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The Fractal Enterprise, Part 1

Oct 6th, 2010 by woodylewis.

The velocity of information continues to change the enterprise. Content and

knowledge, shaped by the speed with which it reaches endpoints inside and
outside the organization, have created the fractal enterprise. Our original
construct of the fractal interface related to devices. Different planes of
information, media vectors, collapsible and expandable interfaces - these
fit neatly into the mobile space, where the web of devices continues to
grow exponentially, changing the face of publishing and other media. But
what about the enterprise as a whole? How has its interface evolved, and
what are the fractal elements?

Publishing is now a legacy process for every enterprise. Internal data once
hidden from public or partner consumption became available via e-
commerce or extranet transactions. These transactions became feeds of
information and knowledge, regular events in the stream of marketing
communications. Car companies drove customers to Web sites instead of
showrooms. Financial services companies used social media campaigns to
distract consumers from the pain inflicted by faulty product. Whether to
distribute objective data or subjective information, the enterprise publishes
24/7 from a variety of distribution points.

The fractal enterprise does more than offer reduced or expanded views of data. It enables different aspects of the business to approach
constituents according to specific needs, as demonstrated through analytics, socially harvested preferences (structured as networks of
friends), and opt-in communication. Our initial premise of fractal distribution points used the elevator metaphor to illustrate the value of
personalized, location-specific media. The fractal enterprise operates in a similar fashion, offering constituents deals on cars, loans,
video content, consumer electronics - all distributed at movable endpoints according to personalized permissions and schedules. Today,
people are talking about Facebook in the context of a movie about its founder. The media companies have discovered the fractal
interface can work in their behalf. How long before you can buy the Facebook movie on Facebook? Share it with your friends? Create
your own edit, your own mashup?

This is the fractal enterprise, part 1. Let’s see where it goes.

Posted in: Social enterprise.

http://woodylewis.com/?p=1164 (1 of 3) [11/28/10 10:39:00 AM]

The Fractal Enterprise, Part 2 | Save the Papers

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The Fractal Enterprise, Part 2

Oct 24th, 2010 by woodylewis.

The idea of a fractal enterprise grew out of my earlier observation that

information flows in vectors. I’m sure the literature of communications
theory makes that an ingenuous statement at best, but that’s generally
how I reason - empirically, with a child’s devotion to newness. The secret
of life, after all, is to rediscover. It’s also a premise of communication, for
what is a series of messages, but a series of discoveries, or rediscoveries?

Death involves discovery as well, in this case the recent passing of Benoit
Mandelbrot, father of fractal theory. I first heard of fractals and Mandelbrot
sets in the early Nineties, when my career as a Mac digital media
programmer first got off the ground. Along with the work of Escher,
Mandelbrot sets were the type of optical event that, to me at least, evoked
mystical Sixties posters, or the Op-Art that followed.

Reading Mandelbrot’s obituary was itself a fractal process, discovering the

units of subdivision in his life. He was an unconventional academic, brilliant
in discovery, erratic in conformity. His methods were dismissed by some who decried his abbreviated research. I love this quote: “If you
take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at
Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

I can certainly relate to that.

So I followed the path of his work, and found references to Felix Hausdorff. My discovery? That a fractal can have a Hausdorff dimension
greater than its topological dimension. A straightforward example of this is the British coastline, where the map of an apparently
smooth section of coast magnifies into jagged edges, resulting in what some would call an infinite length. This is why Mandelbrot was
important to cartographers.

Searching on “Hausdorff dimension” uncovered mathematical expressions that reminded me of the operations research course I took in
business school. I was able to quell the panic long enough to discover that the Hausdorff dimension relates to a vector space.

I learned that a vector space is a mathematical structure formed by a collection of vectors, objects called scalars that can be added
together and multiplied. I’ve already talked about the velocity of information, which implies both magnitude and direction. I was
http://woodylewis.com/?p=1180 (1 of 3) [11/28/10 10:40:08 AM]
Fractal Distribution Points - Part 1 | Save the Papers

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Fractal Distribution Points - Part 1

Jul 31st, 2010 by woodylewis.

Every workday morning, I enter a midtown Manhattan office building and

take the elevator. Having walked to the subway, taken a downtown local
and crosstown shuttle, and walked through heavy human traffic to the
building, I’m ready to plug into my virtual workspace. But before I reach
the office and start my laptop, I can look up in the upper left corner of the
elevator and see a small display of video and rotating graphics. Captivate
Networks owns this space, and they have my undivided attention for about
fifteen seconds. I can read news bursts, see the weather in different cities,
and make a brief to a virtual community. Almost every day, there’s a
statistic and an invitation to comment. The invitation leads to deskchatter.
com.

It’s all an obvious attempt to drive traffic, and guess what? It’s successful.
For all my immersion in digital media, I’ve become so jaded that I rarely
venture out of my predictable cocoon: NYTimes, MSNBC, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Lately, I’ve even taken a break from Twitter, though Foursquare seems to
have taken up the slack. I read Mashable, and several other digital
publications, though now more through following links from my main
sources. The pace and flow of Manhattan life have pared the indulgent streams of discretionary data, conflating all the digital, visual and
organic signals into one mashed pulse.

So what’s the appeal of Captivate? Well, the name does have Orwellian connotations. As a once-again New Yorker, though, I can go with
that. From the fractal interface point of view, it’s inevitable. If they can put displays like this over urinals in finer restaurants, as
happened in my small Bay area town some years ago, then the elevator’s a no-brainer. Some passengers don’t look up because they’re
texting. I can see an opt-in feature that would print part of the display on their device, a customized readout of localized data. It’s too
short a ride to customize the elevator display, not too mention insecure if you want to print proprietary data (”Jones from Acme Widget
waiting for you in the lobby and he’s pissed.”) But the potential is there. Captivate didn’t put the screen there for warm and fuzzies.
They saw a fractal opportunity and made the most of it.

Posted in: Journalism, Publishing, Social media.

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