Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
FT.com, London, 2000
Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
FT.com, London, 2000
ISBN 0273650238
Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
As should be immediately obvious from the book's cover, or from the most cursory inspection of the Cluetrain.com website, this is an irreverent, iconoclastic arson-attack which just happens to be available in public and on paper.
If the whole point of requirements engineering is to ensure that users get the systems they need and that the voice of the customer is heard throughout development, then this book is almost a justification for RE. Except that it roundly belabours, in passing, outmoded ideas like 'user' and 'customer', if those terms imply that there is some large system under the control of some hierarchical management structure, served by an oppressed mass of frustrated workers who have to use the system. Enid Mumford would approve, though she was more muted in her approach to the social aspects of systems design.
And this is the crunch. Centralised power-structures, such as the corporations assaulted in this book, but also governments and institutions of other kinds, instinctively respond to change by trying to reinforce the status quo. Systems are, for them, technical devices to improve command and control.
But what if a billion customers - and a billion workers - do not want to be centrally planned and controlled? Suddenly, with the Web and e-mail, they have voices of their own. Not the Voice of the People as proclaimed by more or less self-appointed political representatives. Not the Voice of the Customer, as proclaimed by more or less out-of-touch Marketing Departments. Not the Voice of the Corporation, as proclaimed by the high and mighty. But, quite simply, the long-suppressed voices of the people themselves.
The Web has given everyone (well, everyone in countries rich enough to offer nearly-free webspace and e-mail addresses) the chance to publish their own home page - or anything else they feel like saying, out loud and to the whole world. But the vanity-publishing phase only lasted a moment before people realized they could do more than that. They could ask questions - and get instant replies. They could argue, discuss, criticize, joke about oppression, organize resistance faster than a thousand Samizdat printing-presses, and generally subvert and steal customers from slow, outmoded, out-of-touch corporations. Call that requirements engineering if you like!
The massive, belly-rumbling, booming joke is that the workers the corporation hierarchies are designed to oppress, and the people protected by all those security procedures and firewalls, are the same humans that the same corporations are trying to woo as customers. So are they trying to control us, limit our creativity, manage us, or feed us and guide us as to what we should consume? All of these! And they haven't yet seen the inconsistency. Meanwhile, virus- and attachment-free emails, just innocent pieces of text, slide imperceptibly into and out of the corporations' firewalls - straight into the minds of the people inside and outside.
What if the people who do the work know better than their bosses what the customers want and what is wrong with the product? What if the customers want answers, and want them now? What if everyone talks to everyone else? Where does that leave traditional businesses?
As the cover blurb says,
"It's magnificently overstated and yet entirely correct: the web changes the way people and markets meet and work, in almost every way, and a remarkably high percentage of companies just don't get it - yet."
This is essential reading for people everywhere. It's funny, exhilarating, stupid, and a delight. By the way, it's a cheap paperback, too. Buy it today.
© Ian Alexander 2000
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