I've been working with Bud Gibson, a University of Michigan Business School professor, who is putting together what he is calling the BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere as part of a course (BIT320) that he is teaching this Fall. Its an interesting idea and I'm eager to watch the course blogosphere evolve as the term unfolds. (Bud is considering making the space public; I'll post a link if that turns out to be the case.) Along the way, Bud, I, and others have had various discussions in an attempt to develop a clear mission statement, not only for the course itself, but for how the course relates to the larger world of knowledge-related issues. This really goes to the heart of what Bill French and I have been working on for the past four years—initially while running the Elmer project for Starbase Corporation (which as since been acquired by Borland), and more recently, as MyST Technology Partners. Here are the basic ideas in a nutshell (okay, several nutshells): - Knowledge is a key asset, if not the key asset, of most organizations.
- In the KM world, a Holy Grail is effective capture, enhancement, persistence, and transfer knowledge. (The goal of the BIT320 course is more modest, but it is a step in this direction—specifically, to develop an appreciation of why this grail is, in fact, holy.)
- Successful solutions will be those that emerge organically through small, incremental behavior changes of knowledge workers rather than asking them to use some new "KM System"—history has shown the latter approach fails far more often than not.
- Emergent systems must provide low-friction scenarios for knowledge to traverse "the last mile" in both directions, i.e., knowledge capture and knowledge dissemination
- Capture must occur anywhere (and eventually, everywhere) a knowledge worker is already working—in Word, in Excel, in e-mail, in web browsers, on PDAs, on cell phones, etc.
- Dissemination mechanisms must similarly deliver the right information into the right context at the right time. This is essential for extracting knowledge (i.e., capacity to act wisely) from the information tsunami (i.e., enormous and ever-growing volumes of data) that is already overwhelming knowledge workers. This implies there must be many dissemination mechanisms—RSS, smart tags, search, research services, e-mail notifications, pager messages, cell phone notifications, IM, and so on, as well as new, "smart" ways to help workers find stuff and—perhaps more importantly—stuff find workers. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
What will it take to get there? That is, more or less, the question Bill and I have been focusing on for years. Here are a few essential ingredients—there are, no doubt, many more, but I'm convinced these are all critical. - We need unifying knowledge meta spaces (it is impractical to imagine that existing information systems will someday all integrate with each other). Further, it must be possible to automatically merge (or virtually merge) multiple meta spaces to create larger spaces.
- We need a formalized concept of information object identity.
- We need a pervasive security and permissions model. This model must be enforced for all information access. (Consider, what should someone find when looking for information about "layoff planning"? Clearly, the answer depends on who is asking the question.)
- We need plug-in architectures to define new business logic for not-yet-understood (or even invented) requirements. New business logic should automatically inherit core capabilities such as object identity, security, etc.
- We need plug-in architectures for new (not-yet-invented) capture and dissemination technologies. Again, these should inherit all core capabilities.
- We need complete separation of (knowledge) content from (presentation) form.
- We need international standards (like XSL) to describe transformation of information from one form to another.
- We need international standards (like topic maps) for the representation and interchange of meaning.
- We need international standards (like XML, SOAP, HTTP, etc.) for platform-neutral machine-to-machine communication.
The exciting part of all of this is that we, as an industry, are getting tantalizingly close to having all the building blocks. At MyST, we've already done a number of interesting "KM" applications based on the MyST Web Services Platform and the MySmartChannels Weblog Application Server, one of which is Bud's course blogosphere. We're always on the lookout for new, interesting knowledge-related applications to attack. Feel free to contact us with ideas. |
