The Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat for Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 highlights a disruptive innovation in, of all things, census-taking.

It’s the battle against paper and electronic, and guess who leads the race?

According to the HBR Daily Stat (and the original source, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística):

It’s a national census of hundreds of millions of people across 8 million square kilometers, using a workforce of 230,000 and a budget of $1.4 billion. The 2010 U.S. Census? No, it’s Brazil’s 2010 census. The current U.S. headcount, by contrast, requires 3.8 million workers and $14 billion. Census takers in Brazil use PDAs and laptops; those in the U.S. still rely mainly on paper (originally reported by CNN in the 2009 run-tup/testing for the 2010 census). – Source: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatístic

This Daily Stat, coming the week just after Apple’s big iPad launch (reported to have sold 300,000 in the first day of sales, April 3rd, 2010), is a bit shocking to me, as someone who has been involved in digital content for over 15 years.

And it’s not because paper is the devil (although it frequently is, that’s another story for another day) – but because the cost savings and flexibility that could have easily been had, were dropped on the floor. What happened?

One Giant Step for Consumers, A Faceplant for Government

Sometimes government lags, and sometimes it leads – but maintaining parity with the commercial world, or for that matter a far less technologically developed country, would seem to be, well, obvious.

The US, being one of the largest commercial markets for smartphones, one would think would be a natural place to use what would seem to be a completely natural fit for the Census mission. GPS-enabled, off-the-shelf, 3G-powered, mobile devices, with local storage for data collection (or problematic coverage areas), and web-enabled connections to the back office – well,  just about any mobile device available on any network conceivable in the US would fit the bill.

Seeking Good Enough vs. Purpose-built

What happened? Nearly every teenager, let alone adult seems to have a smartphone that would fit the needs of Census taking. So how hard could it be to extend this to a once in 10 year project?

It seems the US Census Bureau made the classic Innovator’s Dilemma mistake, of aiming for a “perfect” single purpose-built device, which, as anyone familiar with classic (and misunderstood) “Waterfall Development” vs. “Agile Development” or for that matter “Custom Built” vs. “Configure and Integrate” could have seen coming.

While there is more to the end-to-end system of Census data collection than the upfront collection process (whether electronic or by paper), the fast-moving mobile industry appears to have caught Harris Corp. on the slow lane.

The bureau’s GPS saga began in 2006, the bureau hired Harris Corp. (HRS, Fortune 500), based in Melbourne, Fla., to develop 151,000 handheld computers equipped with GPS software, as well as the technical infrastructure to support the count. – Source: CNN

In 4 years, a lot has changed in the mobile/smartphone world – and it’s safe to say that the consumer world has led the charge here, hence the rise of the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre, and more.

Watch Brazil

In contrast to having custom devices built, Brazil partnered with LG, one of the rising stars in the mobile world:

Brazil will start taking its population census in the second half of this year and to ensure a smooth and efficient counting, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) has roped in LG to supply 150,000 GM750 phones.

The phones will facilitate surveyors to take a population count on the Windows Mobile 6.5 powered phone along with the support of MS Office, web browsing etc. The phone unlike the retail version will sport MS’ honeycomb UI.

It is ruggedized (see photo), with it’s own app (not hardware), but otherwise, the core phone itself, is a phone anyone with $100 could buy at the corner mobile store.

The question is not paper or not paper – it’s what gets the job done, better, faster, cheaper (and yes, you can have all three)

By not doing this step electronically, the bureau is missing the opportunity to streamline its operations, said Hermann Habermann, a former deputy director of the Census Bureau. If workers had handhelds, they could more quickly receive updates on which residences have mailed back forms and more easily send back the completed online forms. – Source: CNN

Smartphones and real-time make the loop from the field to the back office far more efficient, and can allow the Census Bureau to target much more precisely. The end impact on local US Citizens?

The technology (would also help) better identify which Census tract a home is in, a crucial fact in determining an area’s representation in Congress and the distribution of more than $435 billion in federal funds every year.

Until now, the Census Bureau usually puts about 5% of residences in the wrong tract. With the GPS, it is aiming to reduce that error rate to 0.5%, said Daniel Weinberg, assistant director for the decennial census. – Source: CNN

Unfortunately, with the fall back to paper, the error rate is likely to remain, as is the (inadvertent) mis-distribution of funds.

Incidentally, Carl Frappaolo wrote about similar issues in paper vs. electronic filing with the IRS in his frequently referenced post “ECM – From Here to Eternity.” e-Filing rates (as percentage of total submissions) has since gone up, but continues to remain the anomaly rather than the norm.

Watch your peers, watch the technology trends – and be prepared to be disrupted.

If you have any other disruptive innovation tales (of success or woe), weigh in here – these waves can come fast, and it’s all hands on deck!

Team-based Innovation

Let me suggest you Take a Day to Innovate (with our 1 to 2 Day Innovation Workshop) – and you stand a much greater chance of avoiding issues like those that the US Census Bureau faced.

Do you have the right people on your innovation team? Do they have best innovation skills to create and deliver on the innovations they need?

Yesterday I was preparing for an Innovation Management training session I will be doing later this week. The sponsor, after reviewing my credentials asked “How you make the leap from information and knowledge management to coaching/developing innovation
skills?  … Your background seems to be IT.”

I provided what I hope was not too lengthy a response. In essence it stated that I view Innovation Management as a fully ingrained component of KM, and IT as a strategic facilitator of both. It’s interesting, but to many friends, family and colleagues my background appears disjointed. To me it is completely synergistic and logically intertwined.

Well, this morning I saw an article that pulled it all together.  It seems that the State of Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Transportation (EOT) has initiated what it calls “The Developers Challenge.”   This program facilitates the creation of new applications for public transportation riders, utilizing newly released state-owned data.  Several challenges exist. One for example calls for the creation of a mobile phone/web-based app that makes it easier to navigate the Boston subway system – or “T”.

Eureka I thought, – this is the perfect blend of IT (apps) in the form of Enterprise 2.0 technologies (mashups), in a collaborative and knowledge sharing environment (More E2.0 and KM), being used to foster and drive innovation – in an emergent fashion (again E2.0).  The challenge even leverages one of the basic tenets of KM – Incentivization (the  winner of each challenge gets free T rides for a year.)

To today’s casual user of “apps” it may just seem like a tool – but for me it is my life, my  career, the perfect blend of IT, KM, E2.0, ECM, information management, collaboration, information architecture, findability, taxonomies, user interfaces, process management …

(found via Raymond Pirouz)

What if… you could see the information flowing all around you?

What if… you could overlay that “information reality” over “normal reality?”

Some are calling this “augmented reality” while those of you who have seen the movie “The Matrix” might recognize this as, well, The Matrix (which Morpheus will explain below, if you don’t already know the movie).

While I hinted at a similar phenomenon via the “Near Real-time Babelfish” article last week, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that just as many of us can’t recall what it was like to not be able “to google” (and Amazon as a mobile product search agent) the InterWebs for almost anything you can think of, the more power we pack into our mobile devices, and the more often we are connected rather than disconnected from the nework (aka Matrix), the closer we’re coming to a complete blurring of the lines as to what is reality and what is “just information.”

Given the information that YOUR organization is creating every day, or that your customers are creating while using your services, are you taking advantage of this information in a mobile application or other mashup? Enterprise 2.0 isn’t strictly about conversations and communities, but about freeing all data/information/knowledge into new uses, via standards and transparency into sources, that allow new “information model innovations” (as opposed to business model innovations, new product innovations, or any of the many typical views of innovation from the past).

Leverage your digital information, or prepare to watch your competitors blow past you and retain/expand that lead. People laughed when Amazon first unveiled itself, and now they not only own the digital content and physical goods world, but have become the backbone of the vast majority of Web 2.0 companies, and much of the infrastructure of organizations attempting (to various degrees) to do Enterprise 2.0.

Is your Information Architected for mashups? Is your Information Architected for 2.0? Is your Information Architected for Findability? Regardless of how the information is accessed? Wired, wireless, mobile, smartphone, netbook, kiosk, Xbox 360, etc.? What shackles have you inadvertently thrown around your content by not planning for access from anywhere, anytime?

Interested in hearing what you or your organization has done to make the most of digital information and access. What are your stories of success or failure?

If you have a current project, or are planning a project to take advantage of the rapidly expanding capabilities of electronic content, innovations in display, access, findability, collaboration and more – get in touch with us at 617-933-9655 or 617-933-2584 to discuss what aspect of consulting, training or our integrated, consultative training practice would be the most effective and efficient way to jump-start your project.

Readers of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams may recognize the picture at the right as the “Babel Fish” – for others, an explanation is in order.

The Babel Fish is “small, yellow, leech-like, and is a universal translator which simultaneously translates from one spoken language to another. When inserted into the ear, its nutrition processes convert sound waves into brain waves, neatly crossing the language divide between any species you should happen to meet whilst travelling in space.”

Put simply, insert the Babel fish into your ear, and you can both speak and understand any language.

No Universal Language in a “Flat World” (yet)

As the World Gets Flat (or small, as I prefer to think of it, no offense to Thomas Friedman), the lines between countries begin to blur, as technology makes it easier than ever to ship work to the lest expensive locations for any given task.

However, whatever barriers low-cost telecommunications and a rising variety of skilled workforce around the world, language remains a barrier to companies wishing to actually DO business globally (witness some of the horror stories of “call centers gone bad” in the rush to outsourcing and offshoring), as well as to the individual global traveller who, as it turns out, may not speak multiple languages.

Just announced this week for the iPhone as well as Blackberry is a set of new apps from Sakhr Software USA, which provides “Speech to Speech” mobile translation, enabling live communication between English and Arabic speakers. This newest offering combines Sakhr’s Arabic text-to-speech (TTS), speech recognition, and translation technology in a mobile environment.

While the average iPhone or Blackberry user may not have access to this solution yet, nor be able to afford it (price unknown, but largely, this is targeted at the intelligence, defense and political/diplomatic worlds), the fact that the technologies and techniques necessary to accomplish this task have come this close to being able to put near real-time translation in your ear (bud), is quite incredible.

It’s not quite the “real-time” translation as described by the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but we’re getting ever closer.

Going Digital, and Going Mobile are two powerful forces in the world these days. Are you doing everything that you can to take advantage of these trends?

Is Your Information Architected for a Flat World?

Two recommended actions to take to be prepared to outrun your competition in a Flat World:

• Our Integrated Consulting and Training on Electronic Content Management (ECM) or
• Our one- to two-day course on Innovation Management

Whether your organization is large or small, local or global, now is the time to take advantage of the possibilities available in moving work around the world, delivering content in any conceivable format, collaborating globally, and at the lowest costs and smallest form factors ever seen.

How are YOU taking advantage of the Flat World? Let’s discuss.