Myths of MIS

mrG — Mon, 12 May 2003 10:48:58 -0400

I wrote recently how Dave Pollard was lamenting the failure of KM to produce any innovation in years, asking, if that were true, then how could I know about his lament? The how is because of the infrastructure of social computing.

Last week, my bid was rejected for an information architect and KM strategy position for some unspecified corporation out in Newfoundland (condolences are welcome). The headhunter from Eagle said "Thank you for your interest but at this point you do not meet all of the requirements."

I think I know what really went wrong. In my bid, I had hinted my conviction that, as Dave observes, existing knowledge management systems just don't work, and how there's a lot of promising early results from the world of social computing. I had outlined a strategy to deploy knowledge management in the forest management sense, in the sense of fostering social network communications that are, as we all know, the way business really happens. My best guess is that I did not sit up psitta-like and squawk-on about Peoplesoft.

I wrote back to thank her for her time and thoughtful consideration, (and the kind courtesy of confirming my rejection) and to say that I hoped I might someday get another opportunity to drag the Maritimes kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

That last comment probably cost me all future consideration, but I'm not really shedding tears over it if you catch my drift.

Why do we cling to this Myth of MIS?

We (the editorial 'we') have been designing failed filing systems for a thousand years. We all know the truth of KM is that to really find something quickly and efficiently, you just ask the monk, librarian and/or secretary who filed it, or you ask around to see if anyone you know knows anyone who knows anyone who knows where it got put. Robots are fine data managers if you have time for the wild goose chase, but even online, do you go gently into google when it really matters ... or do you seek out a human?

This is what always irked me about Star Trek. SciFi always wanted the super computer brain that answers everything from digging dead datum. They even named their super cyberman Data. The episode I wanted to see would have Striker ask Cmdr Data some critical question in the heat of the drama, and Data would go into a trance as he does, and then come back saying something like

"A personal journal at the University of Rigel 12 suggested contacting Dr van Halen, a noted expert on Fusion Systems Theory. The doctor has forwarded my request to collegues on Alpha 9 in the Cyrix cluster ... oh wait, they have forwarded our request to ... wait ... oh, yes, right, thank you Dr Wallace that's very kind of you ... Dr James Wallace in Zeta 3 advises us to trim the dylithium and introduce gallium arsenide to the core reactors ... "

But no, outside of those times when his creator issued a recall, the infinitely networked robot always and only found dead datum, as if the archives (blogs) were the true knowledge.

But blogs aren't knowledge. Not any more than corporate data stuffed into PDF reports. Blogs and databases and journals and archives, these are only the shadows of knowledge, the foot-tracks that tell only the story how Knowledge was here.

Hunting the KM Snark

I remember back in the 80's at Cognos we had 120 developers on the Zeus project building a distributed object-oriented 4GL; the problem was finding code for effective code re-use. The source code gives too much detail the existing smalltalk-like Eiffel class browsers gave too little information. Cognos applied for and got all kinds of money to research into tools for managing large OOP projects, and we hired co-op students and waved our hands at powerpoint slides.

But here is how it really worked: We all took lunch at about the same time, noon to 2pm. The Cognos offices are way out the south end of Ottawa, far from any other kind of shop or restaurant, so we were all in the same cafeteria. Someone stands up and shouts, "I need a date class that understands days between dates with no leapyear!" and from a distant table comes back, "I coded that last week, I'll send you an email!"

That's KM.

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Myths of MIS