| Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 12:05:18 -0700 | 04 00067 61 00101301 |
Mr. Jack Park
jackpark@thinkalong.com
Street address
Palo Alto, CA Zip
| Subject: | KM Ideas |
Dear Jack,
Congratulations on your new project. I read the paper you submitted the other day, and was very impressed with the sweep of your ideas.
I tried to send a letter using the online response system, and got an error message after clicking "send" that said to click back and enter my name. When I clicked back, the letter that took twenty minutes to create was gone, and I did not have time to create another letter, nor was there enough time to integrate intellectual capital from the time invested to create the letter, into the record to grow new knowledge. Time seems like an important factor of KM, as you pointed out in references to Gelertner and others.
An anomaly seems to occur from the full availability of POIMS and Com Metrics. Indeed the formula for Knowledge Space, and a daily record is available for all showing strategy and actions to advance the work each day, while, also, retaining rights to rewards for any benefit such capabilities might justify, if others are helped. Open source advocates aver ownership rights, yet seem much more secretive about their efforts and work product. It is another KM dilemma?
Thinking back, one point that may have been made in the letter on your project is that pictures take more time than text for creating and using Knowledge Space, because it takes extra time to get information in a PDF file into a form that can be converted into knowledge. Of course most people don't want to take the time to do that step, so it is not be a big issue in launching your project at this time.
I wrote a letter to Pat Lincoln the other day setting out an initiative, and citing a major deliverable of KM that needs attention is the ontology idea, which you raised on 000221 and more recently on 000623. Pat seems less enthusiastic about the opportunity than he expressed in July, so this may not be a good time for SRI on these issues, even though there seems to be useful research they could take up.
Jan Borchers wrote a letter responding to an inquiry about using pattern language to support semiotics, which you submitted to the team last week. Jan said he is unfamiliar with semiotics but is investigating. Looks like Doug is making progress with Mary Keeler's lens idea for KM, reported by Sheldon on 001010, and indicating that lens methods will accomplish efficiencies Doug developed for Augment.
My sense is that people are not aware of the necessity to invest time for performing KM in order to understand what is entailed. Manual KM is very tedious, and so limited time invites shortcuts which inhibit understanding. Even lawyers, accountants and engineers, whose work accomplishes different aspects of KM, do not grasp the implications of what they are doing day-to-day. There isn't enough time to integrate the elements into a composite practice that, over time, reveals the scope of the process. As a result, the secret of KM lies dormant, because the rewards of knowledge come days, weeks and years later, while people only have 20 minutes to an hour for pilot testing to discover the secret.
So, time is a KM dilemma, and it is running out.
Any ideas?
Rod
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net