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?

The Content Convergence Continues!

As computing power increases, “mashable” and findable data/content grows, GPS shrinks, partnerships and individual innovation explore, and it all comes together in the form of a handheld device like the iPhone, Blackberry, and myriad Androids being rolled out on a weekly basis, we continue to see the rise of applications that only a few years ago seemed the stuff of science fiction.

Ladies and Gentleman, it’s the mobile content economy – and it’s going to impact your business one way or another. Isn’t it time get prepared?

The latest indication of this is Siri – Your Mobile Virtual Assistant.

Smartphones are not new, speech recognition is not new, but the concentration of power/content/data and location with contextual, “geographically smart” speech recognition, opens up interesting possibilities.

View the demo below (or download the app to your iPhone or Blackberry), before going on…

Just as with the business models of travel sites such as Orbitz, or Kayak, and similar meta-aggregators or “meta businesses” – new business model innovation is afoot!

It turns out that being *the* aggregation point for information, even given away for “free” (as far as the user is concerned at least), is quite the healthy business model.

The trick is to:

• Do it well = user experience and usability
• Do it with completeness = solid data/content partners
• Make it idiot proof = semantically smart speech recognition
• And not to presume that as the, in this case, mobile app provider, you have to create and own it all yourself.

Siri uses licensed data from allmenus.com, Google Maps, City Search, Taxi Magic, MovieTickets.com, OpenTable, eventful, Gayot, livekick, WeatherBug, BooRah, Rotten Tomatoes, Yahoo! Local, yelp, FlightStats, Vlingo and TrueKnowledge, and licenses the speech recognition engine of Nuance, and combines it into a self-contained application that is, as they say, a “person-centric app.”

It’s essentially the mobile generation of the “Single Point of Access” or Portal that had been all the rage in the 90s – it’s the “Personal Portal” – hyper-localized, and personalized, as it always should have been.

Of course in testing the application, there seem to be some data gaps, and some taxonomy work that needs to be done (hint: a wrap = burrito here in Boston, and vice-versa), but all told, it’s a sign of the mobile times to come.

Where to from here?

How are YOU approaching digital content strategies for a mobile world?

Is  your business found in the content/data aggregators for your market?

Is your business “socially connected” to applications like FourSquare and Gowalla

In short, are you leaving money on the table for your competitors to run off with? It’s early days, but disruptive innovation wins go to those who start the trend first, unless you’re an extremely fast follower.

Weigh in with your thoughts and concerns – and while we don’t do app development, at Information Architected, “there’s a consulting service for that!” (Need digital content strategy for your enterprise? Get in touch.)

(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.