Presenting at Web Directions Government

After receiving some encouragement from John Allsopp, I’m presenting at Web Directions this year on the topic of knowledge management and social computing.

For many people, knowledge management is an IT system that sits somewhere and gobbles up documents. Some vendors claim that their Records Management System or their Document Management System will do all your knowledge management, and for us KM practitioners this focus away from people and to systems has led to nothing but trouble for a decade.

Knowledge management is, first and foremost, about people. It’s not about software. It’s about storytelling, having a coffee and sharing war stories, about getting together after a difficult project and doing “lessons learned”, and even about watching a video to learn techniques from other sporting teams. If you can get your people together to share the important bits inside their heads then you can ensure you’ve got ways to equip people with the information they need do successfully do their jobs in an information-demanding world.

The people-centric part is why the boom in social computing tools out of the Web 2.0-sphere is so exciting. In the modern world, people just don’t have lots of time to get together and chat, so a system that supports the way people tend to share information, that is, in a social-way, is vital.

Want to learn more? Come see me at Web Directions Government on 19-20 May at Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia.
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The world beyond Web 2.0

I was privileged enough to sit in on a seminar recently by Annie Rowland-Campbell, a researcher from FujiXerox. She’s been doing research into semantic technologies and preparing the way for organisations to move beyond Web 2.0.

Annie’s research suggests that the web will become more and more immersive in the coming years — something we’re starting to see with applications like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft. To provide users with a more immersive and information rich experience, systems will ultimately need to better understand an individual’s context.

Context will help provide systems with the ability to intuit what people want (and what they also might need) and serve it up to them without users having to search and browse and differentiate what information is of value to them (and what is not of value). This understanding of context will be based largely on an understanding of who a user is, and what their personal needs are. And this technology to deliver this experience is actually not far away. In fact, the capability exists today through ontologies and semantic technologies.

Without semantic technologies driving the web, we can only produce context through direct points of integration with information. We can tag, categorise, and add other pieces of metadata directly into documents and link databases together where we identify that information has connections. Unfortunately, this traditional information technology approach requires meanings and relationships to be predefined and “hard wired” into data formats and the application program code at design time. This means that when something changes (which it always does in the human-centric world) the systems involved need to be changed in order to interoperate in a new way — a lengthy, messy, and manually intensive process.

Semantic technologies, though, are “meaning-centred”. They encode relationships, meaning, and context separately from data and content files, and separately from the application. This separation of layers allows systems to provide context that can change and adapt as the world around which information exists changes — exactly what is needed for the truly immersive, context-driven experiences required by Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. It could potentially even allow systems to ‘learn’ based on their own experiences of the changes in context. But how can we start to deliver context?

Topic Maps can provide the ontological layer required to describe context in addition to the metadata and data layers.

Utilising a Topic Map as the point of integration between systems will decrease the number of integration points required to deliver context. In this example, introducing an ontological layer decreases the number of points of integration from 24 to just 6.

It’s an interesting paradigm shift for Service Oriented Architecture models and database designs because it allows context to be added and data adapted to an evolving- rather than a static-world because its generally only the relationships between pieces of information that change, not the information itself (assuming that change in information is largely a factor of time, so new pieces of information only result in new versions).

A Topic Map used in this space enables machines, as well as people to understand, share and reason with information when its called upon. With this approach, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these systems share.

Given a question, query, or report request, the ontology layer can access topics, concepts, associations that span a vast number of sources. It’s an approach:

• that has already gained traction in Finland (which is no surprise to me given that Northern Europe is where Topic Maps (ISO/IEC 13250:2000) were born). Here the ontology layers are being used to provide context and points of interchange where standards and language differ between EU countries.

• that is employed by Reuters in their Calais system to provide reporting capability based on context. Theirs is the reporting equivalent of “do you want fries with that?” and “…you may also be interested in…”

• that is being developed by the German government in partnership with SAP and Siemens in a project worth around €440m

As the web moves more toward immersive environments and intelligent agents, this approach is exactly what businesses need to begin to adopt in order to meet future system design needs, the needs and expectations of their users, and survive the evolution of Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 and beyond.

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The “Just Do It” (with users) methodology!

Stephen Collins has written an interesting commentary on iterative IT project methodologies with an interesting and heated discussion following.

In my experience, the approach Stephen talks about has a lot of advantages over traditional methods of handing systems design and development. While traditional approaches can lack innovation and be slow to progress change, an iterative approach can reduce risk by being more responsive to change and result in quicker time to launch. Dominic Campbell even suggests that the eternal beta should be embraced, iterating and improving system design once released to users.

I was recently involved in a project where we used an iterative design and analysis phase. It certainly worked better than some of the slower-moving approaches I’ve been involved with before — it freed the team to try new things and new approaches to difficult problems see if they worked. If they worked, then they were handed over to the developers. If they didn’t work, they were discarded with minimal time lost.

Of importance throughout this process, though, was a user-centred design methodology. So as to not overwhelm users, we only exposed them to things that were improvements to what they had seen earlier, or things that would directly affect them and their work. We showed them storyboards and prototypes (both wireframes and high-fidelity HTML mockups) and involved them in helping to improve the concepts. This was great for change management as it helped to set expectations about what they were getting and how it would look and feel. It also meant, given they were involved in design, they had greater ownership of the final product. And once they were happy with what ever iteration we had collectively come up with (in this design phase and not in production), we then folded it into the development cycle.

Ultimately, this meant that we could really only move as fast as users could consume new information. The result, though, was a final product was tailored to their wants and needs and not the whims of developers who want to try out something new on an ignorant public.

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