Croeso

Big Sister

Well Lilia and I have just been frightening my colleagues on how much big brother technology can be realised by linking together data that already exists - what a reaction - fascinating.

We are in Ferrara, Italy. Pity it is raining but we will both be back to blogging on our return

The Grass is always simpler

One thing that continually intrigues me and has done ever since my first KM steps in 1991, is the fact that people assume their world is complex whilst the world of others is simpler. i.e we all think we could manage our football teams tactics way better that our managers do, and we continually wonder what on earth they are thinking from our comfy seat in the stand (or corporate box these days but that's a long story , maybe a future blog)
Anjo illustrates this to me again in his musing as to the complex nature of Km where no body agrees on anything to the somewhat more elegant clustering of extrusion terms. Now if your an expert in extrusion the opposite is true, what is knowledge seems a trivial question compared to how to set up and run a certain part of an extruder. Yes they seem to have nicely classified terms, but that's the high level jargon, underneath that are a myriad of views opinions and divergence.
To me the water is always muddy, it's just that a far view from an outsider only sees the water and not the clarity of it.

This manifests itself in KM solutions designed by outsiders generally not working, whereas the nice thing of Anjo's work is that as he uses the words of the insiders as input, his views and mental models are not so dominant.

Ah the green green grass of home as another famous Welshman (well I'm not famous of course but very Welsh) once said

Google within companies?

Anjo and Lilia via comments within Croeso to my Mental Model posting have pointed me towards the Google style automation working better because it is based on data produced by humans. However I've seen Google applied within a corporate environment and that did not work so well.

Why was that?

I think Google works well on the HTML based Internet
In companies yes we have HTML based intra-net but most of our data sits in databases (EDMS), CoPs, and ERP systems, when Google crawled these in the trial I saw it was less than impressive.

I'll check further with others experiences but at least to me a straight application of Google may not seem to work, but a modified application may?