Boeing
3370 Mira Loma Avenue
PO Box 3105
Anaheim, CA 92803
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 17:35:41 -0700
04 00074 60 03040702
Mr. Rod Welch
rodwelch@pacbell.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
..
Subject:
Two Worlds Need Bridge Gap
Tools for KM Transformation from IT
Dear Rod,
[Responding to your letter today saying... ]
.. Thanks for your letter today listing tools you are using on the job at
Boeing, following up our telecon yesterday discussing tools for knowledge
management, in addition to SDS....
First, the list of tools you are using is very impressive in the sense of
learning a lot of commands and navigating a lot of menus to get things done.
Integrating this range of tools and maintaining them seems like a big job
that takes a powerful, well disciplined mind.
glj -- I would like to do with less, but I keep looking for ways to do
things better, so there are always a number of tools in play. Each of them
performs some part of m job well enough to have won a place in my toolbox.
Each tool has some idea that I add to my experience, and which will impact
how I approach developing a new version of SDS.
.. Your letter says in part that "Most of my KM activity is still in the area
of information management."
This sounds like you are saying that information management is part of
knowledge management, and so under that definition anything used for
information management is also used for some aspect of knowledge management.
In other words, knowledge management results from using a range of tools for
different kinds of information management, e.g., drawing a picture, sending
an email, looking at web pages and copying web pages into a file, keeping an
index of files, making a call, attending a meeting, outlining, writing, data
base, etc. Is this the point of your letter, and, if so, what theory of
knowledge supports this idea?
..
glj -- You defined the 8 steps. The early steps are information management.
I simply broke my list into tools that address the 8 steps as well as I
could.
[Rod continues....]
Or, are you saying that your work practice primarily uses information
management because tools and practices are readily available for getting
things done using information management, while tools and practices using KM
are rare and so take time for transformation?
..
glj -- I still have to manage a substantial amount of information before I
can create an opportunity to turn that information into knowledge with
analysis, alignment, linking, etc. The tools available do a poor enough job
of doing that, which is why I use a number of them.
..
Most of what purports to be KM out there fails even to manage information,
so I do the best with the tools I can find.
Some of those activities will not go away even when we rework SDS. Trying to
get a file manager as good as PowerDesk, for example, is simply not
something I intend to do, and yet doing a reasonable job of managing files
will always be necessary.
.. Editing program code is something I will continue to do in a fair volume,
and I haven't found anything remotely close to MultiEdit in this category.
Perl or something like it is unmatched at manipulating text files, and that
won't go away anytime soon.
Email has to be sent ant received in some way so some email client is
required whether it is the one available in some browser or stand alone.
.. We are not likely to solve the Two Worlds dilemma completely any time soon,
so until then the best we can do is to reduce the deleterious effects
systematically.
[Rod continues....]
In our discussion yesterday, we talked about theory and practice. On the
job, we mostly have to focus on practices that let us get things done, and
don't really care a lot about theory, so maybe this is not a good time to
bring it up.
.. A lot of the activity set out in your letter, including doing research on
the Internet is part of my work with SDS. For example, you submitted some
keynote files sometime ago on 020722 which reviewed POIMS....
You can see how the keynote file was changed around a bit for use in SDS,
which then provides command and control of the record that, for one thing,
enables finding your keynote file on reviewing SDS, and finding particular
issues discussed within the keynote file, and further assembling ideas in
the keynote file into a chronology of related ideas in other files. My
sense is that this SDS capability to find information and organize it into
multiple views based on context provides a rough idea about knowledge
management, and that information management tools like Keynote, MS Word,
etc., do not enable people to, in this case, go find the SDS record where
Keynote work is reviewed, break it down and put it back together in multiple
ways. This perception may only reflect that I am familiar with using SDS
for KM, and am not familiar with using information technologies. Of course
we have Eric Armstrong's letter on 010916 that says people have a lot of
trouble finding anything using other tools; there is another letter on
011006 asking how projects get fouled up so easily, and so forth; another
letter on 011003 says people using IT are clueless about how to convert
information into useful knowledge, and so on....
.. glj -- The Two World problem confronts the entire industry. Even Microsoft
tools cannot locate Microsoft files based on any content in the record, nor
can they link to a point in a document from a point outside. Hyperlinks
within a document and to web pages can be done, but they can't, so far as I
know, be accessed from outside. I haven't made a sustained effort to fix
that.
Reading some of the work that has been done on various indexing schemes
makes it apparent that no single method works all the time. Most systems I
know use only a single mechanism.
.. The Subject Index is indeed an advance over existing methods, but I think
there are better ways to construct and manipulate the SI or something very
much like it.
glj -- I understand the challenge all too well. Without the ability to
manage information there can be no knowledge, as knowledge depends on
information for its content. Current tools are not quire up tot the problem
of managing information let alone managing knowledge.
[Rod continues....]
.. Or, is SDS being used for some KM tasks and other tools are used for other
KM tasks? The concern is that Com Metrics theory of KM is to augment
intelligence, and this requires using SDS to routinely create and maintain
an external rendering of the connections in the mind, which in turn requires
doing everything in SDS, as Morris noted on 890809....
http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/89/08/09/214314.HTM#2079 .. This doesn't mean we won't do a picture or a spreadsheet with other tools,
but when we do we write up in SDS that we did a picture and a spreadsheet
and here is what it means in relation to objectives, requirements and
commitments.
..
glj -- I got all that. I just haven't caught up to all of it yet. I am still
at the stage where I am often trying things I haven't done before and I have
problems far more often than I care to. I stick with it and slowly integrate
more an more parts of what I do into SDS.
..
I also dislike a lot of how SDS does things, including the fact that the
macro language, while it works for you, isn't something I really want to
learn, particularly if we continue to have the memory limitation issues.
..
I want to continue to augment SDS with external programs, convert more
formats into SDS automatically. The fact that SDS *can* be used to clean up
the messes is no reason I should have to spend time on it if I can get a
program to do the mundane tasks of converting formats.
..
As I can get SDS integrated I will use it more and more as a primary tools
rather than a secondary one. That takes time because I am building an
infrastructure to help bring the Two Worlds closer together.
..
I am stuck with some of the tools because it is what I have to work with on
the job. When my boss wants a document, she definitely doesn't want an SDS
record, he want a document done in one of the Microsoft tools because that
is the world that he and all of the other people in the organization operate
in..
..
As I can use SDS to organize information, relate it to other information and
generate content that can then be used to generate the work product that is
required rather than whatever we think they should want, I will do more and
more of it.
..
During the transition the best I can do is to rely to some (hopefully
decreasing) extent on the tools that I know, new ones I can find, and my own
expertise. This puts me a long way ahead of most of the others who can't
even use the tools they have well, much less adapt to new ones that do
things they have never heard of.
[Rod continues...]
.. Hopefully, this does not sound heavy handed. I just know from experience
that when we are on the job, pressures to do things that generate revenue
during the "fog of war," to use a topical phrase, makes it hard to work
toward new practices that are intended to make good management fast and
easy.
..
glj -- The issue isn't that "SDS can do it all" -- frankly it can't do it all
adequately, and we still face the Two Worlds problem. Both worlds have got to
be made to give a little bit if they are ever going to converge. We can't
simply ignore the other world and say "our way or the highway" -- that is a
losing proposition.
Neither can we say "we'll handle everything" -- those who have tried that
have failed since the other world doesn't, currently, allow some of the
operations that are essential to doing real KM.
.. The only approach I see it to make both worlds give a bit and then a bit
more until the gap between them is one we can bridge easily and routinely.
That is the direction I am moving.