New "Message is the Medium" column at Knowledge Management magazine, called Faster Knowledge. Extends the observations of David Reed about the value of networks, into the real-time communication era.

"Boyd's Law, or the Law of Synchronization Amplification:

As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.

This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners -- passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities -- and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.

This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to take action on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates to higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation that David Reed was getting at.

In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. Its not quasi mystical chaos theory -- it's just practical."