Hi Marcia Great question. I could take it in so many directions. We can start with the word "transaction" where "action" is immediately noticeable. That means, for me at least, a deliberate event that changes the state of something. So like applying a credit to your account ledger to settle an invoice or the closing of a sale. Thinking about it further, both of these little examples showcase a change in control or ownership with a balancing form of consideration. Another example might be less mercantile, say sharing an idea online - although, again, there would be an exchange at work here too. What I was trying to do is to highlight that there is a difference (albeit a fine one) between a collection of data that has been assembled for analysis (say historical information) and the environment where events occur, generating data as a consequence but also effects that change something. When we think of an Internet of Things (IoT), we can visualize this as instructions & algorithms being issued and machines perking up and swinging into action as a result - perhaps then gobbling up data from their domains and acting according to the guidance provided. The provision of guidance is an catalytic action from which a cascade of consequent actions flow. It gets a little fuzzy when we acknowledge that a semantic web populated with data is itself meaningful and it can, just by what it contains, guide the actions of any agent, human or otherwise, that interacts with it. And the data reflects the trace of past actions. Data are not neutral, ever. But actions have impacts and impacts need "owners". Of course, how do we match owners to impacts, assigning responsibility? Data, of course. More obscurely, and annoyingly, I have also been working a lot on "knowledge" (for reasons best kept secret for the moment) and on the dynamic relationship between existing knowledge (precedence), decision (actions), experience (phenomena), data (representations), information (communication) and new knowledge. The movement through decisions > actions > events > experience and then back up into information exchanges establishes, among other things, responsibility. Without this dynamic, and the role played by the assignment of responsibility for outcomes (effects), then the process whereby knowledge emerges and evolves breaks down. Nothing all that revolutionary, although to survey some of the modern academic literature on the topic you might come to see it as revolutionary. In this latest "Crazy Joe" adventure, I was provoked by the delightful Reg Revans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reg_Revans), one of the very first professors of management who came to criticize the academy in often scathing terms. He is known for introducing the idea of "action learning" as a way to try out ideas and theories in real, operational ways, and then to learn from the consequences - like getting into trouble, breaking something, losing something, sending the union into fits of rage. I think he was onto more than we appreciate and even his anti-academic vitriol starts to ring true given the evident importance he placed on having the people who are responsible, the managers themselves, performing the action learning - not the consultants or experts who don't "feel" the consequences in the same way. Actions > Events > Consequences > Responsibility > Learning. I better stop here. I think my comment is longer than my original post. Typical. G.I. Joe - Action Figure

iSALSA - Iterative SALSA I do agree that iteration is essential and that any new thing being added has the potential to change everything. It's sort of a "hermeneutical circle" kinda thing. And yes, my admonition that this is a group activity means that some selection of stakeholders are identified and engaged just to start the process off. Perhaps the first S really means "Stakeholders Synchronizing on Situation Scope". I better stop there. In the experience I was alluding to, from whom I hope to see something shortly, the limits ran a wide gambit from physical distribution, a harsh natural environment, cultural legacies, historical and emergent engagement models, and a gateau of layered governmental bureaucracy. All of these established limits that, depending on where you wanted to go, were going to be encountered - and sooner rather than later. In each case, though, it became evident which limits were the most irksome and therefore where energies towards relaxing them (after the fashion of the Theory of Constraints) would add much needed room to manoeuvre. Also, limits may be tackled by - as in your example - by playing the game by preparing a business case so that the budgetary limit is changed from five digits to six. All of this is familiar territory, and people have grown accustomed to using one or another tactic. With SALSA, I was trying to add one more possibility. Specifically, I wanted to add one that leveraged Appreciative Inquiry and that gave it a well-grounded footing in practical reality (I do find that Appreciative Inquiry can wander in directions that sometimes feel like a New Age Retreat with a lot of talk about dreaming). I take, and endorse, your comments as encouraging me to continue along those lines. Great to hear from you Tom! Joe

Hi Vinish. Interesting observation. And exactly to the point. I like the comparison to children - as this strikes a chord (as a parent whose children have grown up to the point where they can now govern me - or at least provide cautionary words of wisdom when I go a little off track). Unpredictable is not exactly the same as "completely unpredictable". There are things that will be foreseeable and for which reasonable preparations can be made. As the usage scenarios grow more complex and less predictable, sometimes we find that the best things we can do is be yet more clear and precise about what we are providing - so that as people set about doing something weird at least they have a few points of reference that they can count on. This marries up with the hard work of thinking about, and articulating, in formalized and useful ways, the "aboutness" of what we are providing. It is hard because "aboutness" almost always entails some sense of the possible usage (function) of the thing so this brings us back to thinking about the other side - where people (users / partners / customers) are going to do "weird things". As a random memory, I once worked on a large, multi-national Naval project where we were trying to provide a digital onboard learning and reference library that would be stocked with video resources (and this is way long ago - way before such things were commonplace). The issue was to determine which videos merited production when we could not be sure about how and why they would be accessed. We actually found, to our surprise, that the resources that were most heavily used - to the point of being consulted continuously - were the videos about the underlying theories - down to the physics and mathematics behind everything - that explained why certain systems were designed the way they were. It turned out that no matter how weird the usage scenario was, or the how strange the maintenance circumstance was, people wanted to understand why things were the way they were - in large part because they were about to do something weird and they wanted to know how crazy their ideas were. This is a lesson that has never left me.

Hi Larry. Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. An excellent question. I am thinking that an answer indeed lies in the future. There have been success stories where the vision has been realized within the specific context of a given organization - typically ones creating or sustaining large-scale equipment systems - but those techniques still await distillation into a fully repeatable method and system. No surprise, this is one of my skunk works projects - and it is a project being advanced in collaboration with others so I am routinely pulled back down to earth. The good news is that from all those stubbed toes and bumped foreheads we have accumulated the necessary lessons so this final step doesn't seem that big anymore. Joe

Hi Vinish I have not yet had time to look at the Atomic Design in detail, but it definitely looks interesting / promising. I think that there is a concurrent line of thinking about finer granularity that applies to application and experience design just as I have been sketching out for "content". In fact, in my treatment of content objects - they all do need to come together. This actually takes us back to classical Configuration Management where a central tenet is that you manage functionality as your primary focus and allow different components or services get you what you need. This means that you cannot meaningfully manage content in isolation from how it will be delivered and used. Similarly the design of the experiences that will be enabled cannot be meaningfully completed or managed or realized in isolation of the content that will fill in its branches and leaves. I first tackled this line of thinking in a presentation I gave over 20 years ago! Sarah's observations are great and they echo my same experiences and observations from Stuttgart. The German marketplace, with the prominence of the machine industry and their evident interest in (and leadership of) Industry 4.0 being hard to miss. And I do think that the story I sketched out aligns perfectly with your points about "Content - Brick by Brick". Thanks for your comments and for the reference links. I will continue to explore Atomic Design...

Hi Vinish Better late than never...I just caught this comment. Thanks for your comment. You have zeroed right in on what I think is the hub of the matter - understanding content as "potential information", as what we prepare in order to perform good information transactions. And the kitchen and table analogy is one that personally love. See my keynote from Lavacon 2011 where I take this analogy to almost ludicrous extremes: http://www.slideshare.net/jgollner/the-content-revolution-lavacon-2011-keynote

Hi Sarah I hear you on the sufficiency of the root concept of "content management". Elsewhere I have said that if we define "content" properly then all the hyphenated variations become unnecessary. So if we play the game well, "we" will win back the generic content management term. The challenge today is that when you utter the core phrase "content management" then each silo will automatically add a preferred hyphenated variation and hear nothing else. In truth, I use "content management" straight-up, Full Monty. And I am often quite obnoxious about it - interrupting people from this and that silo with "hold it, you are not really talking about the content are you?" from which puzzled looks and breathless incomprehension cascade into a dazzling symphony. All this brings me back to ICBMs. Joe

Hi Larry Yes, you are right that I could have spent some specific time on the chasm between technical content and marketing content. It is one that is worthy of its own treatment. And as luck would have it, I wrote about this very topic in TC World Magazine and that article has just come online - see Technical Content Marketing: Why content marketing and technical communication need each other (http://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/content-strategies/article/why-content-marketing-and-technical-communication-need-each-other/). And I think that there are several reasons why ICBMs shouldn't be pushed too far... Joe