Confessions of a technophile

A recent Gartner report noted that social software, web mashups, multicore and hybrid processors and cloud computing are amongst the ten most disruptive technologies that will shape the information technology (IT) landscape over the next five years.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to those who have been tracking corporate IT in the last few years. Large enterprises have been the first-mover in experimenting with some of these technologies such as social networking and mashups. Others are still concerned with the security implications that these applications may bring to their IT environments and are taking a wait-and-see approach. In comparison, the benefits of multicore processors (multi-threaded applications and virtualization) should be clear to most organizations.

Security concerns aside, social software presents the ability for organizations to tap into tacit knowledge of their employees. For the longest time, IT has been too preoccupied with systems that focused on managing explicit knowledge in the form of information stored on database servers. As long as you get information into the hands of workers whenever they need it, they'll be able to gain the knowledge to do their jobs well. This assumption overlooks the difference between information and knowledge.

Information needs to be contextualized by its user for it to be meaningful. When that happens, it becomes knowledge which is hard to detach from a person's head. This makes managing knowledge harder much harder than managing information. That's why most so-called knowledge management systems are really just focused on organizing and providing access to information assets. This approach isn't going to create a learning organization that we had hoped for.

How then do we expose the knowledge work undertaken by employees? Since knowledge is created through conversations, the obvious way to make it easy for employees to look at the conversations that surround each piece of information, whether it is a document, spreadsheet, database or memo. Only then will an employee be able to understand how the information came about and the knowledge creation and often social processes behind it.

In an IBM research article on what it calls a socially translucent approach to knowledge management, the authors noted:

One of us once interviewed accountants about how they would use a (proposed) database of their company’s internal documents. A rather startling theme emerged: the accountants said that they’d love to access the documents — so that they could find out who wrote them. As one explained, ‘Well, if I’m putting together a proposal for Exxon, I really want to talk to people who’ve already worked with them: they’ll know the politics, and the history, and they can introduce me to their contacts. None of that gets into reports!’ How curious: the accountants wanted to use a data access system to access the people who produced the data. It was only through the people — and the social networks they were part of — that the accountants could get the knowledge and social resources they really needed.

IBM's proposal is to create digital systems that, by making users and their activities visible to one another, we can engage our social intelligence. Its work is still in the experimental stage, but the results seem promising so far. Babble, the proof-of-concept system, was designed to show text conversations taking place within a company as well as the density of participants. If you see a crowd forming, there's a chance that you'll be curious about what's going on and may want to participate. There are other intricacies in Babble which are well-described in this paper.

In some earlier posts, I talked about participatory librarianship which calls for libraries to facilitate conversations among users. Dave Lankes, the brainchild behind this concept, has given presentations which showed mockups of interfaces that mirror what Babble is trying to achieve. While the idea is compelling, I doubt participatory librarianship will come to fruition in a practical sense anytime soon. Most of it is just in the conceptual stages, and besides, there just isn't enough innovation going on in the design of library systems right now that's even close to Babble.