Matrix Overload..

Jeff and Alwin talk about information overload. 

Jeff: "the problem is that even with the news aggregators we're drinking from a firehose. Organize the information, cross-index it, make it searchable/linkable/available 24/7 and GOOOOOSHHH!"

I think it was "sipping from a firehose" playing on the idea of sipping from a garden hose. Lately it feels like being at the bottom of Niagara Falls. 

A Neal Stephenson story called a descendant of the Internet "The Spew." I sometimes think of it as "The Cacophony" with all those voices muttering and shouting into the river.

Why do water metaphors work?

[a klog apart]

Because we're pretty sure we're drowning?

Appropriate that this is number 165 in the list of items in my aggregator that somehow still deserve attention as I try to dig out from the hole I've fallen into as I rebuild my system (thanks for the various sympathetic comments - the gremlins are still lurking).

When I first got into the information systems field in the 70s I thought the goal was to collect and manage the data better so that managers could make better decisions (I was young and naive).  Lately, I've been thinking of Gerry Weinberg's observation (or perhaps it was Russell Ackoff) that whenever you solve your most important problem, your second most important problem gets a promotion.  Most of what I've seen and read around the topic of KM seems to forget this particular piece of wisdom.

I don't accept that you can eventually get enough data to make the decisions self-evident and eliminate judgment, nor do I accept the notion that you can retreat into faith in intuition. For me the answer, such as it is, lies in trying to be a better thinker and to help others become better thinkers. To understand the limits of data and information and to understand that the job always demands judgment. I don't ever expect to see a Wisdom Management System.

One quote that I like and have used before in this context comes from Samuel Butler (AFAIK):

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

9:19:26 PM •  • comment  

Update on KM and Organizational Learning Conference.

...

Warren Sterling, Ph.D., Director, Development Partnerships for Teradata gave an interesting presentation about Technology and KM/OL.  He spoke more from a CRM framework, but he gave some interesting points to consider regardless of application.  For example, he distinguished between structured and unstructured data.  This has a spillover effect on tacit and explicit.  Most of what is interesting to a business is the unstructured data.  That is all of the things a business "knows" about its processes, cutomers, products, etc.  This information is usually not captured.  The way I interpreted this is that unstructured data is actually a subset of tacit information. 

Using the words structured and unstructured has helped me with my project for class.  My project is an attempt to capture all of the unstructured data about my company's e-commerce's activities.  I would not have used this framing, but in doing so, it has allowed for a systematic approach to capturing the data.  I think this was Warren's main point....

[tracey wik's Radio Weblog]

The structured/unstructured distinction actually goes back to the late 70s/early 80s in the early stages of DSS applications.  The first automated applications dealt only with structured data when all information systems issues were shoehorned onto 80-column punch cards. With the advent of word processing, spreadsheets, and the PC, data that never made it into systems was now routinely captured and stored in automated systems.

When you're dealing with structured data, you spend lots of time as a designer thinking through how to organize and manage it. Unstructured data sort of snuck up on us. Initially, it represented a very small fraction of the data stored in automated systems and the unstated assumption was that the goal was to produce the final document (memo, financial report, whatever). Moreover, because of the PC, the volume of this data wasn't visible in the way the the volumes of structured data were. It seemed natural to let each person keep track of their own unstructured data or to let the word processing group deal with it. By the time we realized the wealth of knowledge that was buried in these unstructured sources, it was nearly too late. I've seen estimates that place the volume of unstructured data at 90% of the volume of data storage in organizations.

What we're left with is a huge mass of bytes that might contain information and knowledge of huge potential value. It has the advantage of been largely digital, but the huge disadvantage that it was initially collected and "organized" without thought as to its potential. So Tracey ends up with her challenges of how to manage all this potential while the research wonks have already moved on to the interesting possibilities of creating even more unstructured data that somehow describes the emotional state of customers at ATMs.

There's a nasty disconnect between the technical problems that are interesting and intriguing to work on from a research point of view and the mundane challenges of slogging through the terabytes of memos, presentations, spreadsheets, and email littering hard drives everywhere. The payoff lies in dealing with the mundane. The management challenge is that the payoff is more likely to come from some thought and discipline rather than from a technology silver bullet.

8:49:21 PM •  • comment  

Jenny dragged herself up to Kellogg on Tuesday to offer her Shifted Information presentation to my KM class. Between her presentation, demos, props, and questions from the audience she easily filled up the entire session.

She tells me that an audience of MBAs is a bit different than her usual one of middle-aged parents and librarians (Negorponte's digital homeless), but the material certainly played well. In particular it helped put a number of the business KM issues we've been thinking about into a larger context of both public policy and of corporate responsibility to the community.

A great job and great fun to meet one of the bloggerati face-to-face! Next goal, getting all the Prairie bloggers together for lunch (preferably at some more cental location than Evanston)

10:47:08 AM •  • comment  

I managed to trash Windows 2000 on my laptop machine on Monday.  What went wrong or how remains the usual mystery that it does with MS operating systems. Whatever it was, the system would not boot.

Fortunately, all the data was currently backed up (wonder of wonders), but I still had to reinstall Windows. All sorts of settings are missing or need to be recreated.  The simplest solution is pretty much to rebuild the machine from the ground up.

I decided to make omelettes out of this mess and have been rethinking what apps to reinstall. I tend to collect lots of software to check out so the machine was getting a bit on the crufty side. Radio, of course, was just about the first application I reinstalled (and among the easiest to recover). But I am way behind in reviewing and posting.

Of course, all of this happens three weeks before the end of the quarter/academic year. Lots of penetrating questions and observations from my students, which I choose to interpret as proof positive of the quality of my instruction

10:20:30 AM •  • comment