Tuesday, August 19, 2003

DROWNING IN THE DECISION PROCESS: Back in 1998 while I was still at Lotus, it became very clear to me that the "searching" metaphor was a productivity black hole for most decision processes. I remember reading an article penned by a researcher at a California university (can't find his name 5 years later) who proposed something he called "finding strategies". It was this paper that drove a lot of thinking at Lotus/IBM specific around our knowledge management technology strategy. People needed a more intelligent approach to finding relevant data and information. And it wasn't "searching" as we still know it today. It was more of a machine-assisted crawling approach based on relevant workgroup meta-data, heuristics, and relevant information targets. The result is a mechanism that promotes potential information to a workgroup, rather then the team searching for information. Over the last two months, we've been seeing more and more use of Groove to provide workgroups with a secure, distributed space for the consumption of open source information, and subsequent human "sense-making" of the information. What we witnessed though was more akin to the notion of "finding". Many of these teams had discovered Hugh Pyle's News tool. This is a Groove tool that allows a Groove workgroup to setup crawling criteria, pointing at multiple information sites, and leveraging RSS as the primary interface. On a periodic basis, this tool mines the target sites based on the provided meta-data, and returns a result set of relevant information. Groove then takes on the task of securely distributing this information to space members. Because it is a space-based tool, it can be used in multiple spaces, each with unique meta-data and target sites of interest. In essence, this tool finds appropriate information from open source targets and ignores most noise. Case in point: During the Iraq war, Groove was leveraged for medical supply logistics support. While the coalition had many folks in the villages capturing medical needs, they would also hear of needs through reports in the mainstream media. The News tool culls relevant news articles from multiple open sources, and populates the Groove shared space where relief workers from the NGO's, as well as coalition logistics personnel, can auto-discover needs where human assets were not available to uncover the need. 8:07:36 AM