THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 16:44:57 -0700
03 00050 61 02071801
Unfinished Revolution
ba-ohs-talk@bootstrap.org
OHS DKR Project
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025
..
Subject:
Manhattan Project to establish the Knowledge Sciences
As usual, good analysis in Eric Armstrong's letter, today, on defining
"knowledge," as a predicate to progress on KM, and identifying key details of a
Manhattan Project to formulate Knowledge Sciences.
.. The definition of knowledge as "categorized how-to information" is
ambling toward a useful direction.
.. Refinement that further distinguishes knowledge from information will
sharpen the focus on what needs to be done differently to solve
problems last
year on September 11,
and, also,
arrest the decline of productivity and
earnings
that worries investors, as your explained in your letter on October 3,
2001.
.. Try finding
POIMS
to see if it sheds any light.
.. On September 16, 2001, you said it's
hard to find anything
using popular
methods everybody likes, but take another look for POIMS.
When we met at Intel on 000517
you had printed POIMS and later thought it was in the
back seat of the car. .. If so, there may be some clues in POIMS about moving from information to
a
culture of knowledge
that strengthen the ability to
find everything,
noted in your earlier letter, also, on September 16 last year. Jack Park
reported on October 3, 2001 that he has found
no clues about how to find
information quickly when needed,
but I am not sure he
had found POIMS, either, at least I don't recall seeing analysis of the caliber
you did in your letter today on
Manhattan Projects,
directed at understanding POIMS.
.. It is probably out of the question because nobody has the time these
days, like they did in Einstein's time, but a useful exercise, after
understanding information and knowledge, would be to look for correlations and
alignment between POIMS and Doug's
OHS Launch Plan
which he submitted on
October 25, 2000, and then to incorporate that analysis into your CDR specs. As
I recall, you made a
significant start
on May 5, 2000, but then there was a
hang-up
sometime around November 5, 2000 (don't hold me to these dates, they
can be tricky). Lee Iverson later did more under the banner of
NODAL.
Putting
this ferment together builds a community of expertise and eventually of
practice needed for progress.
.. Once you develop a set of ideas for creating technology that improves
IT, then a Manhattan Project to implement those ideas will have a
chance to succeed. Without understanding what needs to be done, you
can easily
exceed an unlimited budget
and have nothing to show for it,
as occurred with IBM, per Paul's letter on November 30, 2000.
.. Recall that in
about 1903 Einstein worked out the basic concept on converting matter
into energy. Others later developed engineering methodologies (as you
and Lee, Jack, Eugene and others have struggled with for KM), so by
the time Manhattan came along in about 1942, the 50 years that
Buckminster Fuller
suggests is the time required for a new way of doing
things to mature, had transpired. In 1942 they had a lot of clues
about what to do, and so a critical mass of people, resources and
leadership was successful working out implementation engineering, as
you relate cogently in your letter today.
.. At this time, today, however, it is not clear that there is enough
knowledge about what to do to move from IT to a culture of knowledge,
not even a clue outside of POIMS, because limited time, and, in some
respects, cultural blinders, have prevented people from doing the
careful spade work that is tedious and essential in the beginning to
breath life into a new direction for science. To justify a
Manhattan-type effort, clues must be found and people must be found
who are willing to invest time for following the clues to discover how
knowledge is distinguished from information in a way that technology
can exploit.
.. Good to see the group thinking foundationally again, per your letter
on 000212.