Paul Watson's Attention Silos Redux

Paul Watson responds to my mild rebuke with impeccable logic:

Ed makes a good point on my list of attention sucking silos:

Apple, iTunes and his Nano are all potentially-connected segments of the same silo

Semi-ideally*, Ed is right. Apple is the silo and Apple is all knowing of my Apple.com, Apple Store, iTunes and nano silos.

But who here has worked in a large company with large databases spread across a large range of concepts? Ten to one the arse of Apple doesn’t know what the head of Apple has stored on me. Ten to one there is not a central Apple identity and attention server that aggregates all my Apple activites. I’ll bet my iTunes attention data is separate to my Apple Store attention data...

* I say semi because ideally my "Apple" silo wouldn’t be one. Currently there is a silo there though and if it has to remain then ideally it should not be segmented.

Dead-on, Paul. Reminds me of Lee Gomes' column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on SAP's enterprise systems: "SAP engineers tell tales of clerks breaking down in tears as they tried to learn the products." The inherent complexity of enterprise systems and the bureaucracies that deploy them have, for the time being, prevented most companies from truly integrating their multiple internal attention silos. Although relying upon inefficiency seems inadequate as a long-term response.

All that said, no matter what a company can or can't do with our data internally, we as individuals are still confronted with the primary problem--we can't access our data and share it across the various silos we rely upon.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy paul+watson apple