The Information Age is not about technology - it is about communicating with people

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of the Internet is the way in which the progress towards more wide spread order and organisation is through increasing fragmentation; everything appears to be breaking up into smaller, and more specialist, niches. Similarly to the way in which information is increasing and taking many different directions, it is the fractal effect again, an inherent instability of complex systems. This phenomenon we shall be dealing with more specifically later, for the moment though, let's just consider the consequence of this effect. It may prove to yield several clues as to how to best to make use of the Internet.

The constant expansion and increased fragmentation of Internet products and services present a crucial problem for people in the Information Age. Exploiting the potentialities of the Internet will involve not simply the use of modules, but, the growing difficulties arising from their choice and selection. With an untold number of different possible modules to choose from, how is an e-commerce businessman or businesswoman to know which ones to use? How are they to know which are available or even in existence? Which modules are going to be the most appropriately to suit a required system? What are the best choices between a number of similar options. What are the best combinations when a number of modules have to be arranged to work together?

The practical reality of getting a viable e-commerce system into operation soon exposes this problem. It becomes apparent very quickly that no single person, or even any group of people will know all the answers. There are too many options available, too many modules getting out of date, too many just being created. It is a nightmare situation, which would be likely to fry the brain of any resource allocation executive of the Industrial Age.

To visualize this problem, you might imagine the Macintosh manuals as consisting of millions of pages and of being put up onto a Web site with thousands of programmers constantly adding bits, altering bits and taking bits away. This would seem to make the developer's job impossible. Even with indexing and search engines, the sheer volume of information and its constant change and fluctuation would surely seem to render a modular strategy inoperable.

It would be an impossible situation if it were left only to software to handle and organise the information. However, as the fragmenting process itself bears witness, human modules start to come into play as intermediaries. Humans step in where software solutions are unable to cope. Humans can specialise in small niche areas and keep track of changes, additions and new developments. The natural evolution of the Internet encourages a network of human information sources to act as an interface between e-commerce traders and the technology and methods they will use.

It is by such considerations that Sherlock Holmes, through his technique of induction come to the conclusion that success in e-commerce isn't at all about knowing the technology: it is about knowing the specialist and the technologists. It is about dealing and communicating with people.