A Generation Of Misunderstanding

It would have been twenty-five years ago, a generation ago. I was invited onto a working party reporting to the European Commission. The subject was what was then referred to in broad terms as electronic publishing. We knew about the internet, we knew (vaguely) about what was about to come - the world wide web - we knew about database publishing and we knew about how different nets (networks) had been functioning primarily for military and academic purposes. What we didn't know and nor did the Commission was where this might all lead in terms not just of publishing but also information provision.

The working party was not unique in having an environment in which a certain tension existed. At my company this was called, because it suited the organisation's politics, creative tension, when in reality it was purely tension. On the one side were the strategists, the marketers, the businesspeople. On the other side were the technology buffs. At that time, it is perhaps fair to say, the techies looked down on their counterparts. They understood the gobbledegook. The business side didn't. The result was usually argument rather than proposal or action.

I was a non-technologist in search of a technologically understandable (possibly) organisational business model. Certain things had led me to where I was at that time in terms of thinking. One, from a few years before, had been a boss's insistence that I familiarise myself with Edward de Bono and lateral thought. Another was meeting someone called Peter Schwartz, nowadays referred to as a "futurist", then the head of scenario planning with Royal Dutch Shell. Schwartz dealt with what-ifs on a grand scale. Little was not possible, if you only applied your thoughts to it.

There were other influences, such as what Jan Carlzon had implanted as CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines System, i.e. an organisational pyramid with the customer at its peak, and any amount of case-study research from Harvard and elsewhere into the application and diffusion of then recent innovations in applied technology - the PC, the Mac, the digital watch, the Sony Walkman.  

What if Carlzon's pyramid was adapted? It could still be the customer on top of the pyramid, but who was the customer? Or rather, who would be the customer? Would the customer be more than this? A user perhaps. The term user had little currency at that time, but it was there nevertheless. The nets which ultimately led Tim Berners-Lee to the web had users. PCs had users. What if there was a wholesale shift of values within society, towards greater technology acceptance and use? Advances had in the few years before suggested there might be.

This was the essence of the model. It wasn't one which foresaw technological developments or their rapidity, but it was one to form the bones onto which the flesh of those developments might be grafted, and a generation on, it is pretty much how technology now is. The intensity has increased enormously of course, but organisations of all types have come to understand that the user sits on top of the pyramid and is there to be served. Or maybe one should say that some organisations understand this model.

Something else that would have been hard to foretell was just how much societal values were to alter. There might have been a clue from the bulletin boards which pre-dated the web and the forums which sprang up once it was established. But it needed a game-changer, and that was Amazon, not because of its original book delivery service but because of the facility for user review. It was Amazon which popularised the notion of user opinion on the web; readers in its case. From this came all manner of opinion, recommendations and criticisms. The genie was out of the bottle and it has proved to be unstoppable in the ways in which information is shared and sought after. It is now hard to conceive of a time when a fundamental shift in society's values in its use and acceptance of technology might even have been questioned.

All this leads to the present day and to Mallorca and to its tourism. Some organisations get it. The regional government doesn't. Where are the users (the tourists) in its model? Heaven knows. They are not recognised by there being the means for information sharing - through official channels of social media. They are not recognised by there being an appreciation of the latest leap in societal values, namely the whole culture of sharing and the technological applications which enable this, the P2P phenomenon which is proving to be a further game-changer.  The government is oblivious to the user, to his or her values. It is beholden to those who might say that they have the user (customer) at the top of their pyramids: the tour operators who shove product at the customer and call it a brand in the hope that a loyalty is created which itself is questionable in a user-led society that has outsmarted the conventions of business; and also to the hoteliers, latecomers to product as branding, but safeguarding and indeed reinforcing a model in which the hotel is the tourist experience in an age when "experiences" have taken on an alternative meaning, enabled by sharing, which goes way beyond the confines of the hotel campus.

It is as though the last twenty-five years haven't happened. A generation ago the tourist was fed limited information that did his or her thinking. The tourist was constrained in his or her outlook by the boundaries of non-technological society. This is not how it now is. The tourist is a flexible user in conversation with others - peers if you like - who are not part of a still rigid tourism model. Twenty-five years on, and it is not understood who it is who drives an organisation. The user.