Order From Disorder

Entropy as commonly understood is a measure of disorder.  As the phase changes the entropy reduces. For example, ice has less entropy compared to water. The newer definition of Entropy is now changing from a measure of disorder to “Energy Dispersal”. This definition is very apt in the current Information Age. As we drive in the “Information highway”,we occasionally tend to get lost in its many byelanes. Our focus, ideas, goals tend to get dispersed in this journey. As individuals or individuals in corporates we generate brilliant ideas but many times it dies along the way. Let me explain it a bit more. Have you ever felt that you have a great idea and you “tweet” or share with your friends on “facebook” or you send an email to a colleague in office? In the vast clutter of web information, your idea gets sucked in bits and bytes and gets lost in the labyrinth of servers and storage….never to be heard of again. Ofcourse, not all the ideas generated may be brilliant but imagine if these ideas goes through an ideation process, gets nourished and delivered in its magnificent form? The individual gets his or her credit and humanity is much better for it.

 

 

Is Order from  Disorder possible? Is there a way  to channelize ideas to execution? Is there a way to churn these vast clutter of data in to meaningful information? This is precisely what some new age aspirants are attempting. Deriving Simplicity from Complexity is their goal. A company called Aikonlabs(www.aikonlabs.com) in India has developed an Idea Management application that channelizes the idea generated in the social media fabric and within the corporate network, pushes it through process gates, gets the idea validated through different stakeholders and gets the idea navigated through an execution cycle and collaborative space and voila! … you get a working model of the idea. The company is trying to prove that ideas can be weaved through the boundaries of Social Media, Academia and the high corporate walls without compromising intellectual property rights. At the same time they are also preventing ideas getting lost in the oblivion of bits and bytes.

 

Another interesting technology that is attempting to make meaning out of the disorder is enCapsa. When we sit within the four walls of a corporate, our only source of information is what comes from the corporate database. A database that is structured – of rows and columns. But in a large enterprise there can be numerous applications that stores the same data in their proprietary structure in different ways. For example “Customer Name” in one database could be “Account Name” in another database. It could be just “Name” in the email database. What about unstructured data flowing in from other sources aka social media? They do not even come under purview of the organizations today to know the business trend. As a matter of fact, many products are vilified or glorified in the lanes of twitter and facebook. If these information does not form the business intelligence input of the corporate analysis…ahem…they may not be even in tune with what the Gen ‘Y’ wants! In a nutshell, organization of today needs to integrate both structured and unstructured data to do a true analysis to arrive at Sales and Products strategies or to that matter even product design.  That’s what companies like enCapsa are trying to do – integrate the “boundary less” world to the four walls of the corporate.

Creating Order from Disorder is what these new trailblazers are up to…..