversational element at present; it’s broadcast news for consumption only, or at best they include forums and wikis. The broadcast isn't efficient - not only does it cost but top down communications can turn people off. A recommendation from a colleague however is more likely to get looked at and acted upon, and has the big advantage of being free.

So with Flow we wanted to make it so easy to start a conversation about a particular bit of data or event that users didn’t bother to email; they can share it with a community of interested parties with one click – whether they’re in or outside the organisation.

This is viral; in fact, with the communities model, it’s viral plus; 

• Relevance
• Users will share things that they know their community may be interested in. Other users can choose to deal with that person based on their credibility or any other value system they choose.
• If the data itself is annotated, or a shared with an explanatory message, users can assess its importance and view it in context. 

• Security
• Where a community is protected or private, users are approved. Widgets are similarly controlled.
  
• Source data
• No need to export, print or otherwise manipulate data; users can tag and link directly to the source.

Viral is not sequential. It’s exponential. So the right information finds its way to the right people without needing to be addressed properly.  Viral is quick.

Flow aggregates corporate data

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies.”                                          
                                                        David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto

Data ends up stored in many places; entropy rules. Legacy systems, new systems, consolidation initiatives, new storage facilities, old shared drives - the list is endless.

The distributed nature of data is both its weakness and strength; it’s weak because it’s hard to get at and make sense of but it’s strong because it allows data to be held in the ‘right’ place architecturally.

We believe that metadata adds value; whether it's tagging a point data source or trend line. We also believe the larger the dataset the better, allowing users tag and share larger trends or better detail. That's why Flow aggregates data from lots of different sources so that users can get even more out of it. That’s why Flow currently talks to most popular data sources and we are confident we can talk to any; Flow’s aggregation engine even deals with non-relational databases such as Lotus Notes or manufacturing data historians.

Flow is easy to configure for new data sources and the user interface is easy to extend, meaning that as a management information system it's well positioned. But that's just a step towards a more powerful solution, where Flow will deliver the benefits of aggregation; search, mash-ups and fusion.

Every corporate can benefit from the subversive effect of hyperlinks; it doesn’t matter where the data is. It doesn’t matter whether it’s stored way down deep in a manufacturing system, or on a network drive. This new level playing field allows users can find and link data that is hierarchically distant yet relevant. It allows an organisation to make sense of what it knows. It allows conversations to start.

The fact that Flow maintains a single, central, shared version of each truth is important as it makes the conversations about them relevant and actionable. But it also makes it searchable which really adds value; searching a component name will return not just documents with the right term, but actual comprehensible contextualised data. 

Using mashups to fuse data from different sources is coming soon in Flow. Like mapping crime statistics onto Google Maps, Flow will be able to combine data from different sources so as to see the data in the right context.

Flow is a Platform

“A platform enables. It helps others build value...Platforms help users create products, businesses, communities and networks of their own.”

Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?

Flow was conceived and designed as a platform.

Flow is not a reporting, workflow, collaboration or other kind of tool precisely because it is an open platform. We would rather build a platform that can accommodate the best reporting tool in the world, adding value to the platform and providing users with the functionality they need through an interface with which they are familiar. We're good at building platforms that allow integration and extension.

This is the reason the platform can ‘borrow’ from other web applications in real time; we don’t want to dictate to our customers how they have to do things. Flow doesn't ‘lock in’ our customers – rather, it frees them to choose any tool for any purpose in the future whilst the common user interface minimises the effort and cost involved with implementing that tool.

For example, if there's a great manufacturing system reporting tool that meets your organisation's requirements, that’s fine; it can be embedded into Flow's user interface. We understand that there are tools out there that fit your requirements so well, or represent an investment already made so significant, that they're integral to your business. So we've made sure you can continue to see their benefits.

Equally this means that we're always looking for third party tools and applications to link to; if you have a great tool we should look at email us.

Flow has project management, forms design and business processes capabilities built in so it promotes action rather than just analysis. It's platform agnostic and can fit into existing security architectures.

We believe that the best way to deliver on the promise of the platform is through a browser interface. Client installed software has traditionally been functionally rich, but overall it can be a poor experience; users don’t use most of the advanced functionality and it’s often difficult to package and deploy. A browser front end means that every user can immediately get value; extend the platform, converse with their peers, get the data they need. The platform is personal, without any client software or the associated expense.