You see once you strip the network narrative bare. Once you have peeled away the layers of mythology around this brave new world of the networked economy you are left with a very mundane story.

A dashboard story.

A story not so much without merit. But certainly a story that lacks the fauxtopian splendour that can deliver the kind of growth we have seen in the IT&C sector over the past 20 years

You see if the future of media is all about Find Me, Find You and Let's Exchange then it isn't so much a story about the future of media but simply the rehashing of the old IT&C monologue of the 1970's.

Here, let me show you what I mean.

We'll begin with the original MobCon trinity of Find Me, Find You and Let's Exchange that we began with as the basis of this quixotic journey back in 2009.

Now we'll expand it to include the networking dimension.

Now we'll add a central idea that suggests the objective of the market leader (i.e. The rainbow brand) in this networked economy is to simultaneously monitor, measure, manage and manipulate these networked stakeholders (i.e. networked resources) to create a significant competitive advantage. i.e. The commercial objective is for the executive team to build a better "real time" dashboard by centralising control of the RPI while decentralising and distributing the risk to the other stakeholders in the system (e.g. a Balanced Scorecard).

In effect the organisation with the most efficient and agile dashboard wins.

The commercial objective being to simultaneously deliver real time efficiency ( i.e. the centralisation of knowledge) and agility (i.e the decentralisation of activity) channelled through a branded entity (e.g. Apple).

This dashboard economy hasn't happened over night. Indeed this trend is now entering into its fifth decade. Mobile is simply the next iteration in the long wave. Social media merely a socially acceptable descriptor for the practicalities of automating the management of the networked customer (i.e. Bait, Tag, Release and Track) while moving the cost of doing business with the customer back onto the customer.

QR Codes, RFID, Mobile scanners and yes, even the much anticipated the internet of things, is just the good old Bar Code revamped and repackaged to move the next generation of IT&C technology out the door and into your hand, pocket, car, home or workplace.

Click Fraud, Identity Theft, Toxic Derivatives and Privacy Data Breaches symptomatic of the wider systemic risk of doing business on the network and an inherent weakness of the dashboard augmented economic model.

So apologies for taking so long to get here. This three year journey that was something akin to rewriting and then cutting up Gulliver's Travels before tossing the bits into the air to see where the wind carried them. But once you strip the narrative bare you discover in reality there is nothing new. It's 1970's repackaged and updated, reheated, mashed up and re-served for the networkedly connected generation of the 2010's.

A case of the same old, same old. Which perhaps explains why US innovation has stalled. Having flown us to the moon and back it simply ran out of ideas.

Still the idea has matured. Crystallised. Perhaps even fossilised. At least successfully rebranded.

But don't totally despair because, although the big ideas are long gone, things are still happening at the micro level

You see in a world of ubiquitous connectivity, connectivity becomes merely the benchmark. Counting the nodes is redundant. The competitive edge is now frequency. Or more accurately impulse.

Which means the future of the networked supply chain and the networked customer relationship is no different to the high frequency trading systems of the Wall St quants. In many ways when you take a look at search engines and advertising networks it already is. Big data exists to fuel the engine. That's why it is widely acknowledged as the new oil of the information age. It generates the "electricity", the network buzz, that allows the knowledge economy to keep running.

So welcome everybody to the dashboard economy. All you have to do now is choose which dashboard is the right one for you and work out the most effective way to profit from the experience.

All you need is a beautiful set of numbers and of course a fauxionary story to tell.

Best of luck. Remember there's gold in all that data. And if you want to make money employing the network effect remember to keep it stupid, stupid.

Copyright 2012 Digital Partners Pty Limited. All Rights Reserved.