It's Not About Technology (pdf with Notes)

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#VelocityConf @VelocityConf @timoreilly It’s Not About Technology Tim O’Reilly Velocity May 27, 2015 The title of this talk is lifted from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, by way of the Code for America mission statement, but it’s a great way to think about one of the most important problems facing technologists today.

Transcript of It's Not About Technology (pdf with Notes)

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It’s Not About Technology

Tim O’Reilly Velocity

May 27, 2015

The title of this talk is lifted from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, by way of the Code for America mission statement, but it’s a great way to think about one of the most important problems facing technologists today.

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If you take a flat map And move wooden blocks upon it strategically, The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should. The science of war is moving live men like blocks. And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment. But it takes time to mold your men into blocks And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush, They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries, And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them. It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind, But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow To move, when they start they take too long on the way - The General loses his stars, and the block-men die In unstrategic defiance of martial law Because still used to just being men, not block parts.

From Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body

As most of you know, it was Memorial Day on Monday, and because of that, my friend Nat Torkington sent me this marvelous quote from Steven Vincent Benet’s poem about the US Civil War, John Brown’s Body. It is a bit dark to start this way, but the quote is so perfect that I wanted to share it.

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In this fast-paced event, you'll hear from business and IT leaders who are successfully reinventing their organizations to boost profits and create a

culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery. You'll learn how to use IT-driven innovation to respond quickly to opportunities,

reduce time-to-market, and gain a competitive advantage over businesses that follow more traditional practice.

I wanted to start with Benet because of the promise that we made you in the marketing for this event.

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That could easily be misinterpreted to think we are going to teach you to build the 21st century equivalent of a workplace like this, where people are cogs in the machine.

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Esther Kaplan’s chilling article in the March 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine explores just what that kind of world looks like in the 21st century. She describes the instrumented world of work, from UPS and low wage retail and service jobs to Odesk, and highlights how fine grained monitoring of work can be used to create enormous efficiency and profitability gains, but at the cost of building a culture of fear. Data analysis is used to “optimize” shifts on behalf of the company, while making them intolerable and disempowering to workers. Full article: http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/HarpersMagazine-2015-03-0085373.pdf

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This  seems  to  me  to  be  a  really  interes0ng  contrast  with  services  like  Ly7

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and  Uber,  which  use  data  to  empower  workers.    These  are  s0ll  low  wage  jobs  -­‐  not  great  jobs  by  many  standards  -­‐  and  they  lack  many  protec0ons  of  tradi0onal  employment.  Yet  the  workers  I’ve  talked  to  tend  to  love  them.  They  find  them  far  beEer  than  their  previous  jobs  or  alterna0ves.    Why?

Lyft driver dynamic view of passenger concentration by neighborhood

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Data exposed to workers, not just managers Most importantly, workers have agency: they choose when and how long to work Uber “surge pricing” makes a market to match supply and demand

Data exposed to workers, not just managers Most importantly, workers have agency: they choose when and how long to work Uber “surge pricing” makes a market to match supply and demand

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the issues raised in books like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee’s Second Machine Age and Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, which warn that AI and robotics are on the verge of taking away even complex white collar jobs. But this isn’t an inevitability. Technology can be used to upskill workers, and create new jobs, not just to take them away.

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Most  of  us  have  probably  experienced  this  from  the  passenger  side.  Both  passenger  and  worker  are  augmented  by  our  smartphones  and  GPS,  given  abili0es  that  we  didn’t  have  before.    And  in  the  case  of  workers,  it’s  allowed  a  vast  expansion  of  the  workforce.    In  London,  you  used  to  have  to  pass  a  test  called  The  Knowledge  to  become  a  cab  driver.  It  is  generally  considered  one  of  the  hardest  exams  in  the  world.  Now,  anyone  with  a  GPS  can  do  the  job.  Technology  need  not  just  replace  workers,  it  can  augment  them.

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and  You’ve  probably  seen  the  Microso7  Hololens  demos,  with  examples  of  how  the  headset  could  be  used  in  fields  from  architecture  to  medicine.

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This is technology used to give workers super powers

Dick Tracy: 1946 Star Trek: 1964

This kind of superpowers. Our phones used to be the tool of superheroes.

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“a culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery”

When we talked on the website for this event, we talked not about technology but about building “a culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery.” Our industry is an industry not just of technology, but also with a culture that emphasizes and rewards certain things.

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Think about open source software, for example,

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or devops

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“The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

These are poster children for the kind of culture that Daniel Pink talks about in his book Drive. He says

“The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

This is the culture we aspire to in our companies. It should be the culture we bring to non-technology customers as well.

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“even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Ton shows how operational excellence enables companies to offer the lowest prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors.”

And this kind of quest for autonomy, mastery, and purpose shouldn’t be restricted to high end knowledge workers. Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says, in her book The Good Jobs Strategy, “even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Ton shows how operational excellence enables companies to offer the lowest prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors.”

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Technologies can treat people like Steven Vincent Benet’s wooden blocks, or they can recognize, anticipate, and take

advantage of their humanity.

Technologies can treat people like Steven Vincent Benet’s wooden blocks, or they can recognize, anticipate, and take advantage of their humanity.

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This is the great challenge of the 21st century

This is the great challenge of the 21st century. I hope you will take it up with pride, and that today’s sessions will give you tools to tackle that challenge.