July 19, 2001
Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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| Subject: | OHS Needs to be Personal and Organizational |
Rod,
I appreciate the interest [in my work set out in your letter
on July 16,
2001].
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I have been developing my ideas for more than 30 years. I am not
currently working with anybody.
I have looked into the issues of first data management, then information
management, and then knowledge management.
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In my youth I believed that the reason that our leaders made poor decisions
was that the information tools they were using were inadequate to the task
of understand the issues and options on which they had to make decisions.
Maturity and observation have convinced me that this is not the case. Most
people are simply not trained or otherwise equipped to make workable
decisions that are in accord with reality.
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I have attempted several times to organize at least some of my ideas, and
the tools I have at hand have never been adequate. The closest I have come
is the DOS based tools developed by Neil Larson (MaxThink, etc.).
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I have also decided that the tools are not likely to get any better soon,
and that I will have to bootstrap whatever I can find to organize my ideas.
Based on the observation that "skunk works" style organizations are the ones
that actually achieve objectives, and the discovery that ability to reason
correctly is useless without a world view that corresponds rather closely to
reality, my personal vision has become:
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My experience with large groups (I consult at Boeing on Space Station,
and aerospace for most of my career) has convinced me that large organizations
are not the way to innovate anything.
In short, I believe in helping make the able more able and letting them work
on the myriad problems that are of direct interest.
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..
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The difficulty with the large social issues isn't that there aren't
enough people working on them, but that there is no way to manage them without:
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As part of the world view is the recognition that each of the complex
issues is complex because what we think of as independent variables are in fact
highly interdependent. As evidence, consider the number of "single point"
solutions proposed - just do this and the entire problem will be solved. The
reality is that any workable solution must be "multi point" in order to have
any chance of estimating the final state of the system. Without that ability,
unintended consequences are virtually guaranteed.
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Tools for massive collaboration
I believe that the assumption that multiplying the number of people working
on a problem will result in solutions, by itself, is flawed. We do need such
tools because the problem of how to support collaboration is independent of
its scalability. Consider what happens on any wide open news group - the
noise drowns out the signal. Suppose that we have a workable OHS and a great
web crawler and could organize all of the data on information or knowledge
management from everywhere on the web - what would we have? A better
solution than the equivalent library on paper, certainly. But there would
still remain the problem of correct evaluation of the material, separating
the signal from the noise, reconciling conflicting ideas and "impedance"
mismatches to arrive at the really useful and innovative results that could
potentially be derived from such a resource. Simple volume of contributors
or ideas doesn't solve problems - individuals and small groups with access
to knowledge and to each other do that.
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Therefore I support the entire idea of an OHS if I can use the result for
myself and the teams with whom I collaborate. Having an OHS that requires large
corporate funding or centralized resources that I have to depend on won't do
it.
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SDS and your tools
Speaking of tools, is SDS proprietary or is it something that I might be
able to use for myself? From what little I have seen of it, it seems to
allow at least a degree of cross coordination of information which I can't
do easily now.
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Thanks,
Sincerely,
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com
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July 16, 2001 12:31 PM
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com
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| Subject: | OHS Needs to be Personal and Organizational |
Gary,
The ideas you have contributed, for example in
your letter
on April 8, 2001, suggesting technology for KM needs to be personal. makes a
lot of sense. Consideration might be given to combining in some way personal
and organizational support.
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Jack Park
is making progress on Nexist to advance KM in the open source
community, reported on June 18, 2001.
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Recently, Lee Iverson with SRI issued preliminary requirements for NODAL and
CDR that are aimed at accomplishing OHS/DKR objectives. Lee relates in part
the need for a
stronger solution
than wordprocessing,
as you point out in
your letter
on April 8. Since Lee seems to be
focusing initially on document management, Jack's work may be closer to your
ideas. Are you working with Jack and Lee, or developing your ideas
independently?
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Sincerely,
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
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