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March 25, 2002
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03 00050 61 02032501
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Mr. Garold L. Johnson
dynalt@dynalt.com
Dynamic Alternatives
http://www.dynalt.com/
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Subject:
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Intelligence Anytime Anywhere on the Internet
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Paperless Office a New Way of Thinking and Working
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Dear Gary,
Thanks very much for feedback in
your letters
today commenting on the
redundant link feature recently added to SDS. In addition to your guidance,
credit also goes to
Doug Engelbart
for original inspiration in his NLS program
developed at SRI, and more recently to
Eugene Kim
who developed purple numbers
based on Doug's earlier work.
..
Your three (3) letters today submitted via email....
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SDS and Purple numbers
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Issues with sample "purple number" files
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Questions on SDS redundant links
...illustrate significant leverage for improving productivity through
better communication and collaboration from applying redundant links in the SDS
environment of
Knowledge Space
(see POIMS and
Jack Park's letter on May 3,
2000). Flexible structure and organization in
SDS
make it possible to convert a
larger share of daily working information into useful
intelligence that makes communication and collaboration effective.
..
Many people feel that better communication and collaboration drive
productivity of management for saving time and money. These ambitions have
been frustrated
because improvement has proven harder to accomplish than expected.
Peter Drucker
makes
this point in his book Management Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices
reviewed on November 30, 1993. For example, SRI had important discussions with
NIH
about this subject, reported during a meeting on October 17, 2000. A few
months later,
Pat Lincoln
related slow progress improving collaboration at SRI.
A year later,
Eric Armstrong
worried on October 3, 2001
that productivity is paralyzed because it
is too hard to find anything; a short time after Eric's report,
Enron
collapsed because it could not align
daily work with objectives, requirements and commitments, reported on February
4, 2002.
..
For many years, SDS has provided a new way of working
intelligently,
as noted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on March 28, 1997 (see as well
Eric Armstrong's
letter on September 16, 2001, and on September 24 comments by
Morris Jones). Similarly, Gary's initial experience today
using redundant links indicates a
further boost in productivity by making it faster and easier for people, who do
not have enough time to work with SDS, to none-the-less benefit from
organizational memory, based on stronger
addressability that Doug called out in a letter on April 5, 2000.
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Knowledge Management will remain hard work capturing the record, crafting
an effective story for shared meaning and tending the
garden of knowledge.
Like
fixing the car, mowing the lawn, accounting, writing a novel, medical and legal
work, or engineering to design software, buildings, and an effective national
security, skills, tools and time must be
applied diligently in order for KM to be effective helping people.
SDS makes it
faster and easier, but converting information into knowledge is still
hard work,
as the Colloquium heard on March 7, 2000. As well, the letter on September
20, 2000 pointed out that there is no evidence so far
that
cognitive overhead
for KM has been eliminated; this means KM cannot be learned in 20 minutes.
..
However, it now appears that redundant links may make the work product of
Knowledge Management valuable enough to
tweak the wheels of progress for helping a broad spectrum of
people advance from information to a culture of knowledge. Delivering benefits
for a lot of people to improve the work is the secret of lifting civilization.
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Sincerely,
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
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Copy to:
- Doug Engelbart
- Morris Jones
- Bill DeHart
- Jack Park
- Stuart Harrow
- Jeff Conklin
- Eugene Kim
- Denis Henmi