THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700





Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 10:11:44 -0800

03 00050 61 00113001



Mr. John Deneen
jjdeneen@ricochet.net
Deneen Consulting
Street address
Walnut Creek, CA Zip

Subject:   Mel Chew, Ideas for Letter on KM and Doug

Dear John,

Following up your call this evening, here are some ideas to consider in completing the draft you submitted to promote your vision for an advanced communication frastructure. This is probably only a style issue, but my sense is you need less detail, and instead focus on single, or just a few big points that impact time and cost savings, what Eric calls the "elevator" explanation. Something like...



Mel,

Would like to alert you about an event in the next 3 - 6 weeks that will honor Doug Engelbart who is being awarded the National Medal of Technology this weekend by President Clinton in Washington D.C. SRI is planning a local event in about a month, so that more people can meet Doug and honor his work developing key advances like the mouse and linking, further explained in the citation for his award.

You can see that Doug's goal has been to improve efficiency of knowledge work, like management and engineering. This past year Doug has led an ad hoc team meeting at SRI to create new technology in Knowledge Management that saves time and money. Recently NIH has indicated plans to support the project, as reported in a meeting on October 17, 2000.

One of our contributors, Rod Welch, has developed a key piece of Knowledge Management, which he calls SDS. Implementation seems to address a lot of the issues we wrestled with at Bechtel, and in the labs, of tracking complex events by linking and organizing information into chronologies of cause and effect. The US Army Corps of Engineers tried Welch's method under a contract for Communication Metrics, and report it saved time and money on a big project in the Bay Area.

The abstract of USAC's report caught my eye, because it mentions accountability. There is quite a push in the labs and other agencies for ways to establish better accountability, so SDS and Com Metrics might be something to investigate. I am interested in your views about pursuing this opportunity.

From my perspective, SDS and Com Metrics are one part of a larger mosaic that cries out for a strong entrepreneur to get out ahead of the field in Knowledge Management, as the next hot technology gaining attention of government and industry.

Many key people will attend the local event planned for Doug in a few weeks, so you might want to attend and meet Doug, Rod and other luminaries, with an eye toward forming serious business opportunities in KM.

Please let me know if you want to attend. I can get you an invitation, and would like to hear your views about the KM area.

Blah, blah, blah....

...


Something like the above makes more sense to me, but I do not know Mel, and have not really worked with investors, so do not presume too much here. You might expand a bit on your "big picture" view of the different technologies which you think can be pulled together.

Thanks for continuing to plug SDS and Com Metrics. Possibly sending the letter through web mail would illustrate the advantages and meaning of Knowledge Management. For many people, KM is still a foreign term.

Please keep me posted on progress.

Sincerely,

THE WELCH COMPANY



Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net


BCC

  1. DeHart, Bill, bdehart@home.com ,
  2. Jones, Morris E., morris.jones@intel.com
  3. Welch, Millie, mwelch@lillick.com