The power of a crowd

I am having something of a epiphany moment myself here. And, frankly, I am surprised at myself. You see, I made the mistake of doubting that crowds can do really powerful things. This, despite the fact, that my team and I have been preaching this message for over a year, and the result has been we're in the last stages of deploying social media here at the bank.

Let me backtrack a few steps.

I have spent the last three weeks at home writing Innovation and the Future-proof bank. My deadline is fast approaching, so I thought I'd best give myself some time to really knock over a lot of the writing. To those of you I've been on the phone to with respect to case studies, by the way, thank you very much.

Anyway, all this time at home let me see just how poorly a big corporation can do compared to a crowd.

We are a Microsoft home, you see. There are Microsoft laptops, mobile phones, and even a Microsoft Media centre driven television. I suppose this has to do with the fact that I once worked at Microsoft, so it was easy to acquire all these things, and, in fact, it made sense to do so.

So I have had to put up with three weeks of constant complaints that our phones weren't, actually, always picking up calls. You expect that on a Microsoft phone from time to time, but it isn't until you have to hear the constant complaining that you really believe how irritating it is. At work, I have a voicemail service that goes straight to SMS, so I don't really notice the performance of Windows Mobile.

In order to calm that down, we replaced all our Windows Mobile devices with iPhones. You can't believe the household bliss that resulted, and I went happily back to my writing. Power of crowds: iPhone has a Linux buried deeply inside it, which is an operating system built by lots of people on a volunteer basis.

But the quiet was not to be. You see, the Media Centre doesn't really work very well. It does all these strange things, like dropping sound and failing to receive TV. And this on a fresh install with all the latest updates.

When I was watching about 30 minutes of TV a night, I didn't see the problems. Being at home over the holidays let me hear first hand the howls of frustration. So I replaced that with a new media centre, hand written with love by a crowd and running on Linux. Perfection.

Back to the writing, and I heave a deep sigh of relief. Again, the quiet was not to be. The laptops. Stopped. Working. Again.

Emboldened by my successes with Open Source, I resurrected a laptop with so little capability it could barely run Windows 2000, and installed Linux on that too. And guess what? It worked like a dream, so well, in fact, that I continued my writing on that and stopped using my very high end work laptop with every single possible gadget running Vista.

In the space of a week, almost all our Microsoft devices are gone. And so has most of the household angst.

Here is a set of computer technology that was built without any grand corporate oversight. It just evolved. And my mistake was failing to really, really believe that crowd based things could be as good as "the bought ones".

I have learned a valuable lesson: people will build what they want to use for themselves, as long as the conditions are right to do so.

We've been tracking a trend at the bank we call Generation-C, the generation that wants to Create. These are the people who write blogs, who mash up applications to create new ones, who contribute to forums and put themselves out there. They take a car and customise it to within an inch of its life. Or melt the antenna out of their contactless travel cards so they can attach it something more convenient than their wallets.

What might the power of crowds create if we let them loose on banking products and services?

Because if these Generation-C folk can create a better operating system for free than the folks at Redmond with billions to spend on R&D, what might fantastic things might Generation-C do for financial services?

Comments

[Chris Skinner]

James

Nice to see I'm not the only one with Microsoft issues!

Chris

[Neil Robinson]

Welcome to the world of Open Source. Better late than never, James!

Today, the kitchen, tomorrow the corporate mail system. I can't wait for your post about the benefits of Zimbra in, what two years time?

Only kidding. Every tiny little device, from mobile phones to the £20 ADSL router you buy at PC World seems to be underpinned by Linux these days.

But a word on cost. and man hours. Redmond Technology costs so much money because Microsoft is predominantly a marketing organisation (set up to sell poorly written software). If it applied a tenth of its costing diligence to software QA, we may get applications that actually work.

Linux is certainly community led, as is Firefox and many other fine pieces of code. But it wasn't written by a few people or even a crowd. It was a worldwide effort. Its probably had as much deployed man-hours as Redmond, but here's the punchline.

Linux is from outside the box. And that reinforces my long held view that innovation is a light that shines inwards, not a candle glowing in the corner constrained by the amount of oxygen (or marketing spend) available...

[Colin Henderson]

I love this post. After 20 years with DOS/Windows, I switched to Ubuntu 2 years ago, and never looked back. I laugh at peoples Vista churning away trying to launch something. Mind You I am not longer in a Bank ... I do not miss Outlook/ windows/ sharepoint one little bit. People accept the waiting, the daily reboots, the application churning. With Linux these are all things of the past. Its enough to influence where I would work actually.

[James Gardner]

Colin,

I know half the world is laughing that it took this long for the lights to come one.

I am presently talking with our security folks about letting me have Ubuntu on my work machine as well. An "innovation experiment" I am calling it.

I shall then run my windows apps in a VM on top.

[Neil Robinson]

I'll let you into a secret - and a hard-learned lesson about Microsoft's mafia attitudes.

I was commissioned to provide a new ring-fenced Microsoft AD Forest for the senior execs of a leading UK bank while they extricated themselves from a TPM deal that had gone horribly wrong.

Everything went well until we came to creating the mail infrastructure.

This bank had suffered for years from a lack of internal innovation and knowledge about enterprise mail that had left them with over 70 separate Microsoft Exchange domains. And on versions three levels back from the current, too.

Now, we needed a further one as the execs wouldn't accept their existing one, which was managed by the TPM partners they were trying to fire.

Microsoft sent in their best people at £2000 a day and recommended that we build a Version 5.5 domain as the curent Exchange at the time, 2003, couldn't maintain the calanders and Free/Busy information. In other words, they couldn't arrange meetings across the bank.

As the architect, I refused to accept this limitation and said that I wanted to look at other solutions, like MiraPoint. I couldn't have foreseen in my wildest dreams what would happen next.

The Microsoft account manager said in front of the meeting that he would personally go to the CIO and have me removed if any non Microsoft solution was proposed. Despite the bank's internal team sitting there, no one supported me.

Shortly after that, unwilling to accept such a compromise to what was up to then a pure design, I resigned from the project on principle.

So sometimes its not about choice, its about power and culture.

[Sam]

HAHAHAHAHAHA James, you are so BUSTED. Imagine what CT would say if he was reading this type of message!

You obviously need to go back to your office and re-read "The Blown" 10,000 times so you can better understand the power of the upsell.....