I wrote the following:
> So far there has been no method for obsoleting old documents, despite
> repeated pleas from many engineers within the organization. Worse, there
> has been no formal verification process by which the accuracy of the data
> is checked. Since we have not had a verification process there is a lot of
> duplicate information stored in the database. The result is what I'd call
> chaos. But there is a certain sense of order, because people regularly
> find solutions to their problems despite the chaos. (In fact, the
> duplicate information, in some ways, helps ensure a solution is found.)
> Finding information in the database is a real problem, because of all the
> "noise" created by duplicate information.
There is a clear contradiction in these two paragraphs. The second should
have been deleted before I sent the message, but I missed it because I
never re-read the message.
While there is some virtue to having redundant information, I think on the
whole it does more harm than good. If a customer searches for a solution,
they don't know which of all 100 hits is the one they need to read.
This is a problem that has occupied a lot of my attention. I'm now working
on a different solution -- something similar to artificial intelligence --
but not quite, because I intend to "capture" and record the intelligence
of everyone in the organization. The Web will be my main vehicle, and I
intend to develop a system whereby anyone in the organization (and perhaps
even outside customers), can establish "conceptual" links between
information. This will allow the Web to simulate the way we learn through
establishing perceptive and causal links between concepts.
It's too early to know how successful I'll be, but it's been fun and
educational.
--Benjamin B. Compton bbcompton@aol.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>