The Promise of the Paperless Office

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

Have some faith! I know you are still drowning in reams of paper cluttering up our file folders, cabinets and desks. While the promise of the paperless office has not yet come to fruition, it is closer than manned Mars landings, jetpacks, Jetson-like Space Needle houses and all of the other false hopes for the future that have been dangled in front of us over the years.

Consider the evolution of document management in the workplace. A scant 30 years ago, IBM Selectric typewriters pounded out single, impact-printed pages. Enormous secretarial pools were in hired to produce, copy, and file multiple hardcopies and their faint carbon-paper cousins. The records and storage areas of large companies looked like that final warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

With the widespread adoption of Xerography, fewer people were needed to produce yet more paper. And word processing and printing, the first wave of desktop publishing, gave free license for every desk with a printer to create as many paper copies as wanted as rapidly as possible-again, decreasing the workforce need, but increasing the amount of paper ...

Add to this new legal requirements and regulations (Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA medical requirements come to mind almost immediately) and we have a drastic increase in paperwork, and a dramatic decrease in the number of people employed to handle it.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, everything that can be digital, will be digital. It's not that data storage systems aren't large enough or well-connected enough to contain and distribute the information, it's the perception that digitization alone is insecure that slows adoption. Everyone has had a hard drive crash that has cost then information. Everyone has seen portable media morph over the years from 5 -inch floppies, to 3-inch floppies, to CDs, to DVRs, to flash memory, raising the question "will I risk losing my information if I store it on media that becomes obsolete?"

At Lux we are building workflow and information management systems that are safe and secure. They reside on standard platforms, are extensible, and are based on data structures that will allow for easy transition into newer systems as technology changes and, presumably, improves. Using these systems drastically reduces the need to produce, fax, and store paper copies. As widespread adoption of similar systems moves forward, we can all expect to see less paper and a few more tress left standing. Just think of the positive environmental changes when the last of the daily newspapers and the phone books convert to pure, paperless digital versions. It is not matter of, "if," just a matter of "when."

Red Velvet Cyber Cake

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

I remain as amused as ever by the daily contents of my inbox. A recent study has concluded that 50-80% of all email is now SPAM, and while I could easily insert an anti-spamming tirade here, please bear with me as I seek the proverbial silver lining.

Internet apocrypha, messages from and sites on the Internet of dubious authenticity, are among the most entertaining things I see on a day-to-day basis. The evolution of these messages probably precedes the fax-lore of the 70s and 80s (you know the old stories, the Red Velvet Cake recipe wrestled from the mean-spirited restaurant, the million dollar cookie recipe supposedly spread via fax and Xerox to avenge some misdeed or other). Stories like these made their way into early email chain-letters as well, and I still have people forward me stories about the cookie recipe as if it is real. That must be *some* cookie!

Newer messages often involve a government minister or third world potentate offering the recipient vast sums of money to temporarily watch over his assets while he flees his destabilized country. The entertaining part is the subtle differences between the requests ... the increasing sums of money, the improbable names of the government ministers, the amusing salutation identifying you, the recipient, as a "man of great honor and distinction well known to [mysterious unnamed people] held in common." One wonders why the mails persist, unless they are finding pay-dirt somewhere, somehow (the scam being that you have to let the potentate know all of your financial information so that he can "transfer the funds" ... which he surely would).

Other messages include the importance of cheaply had prescription drugs-principally those which enhance sexual performance and/or ward off depression. One imagines the scruffy bulk of sexually frustrated internet users weeping in despondency, awaiting the salvation of the prescient spammer.

Then there are the stock scams aimed at elevating a particular issue to the benefit of a few selected spam recipients ... a wonderful gesture from those "in the know" who are selflessly sharing the leaked information. As I re-read that last sentence, I suppose the same thing could be said of any stockbroker, though.

I'll talk about apocryphal websites sometime in the not too distant future as well - sites that discuss the real history of Victorian steam robots and how England is actually the 51st American state. Remember: it must be real, because it's on the Internet!

The Heavy Burden of Awareness

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

The Internet is still in its infancy; indeed, it is still embryonic. The social/technical aspects of its ascendancy are no less dramatic and in no smaller degree "real" than the evolution of actual global consciousness, a human awareness that transcends the individual. This is why the Internet is the greatest expression of human ingenuity since the advent of fire.

So we see that the Internet can be both democratic and totalitarian; it is both private and consensus-driven, it shines light into the dark corners of the human psyche, but also highlights the real terrors of human mind... it embodies all that is good about our cultures, and all that is bad. In short, it functions as our first collective mind desperately trying to sort out and give priority to the impulses of its constituency: the users, the lurkers, the authors, the artists, the media, the rich, the poor. We see in it the most noble and base of our impulses. It is a simulation of human consciousness itself.

For every World Vision (reaching out to the haves to help the have-nots), there is a Prussian Blue (white supremacist children singers); for every political action committee dedicated to improving neighborhoods and government, there are pornographers and online gamblers. It is a reflection of our values and priorities in real time, growing every larger and more inclusive.

I think the promise of good that comes with the Internet outweighs the bad; but with it comes the heavy burden of awareness. The Internet mind-share is so vast, the perspectives so varied that the sheer weight of information threatens to destabilize the user... to send his mind careening as if he is staring into the sea from cliff ledge. We no longer have the convenience of being able to accept one version of the truth; we must avail ourselves of what is there, and we mustn't shirk away from the responsibility that the first collective of human experience demands of us.

Ultimately, we will see what kind of collective mind we have…will its pathologies outweigh its strengths? Is our collective mind a healthy one?

Thinking and Doing

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

Back in the day, there were no schools or certification programs to train young people who were interested in Internet development. Indeed, most Internet companies between 1994 and 2001 were staffed with an eclectic group of software developers, writers, marketing people, and inspired enthusiasts who could see the promise in what was then a brand new field of endeavor.

As any industry develops, however, certification and training programs began to crop up to respond to the needs of the private sector. The results are mixed, as one might expect in a novel field. In my opinion, an opinion I've stated elsewhere, the people who are best suited for the Internet service industry are people focused not on software, information management, or marketing only, but on the liberal arts as a whole.

The field remains so eclectic, so challenging, and so diffuse, that those who focus too much in any one field of specialization can entirely miss the gestalt of the whole. Liberal arts students are able to see the forest for the trees and have minds supple enough to understand that the Internet is more than just a software development platform, more than just a vast collection of ever-changing bits of information … it is a cosmos unto itself-an economy, a library, a social network, and so much more that we can only guess at.

In practical terms, vertical specialization and training are necessary and there are some good programs in design and development, to be sure. I have seen promising but mixed results from the University of Washington's I-School (the notion that information management on the Internet is evolving out of Library management is itself interesting, and there are superb faculty members at the I-School including people like Senior Lecturer Mike Crandall). The I-School produces superb information architects several of which we have in our employ here at Lux, but it still is only a narrow slice of viewing the operation and, indeed, meaning of the Internet.

I always say this is a creative business, a technical business and a business business. The best training is still a generalized one that supports innovation. Learn to think and learn to do.

Modern Publishing

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

The art and science of publishing is old-older than Gutenberg and movable type, older than the illuminated manuscripts of the so-called Dark Ages, and older than the papyri of the Egyptians. It is an essential human activity-the creation, organization, and dissemination of information.

All that has really changed is the technology and the media type, and, while it's arguable that our relationship to the information has changed over time (it is more immediate, it is more pervasive, it is communal, it is overwhelming in its vastness), the Internet and digital technology are really the modern equivalent of the printing press … and the movies … and television … and the telephone ... et al.

At Lux, we feel that content can be created efficiently and inexpensively as a single source, and then extended across various media and devices to reach an intended audience. Instead of using one author for help files, another author for user documentation, and yet another author to write web materials (each of them essentially covering the same ground with slightly different media-related emphases); why not create all of this related content once without re-writing the same material over and over again at greater expense?

Content may be King, but distribution gets the job done.

Soon we'll be living in a world where all of our information and entertainment are digitally delivered to our homes, our offices, and ourselves. The promise of easily accessible, inexpensively distributed information is upon us. Which does however suggest further problems … what do we do with all of that information? Next time …

Everything That Can be Digital, Will be Digital

By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, LuxWorldwide.com

I found myself standing in the parking lot of Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard last week, and my mind thought back to better days--better days, that is, for Tower Records, which recently declared bankruptcy and announced its departure from the music retail business with a graduating sale of its inventory.

Just as video killed the radio star, digital download has killed the compact disc - and, apparently, those who re-sell them. Last week, EMI Music Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alain Levy told the London Business School that the CD was dead…that music companies will no longer be able to sell them without offering "value-added" material.

Musical download and streaming multimedia are but the initial calling cards for our expanded Internet revolution. An old acquaintance of mine, former Razorfish CEO Jeff Dachis, used to say, "what can be digital, will be digital" and his words are ringing more prophetic than ever.

Lux and many other companies try to develop content independent of platform or media type. Companies have a message to deliver and, in a digital age, the nature of that content should be device independent, platform independent, and media independent. Now more than ever, the adage "write once, use many" is making sense.

It was a lesson lost on Tower Records, I'm afraid, and I must admit I felt a little choked up standing there in Hollywood, in the shadow of Spago and the "Riot" House hotel… how the mighty are fallen.