This blog entry is about the death of standardized compliance.

We’ve gone a long way from mass marketing and categorization to the individualization and long tail choices as defining digital traits, where each one of us is a micro universe of one.  To the institutions we interact with – from commercial suppliers, through brands and government based services, we, users, are largely still links in chains of commercial, organizational and governmental goal achievements processes. The non uniformity of the people that comprise the client base, audience, market share… may already seem obvious , but it still not taken as an axiomatic key stand point .

Seth Godin’s new book We are all weird is a tale of individuality, of celebrating the uniqueness of each one in every food chain. Weird, as not standardized, talks to generalizing providers and institutions, and praises individuality as a stand point for interactions with people with a cynical reference to normality, as an outdated lens for definitions and processes.

Yes, the future belongs to individuals, to a mindset that replaces standardization with the humanification of interactions. Once the user is put at the center, not as a usability and marketing communication cliché’ of form, but as a fundamental matter, the real human value of user centricity and citizen centricity comes to life. To each of us our individually significant actions and choices are our own tales of individuality that strengthen our meaningful and valuable choices and interactions.

Icentricity is a philosophical identity definition that exceeds the individual yet gives a personal print and control on who, what, where, when and why.  Taking an independent yet very personal prism, enables a framework of the unique individual ecosystem of one that interacts with everybody else.

When each one of us has so many personal expressions across so many platforms, we need to take the individual fingerprint that on one hand sets us apart as individuals but on the other hands defines us and our say as parts of collectives in these frameworks.

The Icentered lens is an individual grasp for interactions, a prism that helps separate the wheat from the chaff in the overload of seemingly not connected interactions. It is a framework for a larger process that gives a context for the place of the individual in relations with providers, peers, friends, organizations….. Godin’s book is yet another call to start and exercise this distinct personal mark that sets me apart from everyone else and makes categorizing, segmenting, profiling me…. Impossible.

With the ubiquitous connectedness that enables us to be distributed across many platforms, across many contexts and interactions, Icentricity provides a looking glass that sometimes takes a step back to oversee and sometime to focus on how I am in a particular set of interactions – social, professional, or information based and how I relate to other people in social circles and in service providing systems.

The announcement of Apple of its icloud sharing and sync service empowers user retrieval of personal materials such as photos, music, files… on any device, as it stores all the users’ content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it out to them to all their devices.

Apple’s icloud will reshape user content consumption, not only in terms of ubiquity – my content is intuitively accessible from any point, any device. It is also a significant step towards a user centered, user side cloud based paradigm where all user’s content and data are aggregated and harmonized in a cloud, a personal operation hub for personal management of  our digital life.

Cloud is the infrastructure to empower full user controlled user paradigm.

So I am republishing an old post - Cloud computing – the infrastructure for the vision of a contextualized icentered paradigm that examines the value of cloud based services for an icentered vision.

In a ubiquitous world, who needs siloed fences?

Cloud computing begins to emerge as the infrastructure of choice not just for crunching very complex computation challenges, scaling up storage or managing distributed financial transactions. Commercial cloud services, social cloud based networks, open public clouds will evolve to serve in real time any business or data process, not just for big data centers, but as a direct infrastructure for web applications aimed for the end user market. It is the best suited infrastructure on which the vision of a contextualized icentered web paradigm can materialize.

The real value of the cloud exceeds by far the financial benefits of not having to invest huge sums in IT infrastructure or scaling up. It lies in the array of on demand based applications that can revolutionize many businesses through Saas offerings. When computation and connectivity are pervasive, commoditized, perceived as a basic utility like electricity or water, when terms like ubiquitous, always-on, real-time, dynamic, instantaneous, pervasive will be at the heart of all information services, it would become natural to develop an open ended approach to data retrieval.

The fragmentation and distribution of information and interaction sources in siloed sites of distinct providers is counterproductive to our interests as users, namely facilitation through simple, intuitive, adaptive modes of interaction and the ability to reorganize data flows in personal or topical strings, according to individual needs or interests. Imagine being able to organize ad-hoc strings across sites or social networks, a social graph around an event, a prismatic view of a news item, comparative and informative shopping queries, personalized search related results, open ended work information queries – all individually rearranged, according to the personal context, relevance, history or predictive forecasting for each of us.

The cloud as an on-demand service infrastructure is robust more than any siloed data center of an individual company. It empowers mashing up the infrastructure and the applications that run on it and the creation of data strings across distributed sites. It will allow the creation of new kinds of user bound services that will exceed siloed sites, and empower more sophisticated mobile applications.

From an icentered point of view – where will my data reside? In the cloud, dispersed in all the sites I interact with and harmonized under the umbrella of my inclusive profile. The ubiquitous nature of the cloud will allow accessibility through all media and sites, agnostic to the origin of the data’s residence. When I can access everything from everywhere, storing materials, retrieving them, collaborating, sharing and creating food chains around them, will become a non-issue. Localization loses its meaning for both data retrieval and the whereabouts of the user or device storage and computation limitations.

The big shift from push to pull mode, as analyzed by David Siegel, automatically shifts the wheel from content providers who put their offerings out there, to the users who actively pull, agnostic to where what they pull resides. Once companies adjust their businesses to the pull mode, empower account and profile portability, harmonized contextualization can start to take place.

Once data referencing schemes and tagging systems enable to pull any data and contextualize that around a personalized scheme, there is very little difference between pull of services, content and products and pulling of personal data, creation of new food chains and building companies that pull, reorganize and capitalize on the pulled data on our behalf. Data stream services will extract relevance based context strings for a specific query/service/offering. Contextualization processes, delivered by business process software through a cloud based delivery mechanism need contextualization platforms and applications – but all these cannot develop without a ubiquitous, open ended, flowing infrastructure that empowers portability and accessibility through any smart device everywhere.

Once my data and interactions reside in the cloud, I, the user, become free to access my personal files, connectivity and content, consuming files from any point – fully materializing John Gage’s vision of “the network is the computer”. New kinds of providers will emerge, giants wars over hegemony of the clouds infrastructure and providers of new food chains and services. It will truly facilitate an Itom based new long tail models based on data aggregated from different dispersed sources, and facilitate new personalized services.

It will empower an icentered culture, since the ubiquitous infrastructure available through clouds is bound to enhance new generations of web services, using pay-per-use models that will empower individuals to do things that previously only corporates could offer, due to high costs of storage, retrieval and data manipulation. More people will be equipped with more tools, a larger portion of our life will become digital, unique individual needs, personalized eco systems will ”float” in clouds.

At the same time, cloud computing brings with it privacy apprehensions that need to be addressed. The fact that everything is always-on, available and accessible does not mean that it is automatically exposable as well. Pervasiveness and total publicy do not automatically go hand in hand. Total availability and manipulation of data from wherever, whenever and however still must leave me, the user, in control over what to expose to whom, when, in what context and in return for what. The non tangible conceptualization of an ether like cloud out there does not provide the mental security of a sealed data center whose owners are accountable for retrieval breaches from their data storage facilities.

Therefore cloud service providers should be accountable for their protection levels of data stored in their clouds in the same way that banks are accountable for the security and safety of assets put in their trust.

The spectrum of the concept of user centricity fluctuates from pin pointed data management of relations between users and online identity providers, the technical  federation of computerized identity schemes and up to  a holistic  user centered disintermediation paradigm.

User centricity is not just a concept for implementation in computerized protocols, federated identity management or CRM processes. Nor is it a corporate cliché’, a marketing lip service for “we serve you best” as “we see what’s best for you”

The above is a manifestation of business and process orientation of customer centric approaches that corporates, providers and organizations  claim, in top down unilateral relationship schemes, based on their mediation. They define what, how, where, when and in what way, in the name of knowing best what users need.

In that spirit, even in the distributed web and in social networks, users are deprived from direct access to many services or information strings that are provided for free (no free meal..) or fee of a sort. In exchange for services, users’ data  become the provider’s property, to be manipulated at will, without the user’s consent and many times even awareness. Commercial offerings are wrapped in schemes of captivity, profile base stickiness and a golden cage of web services that menace our privacy and  freedom. The centralization of provider-side service platforms makes sure that the data accumulated remain hosted on company’s servers, even when the architectures are cloud based.

Even claims of focusing on end- users require modifications. Taking a business oriented view, Brian Solis claims that that customer centricity begins with creating a climate of change. He claims that organizations need to really listen to their customer, tap into social networks where customers converse and adapt the corporate culture and inner processes in the organizations to the expressed customers attitudes and engagement, and thus be able to create change  by placing the user at the center of the design of the organizational systems, adapted to what they have learnt.

Still that approach assumes a patronizing top down intermediation. In a world where commercial offerings and social services are wrapped in schemes of captivity, profile base stickiness and golden cages of web services that menace users’ privacy and  freedom. The centralization of provider-side service platforms makes sure that the data accumulated remain hosted on company’s servers, even when the architectures are cloud based. Even when providers try to humanize

What combats that?

One approach was open source and free.  Services, offerings and source codes created bottom-up or through crowdsourcing

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/What-s-the-solution-cont-956215.html

However, user centricity is more. It’s a culture, a paradigm, a lens.

Real user centricity starts with taking the point of view of the individual, and not that of  the corporate or organization. A human point of view, of people flesh and blood that converse, engage, adapt and influence is different than that of corporates, even if those providers claim that they care about us, users. Organizations  don’t  care.

The human side, really looking at the users and adapting a culture that puts them in the center, requires a paradigm change.  Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom , creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it as a people’s web,  it’s an “I in the center” paradigm, where  each user becomes a distinct anchor,  an Itom.

In that paradigm of total disintermediation, the self sovereignty of users rules. They are independent, free, at the center of systems that serve them, equal partners to the processes and food chains created around them, with total control of their data, privacy and sharing – pulling services at their choices.

We are not there yet. Neither technologically nor commercially. The culture is already fermenting. User side services are beginning to bud, the road is still long. Yet the free spirit, independent state of mind and natural sense of entitlement that real Icentricity required, should become adapted  by organizations who want to adapt to the emerging digital landscape where users are the real center. Embracing transparency, compassion and engagement – soft values that enhance trust and a true sense of partnership.

In a user centered trust based culture, respecting users’ freedom, choices, set of values and their need for trust through transparent information, will bring a new spring to the dynamic power balance  in the relations between providers and users.

As we increasingly turn from citizens to engaged consumers of information, services and goods in many systems we interact with, providers need to become more attentive to the growing user centered culture. Once fighting over our attention is not enough – humility is called for: fighting over our trust demands adapting to the growing zeitgeist of more humane soft values: transparency, relinquishing control, accepting our state of mind and adapting to it.

Recent amendments to the Consumer Bill of Rights, originally articulated by Kennedy in 1960, suggested lately, reflect the shift and scope enlargement of consumers’ place in the food chains.  The growing user centered dignity emphasizes what consumers’ consciousness puts at center stage:

“to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given, by all goods and service providers, unrestricted access to the complete information needed to make an informed choice, including but not limited to ingredients, materials, origin, labor conditions, life cycle, and political activity.”

The original consumer bill of rights treated the basic consumers’

• The right to safety: to be protected against the marketing of products and services that are hazardous to health or to life.
• The right to be informed: to be protected against fraudulent, deceitful, or grossly misleading information, advertising, labeling, or other practices, and to be given the facts needed to make informed choices.
• The right to choose: to have available a variety of products and services at competitive prices.
• The right to be heard: to be assured that consumer interests will receive full and sympathetic consideration in making government policy, both through the laws passed by legislatures and through regulations passed by administrative bodies.
• The right to education: to have access to programs and information that help consumers make better marketplace decisions.
• The right to redress: to work with established mechanisms to have problems corrected and to receive compensation for poor service or for products which do not function properly.
• The right to service–the right to privacy, courtesy, and responsiveness to consumer problems and needs and all steps necessary to ensure that products and services meet the quality and performance levels claimed for them (Added by Clinton, 1994).

Many of these things seem obvious today, although the recent amendments reflect, more than anything else, the spirit of users’ consciousness, based not only on awareness of the quality of goods and services consumed, but to what they stand for, our understanding that manufacturing conditions  of goods and our judgment of  corporate identity of the provider.

We expect from our providers engagement that exceeds CRM discourse and corporate oriented revenue making policies. We expect transparency and a more humanizing culture. Therefore this bill goes as far as the political intricacies that corporates employ – such is the level of consumer scrutiny of their providers.

As we, users, increasingly see ourselves as equal partners in the process and are aware of our power, the shifting balance calls for a new level of ecology, for paradigm change that will flow with the openness, freedom and central place, that we, conscious consumers, have today.

Providers that will accept the evolution of consumerism, sign this bill and adapt to its spirit, will prevail in the shifting user centered paradigm.

Immersive Labs, a NY based  start up,  builds billboard technology that can target you, personally, and present relevant ads on bill boards.  Promising? Frightening? definitely intriguing.

A closer examination reveals that this is no scene from Minority Report and your iris data are not being read to target you with direct messages.

 In fact a combination of real time, location based, combined with age and gender reading from cameras in locations where the bill boards are placed, make it possible to change ads based on the age group and activity that takes place and segment age and gender based ads in real time.

This does not fall under the category of personally targeted ads as it lacks the personal context of each person that passes near the billboard. If a 30 years old woman passes by and a disposable diaper ad appears, it’s not because they know her identity, number of young children  and the fact that her credit card shows baby related shopping, but because she falls under age and gender based segmentation.

 So for the time being – fear not the retailer’s  big brother’s eye on you just yet – with ubiquitous connectivity, smart gadgets and an always on life style, the future of  personal targeting will some day  be in time and place defined real personalized ad placement on your personal mobile device once you enter a location, based on your very personal context, purchase history – the semantic web vision and internet of things that will eventually connect, combine data and screen each of us very very  personally.

A dooms day or real user centered scenario – depends on where you stand in the privacy/sharing debate.   Let’s hope that till this happens, privacy keeping and sharing mechanisms will  be as developed as the semantic context based  profiles that will allow such individually targeted ads.

 In a user centric world, while the digital “e” is already naturally taken for granted, the shift to the user centered  “I” is reshaping relations and the power balance between users and providers. From building product identities, such as Apple’s  Iphone, Ipad,… through marketing campaigns that emphasize the product/service direct benefits  to the user, and up to tailored personalized offerings and information strings around personal interests –  all create a real user centered digital world that reframes traditional values and assumptions on provider – user paradigms,  be it with commercial entities, information organizations or egovernment systems.

The internet today is truly personal. It’s about the individual “I”.  The self sovereignty and natural sense of entitlement of users is expressed  by their intrinsic motivations to get what is most relevant to them, anywhere, anytime, and speak up their mind and wishes. This is the source of users’ power, that puts them in the driver’s seat in their web based interactions.  It creates personalized fragmentations that force providers to dedicate more extensive efforts to target, reach and satisfy their potential users, and even greater efforts to preserve their loyalty without using captivity methods that immediately bounce back as they only motivate users to reject the offering or provider.

Taking an Icentered approach, customers clearly specify what they would wish to have, evangelize  what they find useful, annoying, and bring up ideas for product/service improvement and better suitability to users’ needs. Mostly, such expressions of needs, wants, dissatisfaction or praise are independent, targeting their own social networks. Furthermore, users seek to trust those they interact with. They express their degree of faith and demand transparency, ethics and engagement from their providers.

Therefore, the voice of the user should become a compass to providers in defining new systems and crystallizing their offerings, relations and even corporate identity.  In a user centered world, listening to that independent  voice of the customer, is priceless not only in usability design, but in defining, acting upon and creating brand identities and conducting an engaging dialog with customers.  All this translates to relevance, usability and increased user satisfaction from both the product/service and its supplier.

User centricity is gradually maturing from a being a term coined as a lip service from the Petri dish of digital marketing CRM culture, to become fundamental in digital relationship. User centric systems, tailoring offerings and information strings to specific user demands, giving users independent access options to endless choice in a long tail economic model, personally modified offerings that the digital economy empowers, create a new power balance.

In a way, users’ powers of selection and expression liberate providers from taking all the responsibility on what to offer, and turns users into real partners to the whole process – from design, manufacturing, marketing and up through very transparent user satisfaction feedback.

Providers try to humanify their offerings, give it personalities. But even this is not always enough, as we, users, want more from our providers than just get our attention with their offerings, because it’s relevant. We want to trust them, identify with what they stand for. In the new digital marketing discourse, users own the conversations, manipulations are rejected and social media empower immediate feedback. A new discourse, attitudes and power balance will reframe the current paradigm to create a more balanced, trustworthy digital sphere.

User centricity is a universal approach that takes a holistic systemic view of  the place of the individual in it. As the web’s ubiquity becomes a given and an increasingly growing part of our interactions is web based, the issue of user centricity takes a more significant meaning. User centricity can no longer be seen as just a design principle, but the other way around, especially as user centricity and trust, an essential element in 21^st century web and business culture, go hand in hand.

User centered semantics comprise of multidisciplinary approaches – philosophical, social, economic principles and a fundamental set of values and concepts that assume:

• Open ended systems, interoperability protocols, design premises.
• User control over data, privacy, identity management…
• User controlled data portability
• Transparency
• Users own conversations, interactions, privacy and sharing
• Simple, intuitive usage design and inclusive user experiences for the weaker digital populations.

Once the user is truly at the center, user centricity requires balancing the interests of all parties involved, users, providers, institutions, architecture designers through a cooperative discourse that looks at all as equal partners and respects the rights and interests of all, through transparent mechanisms that enhance trust.

In web based systems, these values and premises can then be translated to define design principles of enabling and supporting technologies, platforms, architectures and business processes that empower user centered interoperability between users, providers, institutions, governance, communities and content creators.

User centricity in existing paradigms does not go hand in hand with top down siloed approaches that claim to be focused on the user, but confuse users with consumers from a corporate/institutional point of view. It is due to hegemony wars and business dominance of corporates and service providers, that do all they can to cultivate approaches that put constraints on customers’ disengagement, as they try to keep their customers captive for corporate profit building plans. It is in complete contradiction to the open, free and transparent spirit and culture of the web and of us, its users.

User centricity is not just about commercial offerings. It is about users’ control over their data, transparency mechanisms that are based on the principles of free choice, portability, simple and free disengagement…..

Whereas user centered takes a systemic view of user centered systems and scenarios, Icentered takes a prismatic view of the individual as the hard core nucleus of any user centered system. It represents the individual in the conceptualization of a user centered blueprint. How the world, interactions and relations should be seen through this lens, once the user is really at the center, with the reins of control in her hands.

The I in icentered focuses on the individuality of each user, as an Itom, the granular entity of the icentered world. An Itom is the smallest comprehensive unit that describes me, the individual user, as a whole, as a unique individual, through all my interactions, across all sites, platforms and media. Each and every one of us is an individual, unique, distinct, non divisible Itom.

Looking at the digital world through a prismatic view of each individual Itom , creates a new vantage point for web based relations. Once we look at it as a people’s web,  it’s an “I in the center” paradigm, where  each user becomes a distinct anchor,  an Itom. The systemic concepts and blueprints that will empower this vision of the web,  are at the heart of user centricity paradigms.

If You Love Your Customers, Let Them Go! That, in a nutshell, is the basis for confident, open and respectful relations between  companies who have the sense of the value of their offering and a deep understanding of the dynamics of customer- provider relations in an age of a click away loyalty disengagement.

Josh Bernoff , tired of unsolicited marketing mails, sent this Valentine message to marketers.

 Imagine your life if you could use the universal Begone service:

“Universal Begone is intended to make things easy for us, the consumers. The principle is simple. If I receive an email from anyone whom I don’t wish to receive emails with in the future, I reply with the word “begone” in the subject line.

Begone, as in “be gone, don’t bother me anymore.” A word, I point out, that is unlikely to be used for any other purpose.

The emailer is then responsible for taking me off their mailing list and not emailing me again

Is it realistic and feasible? In the current paradigms, if providers embrace this user centered culture, mail systems introduce it as part of their services, and marketers  integrate it into their automatic CRM systems.

Even if not just yet, it’s a groundswell, a grassroot approach, and I hope that others will follow, all harnessing our sentiments about invasion to our privacy, spamming in the name of marketing discourse, keeping us captive instead of serving us according to a free, open web spirit…It highlights a universal user centered prism on our relations with our providers or wannabes. From an icentered lens, a web of life is a web that empowers ME to selectively and intuitively choose what I want presented top me  based on its relevance, solicited by me and of real value to ME.

The idea to create a BEGONE movement   is yet another step to tell marketers that we have had enough and that they should embrace our culture, listen to us and respect our choices. We choose to converse with them if what they offer is of personal relevant value, and we opt whether  to interact, that’s how relations should be in a pull based world where proactive management is placed at the hands of users.

Taking a universal approach with a simple basic opt out button represents a user centered culture, where we, users, own the conversations, manage them and interact out of choice.

More irritated calls will mushroom, pointing at intrusive ways of conduct, calling for transparency, authenticity, ease of opting out and calls for control shift. That’s the zeitgeist that should be embraced by providers who want sustainable relations with their users.

Marketers should not be intimidated by this reversal of mindset, if played rightly, it will bring to them their relevant clients, and that will make their ROI more pinpointed, as relationships of choice are more sustainable.

Augmented Humanity, Google’s vision, was presented by Google’s Schmidt in a recent speech in Berlin . It is a vision of a mobile and  cloud based search that integrates sophisticated search, human needs and its human translation to  serve human wishes and curiosity in  real time anywhere search.

 In his vision computers working on our behalf, through Google’s platforms, will make us happy. Google is empowering a mobile based “super computer” in our hands. It is building the next decade platform to connect all the dots around us, a complete system that empowers sophisticated searches that can serve us on anything, anywhere. The reciprocal relations between us and technological platforms where we can “educate” applications that can know who we are, where, what we are interested in, combined with smart phones that will know all about where this is happening, will create an autonomous search environment, that can tell  me relevant info I didn’t know but would be interested in.

 Humanity can be defined as the quality or condition of human nature –  being human and/or the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence.

Schmidt’s augmented humanity vision refers to personalizing search experience as he talks about humanizing the IT based search experience through integrating many technologies and platforms developed by Google, served through cloud computing, available ubiquitously at my fingertips through mobile devices.

It will embetter our information, communication, knowledge. Imagining a future where the computer stores all relevant knowledge, personalize our information, keep memories, track what interests us, where we are, where we want to get, connect with whoever we want……make us more knowledgeable and informed in real life.   

The other definition of humanity, humane, means characterized by kindness, mercy, or compassion. In this semantic map, augmented humanity translates to being more humane, more sensitive, values driven, considerate, empathic….

In business ethics more humane spells integrity, being aware – socially, environmentally, accountable,authentic,  transparent,  do good, all the soft values that humanize corporates, evoke trust and create brand thick value and customer loyalty.

  Google’s global search strategy, a universal personal data-driven, cloud and mobile based, will definitely make search, information and connectivity ubiquitous, personalized and very relevant and therefore will free us to do what’s really important in our life.

In doing so, many privacy/big brother apprehensions come to mind.

Google’s future platform can become our right hand, our web based personal assistant to cater for many of our needs that are machine tractable. This integrated vision around each and every human need that each and every one of us can have anytime, anywhere through the web, is user centered in its nature. It connects all the relevant dots around each query, individually.

What remains to be seen is if once the augmented  humanity computer based vision is completely integrated in the hands of Google, will it become claws of an  omnivore predator of web hegemony exploiting our privacy, data and freedom, or will Google preserve the humane nature of what catering for our personal needs should be about: respect our privacy, be transparent in our data collection, storage and manipulation, exercise permission based usage of our info and make us partners in food chains created around us and our context.

How truly user centered will Google be, to what humane level will it cater for what makes us, indivisulas,  human and happy, yet  remains to be seen.

Welcome to the January 23, 2011 edition of the Icentered – Blog Carnival. I am very happy with the number of submission included in this first edition of the carnival. I would like to thank all of the contributors. I really appreciate your participation and love the variety of articles in this edition.