October 2004

By Greg Rosenthal
Special to FYI Online

Art Fritzson

Art Fritzson, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and a leader with a track record of recognizing emerging technologies, believes that cavemen had a lot in common with today’s digital elite: They formed communities so they could thrive in an untamed environment. When Fritzson addressed the fall Graduate School faculty meeting on September 18, 2004, he urged UMUC’s faculty and administrators to teach this same skill to their students.

“Historically, people always form communities,” said Fritzson, who also serves as a member of the advisory board to UMUC’s executive MBA program. “You start as cavemen, but as soon as you have industrialization and cities, people cannot cognitively deal with that number of people, so they always form communities of the right size. It happens naturally; you see it in the formation of neighborhoods within cities.”

Fritzson applied that same observation to life on the Web. “Internet communities are virtual neighborhoods,” he said. “In fact, the Internet gives you the ability to be a part of many communities.” And, most importantly, he added, communities of people with like interests organize information in ways that make sense.

To Fritzson, the Internet’s “wildness” comes from the minimal cost of creating, disseminating, and accessing online content. After paying a small initial cost, Internet users can consume a staggering volume of data at no extra charge. Yet a world of free information, combined with information overload, can create chaos, Fritzson said. To counter the chaos, forces in a community often intervene to restore order.

Fritzson offered the online auction site eBay as an example of how Internet communities can self-regulate. As a global “flea market,” said Fritzson, eBay “brings lots of little vendors to lots of little buyers” with “high information flow in both directions,” leading to a “profitable use of the zero cost of information.”

But how can eBay buyers trust eBay sellers in such a huge online community? eBay allows buyers to rate sellers, and all buyers can view those ratings. Sellers therefore have a real incentive to deal honestly. But, Fritzson added, that kind of self-regulating system only works to the extent that buyers are willing to make the effort to rate the sellers.

Such community citizenship and involvement forms the core of the concept of “netcentricity,” which Fritzson described as promoting and encouraging communities of interests that will reuse information assets. Fritzson calls the two pillars of netcentricity “Thing One” and “Thing Two,” which are really questions and answers that help make these communities work:

• Thing One: “Have you asked friends for help? Establish or seek a community of people already together on this new thing who are experts.”
• Thing Two: “Are you helping your friends? Not just asking for help, it’s contributing and paying your dues. If you had a good experience, it’s your duty to go back and share that, and the same with the bad.”

Fritzson appealed to UMUC to teach its students how to create such communities, thereby helping make sense out of the vast information in their respective fields.

Sal Monaco, UMUC’s graduate school dean, has known Fritzson for years, and described him as “one of the most innovative and creative people I know, someone who always challenges the status quo and the traditional way of doing business.” A graduate of Union College in New York, Fritzson spends his free time with Celeste, his wife of 20 years, and their two sons, David, 16, and Daniel, 9.