February 29, 2004
knowledge economy news...
Scotsman.com Business - Management - Firms 'miss out' on tax credits for innovation
..."In America the knowledge-based companies, including technology companies, get about 50% of their revenue from the public sector. Companies like Oracle would have been in Chapter 11 [administration] if the government hadn't purchased from them from their inception."
He [Iain Graham, chief executive of Renfrewshire software company Graham Technology] says that if the politicians believe that Scotland has good quality people then they must support them.
"Currently they must consider the intellectual group in Scotland to be so stupid they won't spend any money with them. They go to America for all their purchases," he says.
"Can't we move the public sector into the 21st century and buy the leading technology that American companies are buying from Scottish companies in our sector?"...
February 28, 2004
autonomic computing & on-demand...
Search390.com | Consolidation sparks mainframe revival
...Last week, IBM announced that Sparkassen Informatik, one of the largest providers of IT services for the German banking industry, has purchased 20 IBM z990 "T-Rex" mainframes to anchor one of the largest IT consolidation projects ever undertaken. The four-year deal is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, IBM said.
"This is the biggest deal of its kind I've ever seen," said Edward Broderick, principal analyst at the Robert Frances Group, of the Sparkassen Informatik deal. Without a doubt, both deals are a reflection of the growing demand for the z990 mainframe, which Broderick refers to as a "glorious implementation of technology, the maturity of zOS, autonomic computing and on-demand."
"They have taken a legacy mainframe and injected vigor and enthusiasm into what people thought was dead," he said. "It's not dead. It's not in the hospital. It's not even sick. Companies are now figuring out that client/server was a smoke-and-mirror charade." Not only is it not dead, it's actually thriving. According to IBM's fourth-quarter results, sales of the monolithic server were up 33% from the previous year. Some say the surge could just be the natural spike in sales expected following the release of the much-anticipated T-Rex z990 mainframe, which experts say breathed life into an ailing platform...
February 27, 2004
knowledge economy news...
...The former Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Wim Kok, is in Dublin tomorrow Thursday 26th February 2004, to address an EU conference on 'Adaptability and Adjustment to Change in the Workplace'. Mr Kok will discuss the findings of the European Employment Task Force, which he chaired, and which presented its final report to the European Commission in November 2003.
..."A productive, highly competitive Europe requires companies and organisations that are able to compete in terms of innovation in the global knowledge-based economy." Research pointed to a growing body of empirical evidence for the economic benefits of new forms of work organisation, it adds; "In the emerging workplace model, a participative, consultative style of management and attention to work/life balance cannot be viewed as optional extras"...
February 26, 2004
musings on autonomic social & knowledge networks...
In my continuing research at the intersection of emerging social and knowledge networking trends, I have been tracking news in my 'knowledge notes' Weblog on 'autonomic' or 'self-healing' systems. As I was performing a search on 'autonomic knowledge management' this morning I came across the following article by Christopher Meyer, [coauthor of It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business] for Wired Magazine, - The New Facts of Life - in which he writes:
...networks could play a critical role as machines come to resemble living creatures. In life, as on the Net, connections matter more than processors. The Internet could allow sensors to interact in emergent ways, forming an autonomic nervous system for the physical world. An early version is taking root in Los Angeles, where sensors at intersections identify approaching buses and ask a central computer whether they're on time. Late buses get the green light; the system gives crossing traffic extra time in subsequent cycles. The result: 25 percent improvement in transit times without creating congestion.
Oddly enough, our growing knowledge of life processes could have its biggest impact in the social sciences. Social systems, after all, are made up of interacting agents, i.e., people. When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we'll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself. At that point, the new science of life will help us not only live better, but live better together...
In the above citation, Meyer talks about the importance of connections over processors. Isn't this concept - of relating as biological 'connections' - at the very hub of our current fascination with Social Networking Services [SNSs]? Centralized, standalone SNSs are fun at times, initially compelling, but eventually boring if they do not add value in our day-to-day lives.
Meyer also posits that "Scientific advances point to a startling conclusion: The nonliving world is very much alive." And these networks do indeed take on lives of their own - existing with or without us as - the non-biological representations of the 'us' aspect of our social groups and, - to the degree that we have shared, connected in, or up linked in these spaces - our social knowledge. This is the field of analysis in which we will often find social scientists such as Valdis Krebs at play - tracking, tracing, and trending our digital trails.
It is this delicate dance of 'us' maintaining 'presence' - in either loosely or tightly choreographed associations - that keeps these networks lively and infused with both our individual and collective knowledge. While I was ruminating over writing this post on 'autonomic knowledge management' this morning I was also chatting with Jim McGee who recommended that I reference David Reed's work in this area.
An excellent recommendation that inspired me to question - How soon and/or successfully will the current eruption of both Knowledge and Social Networking Services morph into viable components and/or extensions of David P. Reed and Andrew Lippman's visionary architecture of Viral Communications?
Historically, people do not scale well, networks do - and autonomic or self-healing networks hold the promise of robust scalability. An important upgrade for ailing telecom carriers and service providers who suffer from extensively manual business processes that are quite simply not sustainable in our burgeoning 'network-centric' world. Cultural change is imperative in the current 'carrier-class' world in order to 'tool up' for the near and distant future of wireless networking.
Reed & Lippman state, "The Essence of scalable wireless networks is cooperation..." I think that this 'cooperation' concept also applies to 'us' as the wetware components of these network architectures. Reed & Lippman also assert in a May 19th, 2003 Viral Communications draft that "the impact of enabling architectural innovations is amplified when they are in synchrony with cultural change." [This draft is available as a PDF file in the Viral Communications related link below.]
How can we - as early adopters - influence the evolution of Social Networking Services so they do enhance our communications - aside from the current widely practiced activities of job searching, dating, friend finding, and strengthening weak ties?
If you utilize one or more of the current entrants in this swell of online SNS offerings [such as LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut, Ryze, and/or Tribe] - what value, if any, do you derive from them? And, harkening back to the citation with which I started this post, has one [or more] of these services assisted in helping you to successfully reduce the 'traffic congestion' at the 'intersections' in your life? And, in closing, any insights, comments, or ponderings on the recent and future blurring of lines between 'wetware,' 'software,' and 'hardware' in an infinitely connected wireless world?
Related Links:
Wired | February 2004 | The New Facts of Life
Viral Communications
Feedster Search: autonomic computing
autonomic computing - CiteSeer ResearchIndex
The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com
Without autonomic capabilities to maintain themselves by "learning" from experience and infusion of new data, knowledge management systems will not achieve their destiny as pervasive success tools for the 21st century manufacturing enterprise." [BMST Knowledge management]
Reed's Law says that the value of the network that comes from supporting the formation and sharing of information among persistent groups (group forming networks) grows exponentially in the number of elements.
knowledge worker tools...
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 2004--Industry Leader Launches Professional-Strength Solution for Individuals to Capture, Store, Search and Retrieve Paper Documents
Kofax (LSE:DCM), the world's largest information capture vendor, today announced Capio, a new professional-strength document capture solution for desktop information management. Capio enables individuals to better manage the paper documents that can clutter their desks by quickly and easily scanning, storing, searching and retrieving them.
Capio uses Kofax's patented VRS (VirtualReScan) technology to deliver unmatched image quality and eliminate the need to re-scan documents. This exclusive feature automatically checks and adjusts alignment, brightness, contrast and image clarity, delivering perfect images and ensuring the maximum usability of the scanned documents.
"Our customers and channel partners asked Kofax to make our industry-leading capture technology available for individual use," said Anthony Macciola, vice president of marketing at Kofax. "With Capio, we are pleased to extend VRS beyond production capture and to bring our long-standing expertise in production document capture to individual business users."
Capio is designed to be easy for any knowledge worker to set up "out of the box," without the IT resources that might otherwise be needed to install, train or support a larger document capture product. In addition, Capio's intuitive interface enables quick and easy search and retrieval of documents in the popular PDF format.
"Instead of wasting time digging through file cabinets or stacks of papers to find a document, individual business professionals can use Capio to easily capture and retrieve the information they need to do their jobs better and faster," said Macciola. "Kofax and our channel partners can now address the full range of information capture needs, from complex enterprise-wide business processes down to simple desktop information management."
wearable km?...
FAIRFAX, Va. & FREDERICK, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 25, 2004--
..."The mobility and point-of-task computing power afforded by joint Xybernaut-ESS solutions allows mobile employees increased flexibility and greater accessibility to knowledge at critical moments," said Grady Venable, president and COO of ESS. "The ability to send and receive information when and where field technicians need it is a critical component of success for service-centric organizations. Wearable computers and mobile systems facilitate this type of constant communication."
ESS Mobile IT primarily focuses on "flyaway" kits designed to address the needs of first responders, as well as tactical stand-alone operations. When combined with Xybernaut Mobile Assistant(R) V (MA(R) V) and/or Atigo(TM) wearable computers, benefits to customers include mobility, enhanced functionality, inter connectivity between operational teams, higher quality in data gathering and improvements in knowledge management.
...Organizations such as the U.S. Air Force, National Security Agency (NSA), National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), CECOM, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and others already use ESS solutions to improve their field employee productivity. Organizations currently employing Xybernaut wearable computers include American TransAir (ATA airlines), Bell Canada, Boeing, various U.S. and foreign militaries, DynCorp, FedEx Express, GE Power Systems, International Truck, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and NTT DoCoMo...
emerald 2003 usage statistics...
Managing Information News :: Emerald 2003 Usage Statistics Speak Volumes
...Emerald statistics reveal the top five subject areas researched by its customers during 2003 were innovation, organization, knowledge management, as well as marketing and business intelligence. The article downloaded most often from the Emerald database was "From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing" by Christian Gronroos and published in Management Decision.
Emerald, the leading international management and information science publisher, released its 2003 usage statistics, which show more than 7 million articles were downloaded from its database, Emerald Fulltext. The number reflects an eleven percent increase over 2002 for the same 12 month period...
February 25, 2004
personal knowledge networks...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: e.story Launches LinkedMinds at DEMO 2004
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. and LILLE, France, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- e.story LLC today announced it is launching the industry's first Personal Knowledge Network at the DEMO 2004 conference. Personal Knowledge Networks (PKN) is knowledge management for the individual knowledge worker. PKNs are forecasted by Gartner Inc. to be the predominant knowledge management channel for individual knowledge workers to help them stay competitive, responsive and improve their productivity.
"Today knowledge workers are experimenting and experiencing computer mediated social networks. e.story's LinkedMinds is the next step by enabling the networking of knowledge and ideas. Personal knowledge networks naturally ride on top of social networks to add value and drive innovation," said
Chris Shipley, DEMO executive producer.
Founded in 2001, e.story is a privately held software company enabling knowledge workers to easily find, share and collaborate on personal knowledge. e.story's LinkedMinds automates functions for search and information collaboration to increase worker knowledge and productivity. The subscription-based product is based on number innovative technologies including an inference engine, automatic thesauri and dictionaries and data visualization.
"We are thrilled to be introducing LinkedMinds at DEMO and will be offering attendees a free one-year subscription to LinkedMinds," said Gerard Chalom, CEO and co-founder of e.story.
Related Links:
autonomic data management platform...
CANNES, FRANCE (PRWEB) February 25, 2004--Solid customers are building and shipping applications like SGSN and VoIP Switches that have stringent uptime SLAs. With these new partnerships, Solid customers benefit from a pre-integrated stack of components that stretches from the board level through the chassis to the operating system to high-availability management. This proven ecosystem ensures faster time to market at lower development cost and lower Total Cost of Ownership.
Said Jussi Harvela, Solid president and CEO, "These agreements cement our ongoing relationships with several strategic partners and demonstrate the power of the Solid ecosystem to deliver time-to-market value. Infrastructure applications are built on a complex hardware and software foundation. Bringing these companies together into the Solid ecosystem delivers synergistic value to our joint customers, ensuring fastest time to market at lowest cost."
About Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform
The Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform is the first example of a data management solution that assures developers the data will take care of itself. The Solid platform supports the creation of applications that are self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting. The Solid Autonomic Data Management Platform is a software suite made up of three tightly coupled components:
* A pair of embeddable, lightweight, high-speed database management systems,
* A carrier-grade high-availability hot-standby option, and
* Asynchronous data distribution technology
This optimized combination is encapsulated in a low-maintenance framework to create an easy-to-manage platform that can take care of sophisticated data management needs in complex environments like network infrastructure applications running on blade servers. Solid customers realize dramatically reduced cost of development and reduced time to market. Their customers see a compellingly low total cost of ownership (TCO).
February 24, 2004
navy knowledge management news...
Consultant - News.com :: US Navy selects AMS company to continue strategic consulting services
...American Management Systems will provide professional support services to the US Navy's Chief Information Officer (DON CIO) under a contract awarded to RM Vredenburg & Co. Vredenburg, a wholly-owned subsidiary of AMS, was acquired in August 2003 and began supporting DON CIO in 1998. AMS will assist in the development and dissemination of strategy, plans and policies in support of DON CIO's mission to transform naval information management and information technology to provide affordable, next generation capabilities to the Navy and Marine Corps warfighter. AMS will perform the work under a delivery order worth up to $55 million if all options are exercised over the contract's four-year duration.
Under the agreement, AMS will provide strategic consulting services and develop tools, including strategic plans, policy guidelines, and tutorials to ensure DON CIO initiatives align with mission objectives and the Department of Defense's goals for military and business transformation. The tools and services AMS provides will support Navy programs in enterprise architecture, information assurance, critical infrastructure protection, e-business, knowledge management, management of electromagnetic spectrum, and investment planning...
knowledge management + security incubating...
BayouBuzz.com :: Two Companies Join LSU Business Incubator
...United Security Applications provides enterprise software products to secure people, infrastructure and assets. The company began developing software security solutions after the events of 9/11 and has provided products and services to agencies involved in security, law enforcement, public safety and justice. Sam Bhat and Paul Singh, the principals in the company, have over 40 years experience in the industry. They have developed products such as Enterprise Security Management (ESM-USA), Enterprise Image Repository (EIR-USA) and Enterprise Knowledge Management (EKM-USA). They are also working on a number of other security systems and follow-on technologies. United Security Applications primary target market includes Port Authorities, chemical and petrochemical industries, state and local governmental agencies, law enforcement, healthcare providers, transportation & warehousing, and other businesses requiring security management...
more on 'the outsourcing of america'...
Or 'A preponderance of mixed messages for an under-employed American 'knowledge worker' force in an election year.'
"I'm all for united action, and so are the 34 coalition partners we have in Iraq right now. Yet America must never outsource America's national security decisions to the leaders of other governments."
-- President Bush, 2/23/04 [CNN.com - Bush takes on critics - Feb. 24, 2004]
To which Cynthia Typaldos replies:
Even the president is worried about possible outsourcing of his job. With the upcoming election and the proposal to allow foreign-born citizens to become president he does have valid concerns.
However, if you add in his own (and Greenspan's) rhetoric about how outsourcing is good for America, and job losers should retrain, his attempt to defend his job against outsourcing seems NIMBY [Not In My Backyard.]
Cynthia then cites a reference to the following Greenspan article:
"There is a palpable unease that businesses and jobs are being drained from the United States, with potentially adverse long-run implications for unemployment and the standard of living of the average American," Greenspan said in prepared remarks delivered to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. His solution to the problem, as he told Congress last week, is to do a better job of educating American workers. [Greenspan sees 'unease' about jobs - Feb. 20, 2004]
A question that I have for Greenspan is: How much more 'education' do American workers need? From where I stand, here on the East Coast of these United States of America, we have an alarming number of highly skilled, highly educated American 'knowledge workers' who are either un-employed or seriously under-employed.
Alas, I agree with Cynthia that the President should be concerned about the outsourcing of his own 'knowledge worker' job - and the 'jobs' of his top security advisory staff. But then, as I have ruminated in prior posts - inspired by Carly Fiorina's advice that: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore, we have to compete for jobs." - I am left to wonder: "Wasn't George W. Bush listening?" And when President Bush's chief economic adviser, Greg Mankiw, who said "outsourcing" - sending white-collar service jobs abroad where labor is cheaper - was a good thing, was George W. Bush not listening then either? Did he not reflect on the color of his own collar on the day Mankiw made that proclamation?
I am befuddled by Mr. Bush's confusing stance on 'outsourcing.' On one hand I read - Bush opposes outsourcing - Deccan Herald: ...Mr. Bush said in a speech in the industrial state of Pennsylvania: "There are people looking for jobs because jobs have gone overseas." He said, "We need to act to make sure there are more jobs at home, and people are more likely to to retain a job."... and then, look over here - Bush economic report praises 'outsourcing' jobs.
It is no small wonder that the White House found both Democrats and Republicans alike distancing themselves from the insensitivity of President Bush's chief economic adviser, Greg Mankiw's stance - that Rep. Don Manzullo, R-Ill., chairman of the House Small Business Committee, who called for Bush to fire Mankiw, described as: "He would probably stick his finger in the face of one of my unemployed people and say, 'You are out of work. Congratulations. That is good for the economy, good for America,'" Manzullo said. [White House Outsourcing Remark Ignites Firestorm]
And to think - in an 'election year.'
February 23, 2004
solaris 10 goes autonomic...
BetaNews | Sun Preps Solaris 10 With 'Predictive' Self Healing
By David Worthington, BetaNews
February 23rd, 2004, 6:06 PM
Sun Microsystems has fleshed out an updated release of its Solaris operating system. After deciding upon the structure and nuances that would make up Solaris 10, Sun homed in on supplying its customers with superior value, stability, security, and performance.
To meet its self-imposed checklist, the Solaris product team turned to its technology tool chest which includes: N1 grid containers, a new "predictive" self healing framework, process rights management derived from Trusted Solaris, and a new bottleneck hunting technology dubbed dynamic trace.
autonomic computing technologies...
IRVINE, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/23/2004 -- Vision Solutions, a leading managed availability solutions provider, today announced that it is collaborating with IBM on its Autonomic Computing initiative, and is one of the first IBM Business Partners to adopt the groundbreaking new technologies. These technologies will create a new way of managing systems and the architecture will lay the foundation for an autonomic, self-healing infrastructure that will help users to perform problem determination and remediation more quickly and easily.
This collaboration includes the design elements and implementation of the Common Base Event format, a basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services. Common Base Event was recently introduced by IBM as a common format for log/trace information.
February 22, 2004
inside outsourcing...
The Times Herald :: Inside Outsourcing
By: Carl Rotenberg
...Ernest J. Dianastasis, the managing director of Computer Aid Inc., said the "60 to 70 percent promised cost savings of outsourcing really ends up being 10 to 15 percent." He said companies with established "best practices" had a better chance of achieving higher savings from outsourcing.
"Companies should get their own operations in order," he said, "before they turn to outsourcing." Dianastasis said the loss of 3.3 million U.S. jobs in the future would represent $136 billion in lost wages and nearly $1 trillion by 2015.
He said 123,000 jobs in the Delaware Valley were at risk now from outsourcing in the fields of information technology, call centers, customer service, bookkeeping and claims processing.
The loss of these local jobs would have an economic impact of more than $5 billion in annual salaries...
February 20, 2004
Knowledge As Aesop's Golden Assets...
Byron Glick, in an IT Insights piece for The Wisconsin Technology Network, talks about: Transforming Information to Knowledge.
Borrowing from Aesop's Golden Goose fable he writes:
...A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose, which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once. But when they cut it open they found it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any longer the daily addition to their wealth. Aesop
From a management point of view, Aesop describes two kinds of knowledge assets: intellectual assets and knowledge workers. Golden eggs represent intellectual property, the unique processes and various types of knowledge and experience that exist within our organizations. IT captures some, but by no means all, of this rich stream. The bits that can be documented, digitized and chopped up into databases all get IT attention but there is less certainty regarding the bigger parts, such as individual's creative ideas, insightful conversations among coworkers or a discussion focused on an engineer's design.
The second type of knowledge asset, the goose, represents the engine of production in the new economy, the knowledge worker. People create this asset and they use it daily, extracting the value from the golden egg. This human role is not readily reduced to bits and bytes, which poses an interesting challenge for IT.
IT departments are experts at building information pipelines for the desktop, but that's not enough anymore. Those dreadfully efficient pipes are creating geese overstuffed with information, which is great for pate but not so good for productivity and creativity. IT can't continue to treat the use of information and knowledge as unintended system consequences. Information managers must shift attention from volume and availability to content-related issues such as quality and reliability...
whatever happened to our 'paperless' future?...
In Computerworld, Michael Conley, eCopy Inc. wonders Are copiers part of the CIO's job?
...many CIOs are starting to realize that one of the biggest problems plaguing office workers doesn't have to do with computers, but rather good old-fashioned paper! Each office worker uses about 13,000 sheets of paper per year through copying, printing and faxing. And 60% of an employee's time is spent working with paper documents. A $30-per-hour knowledge worker will waste an average of $4,500 each year because of lost productivity time due to problems with paper documents. There's no such thing as the paperless office -- e-mail and the Internet have only increased the amount of paper being printed, copied, distributed and stored in the office...
February 19, 2004
knowledge worker news...
Stephen Cathers, in The University of Southern California's Daily Trojan posits that the movement of 'knowledge worker' jobs from USA shores is not a bad thing, and in fact is a good and necessary thing. In response to what he calls the 'Protectionist' platforms of candidates Kerry and Turner he asks:
...What makes the current dispute any different? The main difference between the present fight and previous battles is that white-collar workers are the ones who feel threatened this time.
This is supposedly important because knowledge workers are losing their jobs, and "everyone knows" that knowledge work is "America's future." When reminded that over time America has gone from agricultural to factory to knowledge work (which includes information technology), New Jersey State Senator Shirley Turner, author of protectionist legislation, told Wired, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge." Of course, this assumes that more jobs won't be created in promising fields like biotechnology and nanotechnology, while discounting the fact that more discoveries and inventions are yet to come in areas we can't predict. Politicians are hardly the best people to figure out what future innovations will transform the economy. While the rest of us are still in the dark, protectionist politicians have somehow figured out a way to divine America's future, and apparently it looks exactly like the present.
...All these objections don't mean that the cost to workers who lose their jobs is not a valid concern, only that protectionism is a poor solution. More innovative and less destructive responses are called for. For instance, the McKinsey Global Institute's report on outsourcing concluded that "as part of a severance package, and for a small percent of the savings from offshoring, companies could purchase insurance for their displaced workers that would cover their loss in wages for the time a worker is unemployed."..
autonomic add-on...
Guardian Unlimited | Online | IT news
Autonomic add-on
IBM's promise to create self-managing systems took a new turn this week with the release of the The Autonomic Computing Toolkit. The kit is a free download aimed at supporters of the Eclipse project, an open-source initiative, sponsored by IBM, to develop and maintain a basic framework upon which application development environments can be built. The ACT is designed to supplement these environments by providing a standard way to build self-healing applications. Included in the download are embeddable components, tools, usage scenarios and documentation that IBM says will be supplemented and expanded over the next year.
February 18, 2004
digital aristotle...
In a recent press release - Creating a Digital Aristotle: A Computerized Knowledge System for Scientists and Students - the Project Halo team announces:
...At the core of Halo's knowledge formulation approach is a document-rooted methodology, where domain experts - chemists, biologists and physicists - use existing documents, such as textbooks, to create knowledge modules. Tying knowledge modules to documents establishes the scope, context, and type of questions they can answer, as well as the depth and resolution of their answers. The goal of Phase II is to determine the feasibility of building such tools within a reasonable timeframe and the likelihood of their adoption by the scientific community.
The six-month pilot phase of Project Halo, which concluded in May 2003, demonstrated that state-of-the-art "knowledge representation and reasoning" technology is capable of producing computer applications that answer novel questions in Advance Placement (AP) chemistry - and also provide readable, domain-appropriate justifications for those answers. The project also identified two closely related challenges: (1) knowledge and question formulation requires highly specialized and expensive personnel (knowledge engineers), which pushes the development cost to about $10,000 per page; and (2) most of the evaluated system failures reflected insufficient expertise in AP Chemistry by the knowledge engineers creating the system's knowledge modules.
Halo Phase II will address these two issues directly by developing technology that will allow domain experts to formulate knowledge with decreasing dependence on knowledge engineers, and to pose questions and problems to the knowledge systems. Vulcan believes that achieving those goals will reduce the cost of knowledge formulation to levels comparable to textbook development, and will encourage scientists and educators to build an expanding body of machine-processable knowledge that will facilitate the Digital Aristotle's role as a tutor and research assistant.
The 30-month Phase II effort will be undertaken in three stages: (1) a six-month design stage, (2) a 15-month implementation stage, and (3) a nine-month refinement stage. Three competing teams have been contracted by Vulcan, each with world-class skills and technology in five primary areas: knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge acquisition, and intelligent interfaces, including natural language understanding, usability and system integration...
February 17, 2004
autonomic computing roadmap...
IBM :: An autonomic computing roadmap
by Nicholas Chase (nicholas@nicholaschase.com)
President, Chase & Chase, Inc.
For an autonomic computing system to discover and control events and situations, it uses a control loop that constantly monitors the system looking for events to handle. This control loop is defined by the autonomic computing reference architecture, as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 2. Control loop
The Control loop is the system by which events can be detected and dealt with. The process involves four steps:
Monitor: First, the system looks for the events, detected by the sensor from whatever source -- be it a log file or an in-memory process. The system uses the knowledge base to understand what it's looking at.
Analyze: When an event occurs, the knowledge base contains information that helps to determine what to do about it.
Plan: After the event is detected and analyzed, the system needs to determine what to do about it using the knowledge base. The symptom database might have information, or a central policy server might determine the action to take.
Execute: When the plan has been formulated, it's the effector that actually carries out the action, as specified in the existing knowledge base.
outsourcing ceo jobs...
On January 18, 2004 I wrote a post Free Trade Is Not Free in which I recommended that outsourcing CEO jobs might be a good thing. I was inspired by HP chief Carly Fiorina's incredibly insensitive quote: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore, we have to compete for jobs."
While it is unlikely that Ms. Fiorina's intention was to intimate the possibility of outsourcing C-level executive positions - it appears that a number of writers, cited in the related links below, have picked up on this concept and run with it.
Related Links:
Outsource the CEO next time by Rich Heintz
Why not send CEO jobs overseas? by Jesse Kornbluth
Economic policies need a shakeup by Lewis Billig
February 16, 2004
autonomic computing toolkit...
IBM delivers autonomic tools | CNET News.com
IBM's push to create systems that can manage themselves is moving from the drawing board to the commercial development community.
The company plans to release on Monday an open-source toolkit that will let programmers build autonomic, or self-managing, capabilities into their own applications. The Autonomic Computing Toolkit will be offered at IBM's DeveloperWorks Web site as a free add-on to the Eclipse Development Environment. IBM expects that software companies as well as corporate developers will use the tools.
Previously, Big Blue has used AlphaWorks, its site for prototype software, as the venue for the release of code arising from its research into autonomic computing. The shift to the DeveloperWorks site indicates that the software is fully tested and supported by IBM, said David Bartlett, the company's director of autonomic computing. He said IBM may decide to charge for the software.
IBM's autonomic computing initiative, launched in 2001, aims to create hardware and software that have the "intelligence" to monitor and manage themselves as part of a distributed computing system. It reduces the cost and complexity of operating computers by cutting back on the need for human administrators.
The overall goal is to let systems resolve problems automatically. Last year, Big Blue issued a blueprint describing the different aspects of its autonomic computing vision.
knowledge portals...
This market is expected to reach an estimated US$52.2M by 2007 with a robust compounded growth of 15.5% over the next four years.
"The interest in EIP software will continue to grow as this access layer into the IT environment is increasingly used to aggregate composite applications and web services", said Andrew Chew, Research Manager, Software Tools, Asia/Pacific. "Enterprises will also be looking into unifying applications and processes with a single interface and administrative layer to improve data and process accessibility across the enterprise. This is due to increasing demands to have visibility into business processes, knowledge management and business intelligence through portals."
February 14, 2004
knowledge worker exchange...
In an article for The Star - Many IT Jobs, But Only For The Right Skills, Hariati Azizan writes:
...In an employment survey conducted by recruitment firm Knowledge Worker Exchange Sdn Bhd (KWX), an MDC subsidiary, it was revealed that employment in ICT is expected to grow 23% this year, creating an estimated additional 26.2% job vacancies in ICT in 2004.
KWX notes that the supply of knowledge workers (approximately over 150,000 graduates) in the period of 1998 to 2005 is expected to meet the demand for ICT workers. The good news is that despite the increase in supply forecast, KWX assures that ICT employment opportunities will remain abundant....
February 13, 2004
is km a fad?...
In Fads We Love To Hate, Wallace Immen, of The Globe And Mail, talks about the continuing conversation regarding the staying quality of knowledge management:
...However, "fads emerge quickly and are adopted with great zeal, then peak and decline just as fast," the authors found. Then there is a "tweaking phenomenon," in which successful parts of a fad morph into a new concept with a new name.
A current example is the continuing discussion on the Internet these days about whether "knowledge management" is merely a fad. Many discussions posted on the Web are arguing that electronic strategies for getting, storing and sharing information represent a revolution in the way everything will get done in the future, while others argue employing the latest technologies to stay ahead of the competition is as old as the Roman conquests...
In this article he also reports an "On The Rise" phenomenon that is closely associated with a successful knowledge strategy:
...Human capital: Trying to quantify the knowledge and intangible benefits employees add to a company's value...
February 12, 2004
knowledge bytes...
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2004--Primus Knowledge Solutions (Nasdaq:PKSI), a leader in knowledge management solutions, will be presenting to investors at the Roth Capital Partners 16th Annual Growth Stock Conference on Thursday, February 19th at 9:30 a.m. PST. The event is being held at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort & Spa in Dana Point, California. Investors are welcome to listen to the live audio webcast online on the Primus website, in the Investor Relations section, or at the Vcall Conference site. The recorded webcast will be accessible online until March 31st, 2004.
Joanne Cummings reports on DocumentIQ that IXOS and OpenText announced the first fruits of their recent merger, a new enterprise content management (ECM) system called IXOS 6 Suite. "IXOS 6 Suite is based on a single, highly scalable repository that provides a single point of access to all structured data (content that is managed by a database, such as ERP) and unstructured data (such as e-mail, word processing and spread sheets files, scanned faxes and images and Web content) within an organization. IXOS said organizations can use the repository to store all relevant content, along with its descriptive meta data, including author, creation date, version and so on, and have it all readily accessible from one place."
February 11, 2004
autonomic networking...
NORTH HALEDON, N.J., Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Tech Laboratories, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: TCHL - News) announced today its recently introduced DynaTraX(TM) digital switch matrix, "Virtual Technician", when placed in a digital VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) network can automate IT infrastructure/reconfiguration for both service providers and digital phone users.
The DynaTraX(TM) placed between the VoIP network equipment and IP phone users allows quick connectivity of IP phone stations to network assets automatically without human intervention.
Bernard M. Ciongoli, president of Tech Laboratories, Inc., said, "No longer do technical personnel need to enter a digital telephone closet. All connectivity or reconfiguration can be done from a management workstation. Branch office operations can be managed from either a remote or central office."
The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market already enjoys growth in the wide area network (WAN) and is positioned for robust growth in the enterprise.
The worldwide demand for VoIP equipment is expected to be much larger than traditional phone systems in the next 10 years. Driving this robust growth is the efficiency derived from a unified network for voice, data and video.
"We believe our DynaTraX(TM) system can be a value-added appliance to help automate the management of VoIP networks in the future," said Ciongoli.
The Company recently announced the introduction of DynaTraX(TM) Enterprise Management System (DEMS) to thwart the increasing threat posed by cyber terrorists. This software/hardware system provides the ultimate in positive access security. The Company also recently introduced DynaTraX(TM) Virtual Technician, which provides autonomic self-healing and self-managing of network technologies.
To view video on Tech Laboratories' comprehensive DynaTraX(TM) technology, go to the Tech Laboratories, Inc. website at www.techlabsinc.com click on "Global Network Management Communications" and download video.
February 10, 2004
boards as knowledge organizations...
Corporate Board Member Magazine :: How Directors Should Redesign Their Job
by Colin B. Carter and Jay W. Lorsch
...Boards are "knowledge organizations," and for such groups the effective response to complexity is to specialize and focus. In that spirit, we believe that each director should be encouraged to build deeper knowledge in a couple of areas that are important to the board's performance. They should be encouraged to take a topic or issue and focus on it in greater depth. The objective is not only to be better informed, but also to be a better contributor to the discussions among all board members. This deeper focus is not to be confused with executive responsibility. That remains management's prerogative...
February 07, 2004
where did you park your knowledge?...
I have seen and/or heard many different metaphors utilized in describing knowledge as a resource in an organization. This morning in my news reader I found this clipping from - ic Wales - Don't let expertise leak away:
...What we do is treat expertise or knowledge as a resource or a commodity, "owned" by the business but "parked" in individuals' minds. The business owns it, but the expertise is effectively sitting in a giant corporate car park.
This is, to some degree, depersonalisation - and in the coldest, corporate, clinical terms it makes sense. But we obviously want to maintain a responsible/caring element, and there is a fine balance to be struck between social interaction and knowledge management...
Have you checked your 'car park' lately? (-:=
information work news...
vnunet.com :: Due credit not given to IT
By Jonathan Collins in New York
...The Information Work Productivity Council (IWPC), which was formed two years ago, is part of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute Technology. It counts IT giants Microsoft, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Intel among its supporters.
Speaking at a forum held by the group in New York, IWPC chairman and Microsoft group vice president of productivity and business services, Jeff Raikes, said: "It is time to stop the debate on the value of IT. The issue is not whether there is value in IT, the issue is that current measurements fail to capture the value of IT to the economy.
"The genetic sequence of Sars was developed and identified between teams in China and Toronto in a month. Labour statistics don't have a way to measure that kind of rapid collaboration - especially not across national borders."
The IWPC claims that measuring economic productivity in the twenty-first century means a shift from measuring business process outcomes or the quantity of economic production to measuring the quality of that output.
The organisation is working to develop a framework for businesses to measure productivity that results from technology such as email, instant messaging, team workspaces, video conferencing and web conferencing.
Its latest findings include initial studies into best practices for customer feedback in product development, IT support for global collaboration, and personal information and knowledge management...
February 05, 2004
e-learning visionaries predictions...
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: E-Learning Visionaries Share Their Thoughts
NEW YORK, Feb. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- What will be e-learning's successes, failures, and innovations in 2004? Lisa Neal, Editor-in-Chief of eLearn Magazine, asked e-learning visionaries from industry, academia, and government for their predictions. The published results point to e-learning's continued penetration into mainstream education and training and that e-learning will be better integrated with knowledge management, document management, and personal lives.
In this article, e-learning visionaries provide a variety of perspectives. Centra's Leon Navickas prophesies that e-learning technologies will penetrate areas beyond traditional learning, such as mentoring and parent-teacher conferencing, whereas Elliott Masie says that the most central issues to e- learning will be context management, learning integration, and readiness. Other key topics include the use of games for learning and the role of online learning communities.
Contributors to the article include e-learning consultants and vendors as well as researchers and faculty from the US, Japan, Greece, New Zealand, The Netherlands, and Canada. Read all the Predictions for 2004 at eLearn Magazine...
February 04, 2004
master in plm...
Business Wire :: RuleStream Sponsors mPLM - master in Product Lifecycle Management
WAKEFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 3, 2004-- RuleStream's Product Suite and Engineering Knowledge Management Expertise Are Key to the Success of the First Master in PLM at Polytechnic University of Milan.
RuleStream Corporation, a design process software company that delivers unbeatable competitive advantage to manufacturers, today announced that it is currently sponsoring the first edition of the post graduate course in "mPLM - master in Product Lifecycle Management" organized by MIP, the Business School of Politecnico di Milano, the Polytechnic University of Milan.
The mPLM program is part of the wider collaboration established by RuleStream since its inception with Politecnico di Milano's KAEMaRT (Knowledge Aided Engineering, Manufacturing and Related Technologies,) group led by Prof. Umberto Cugini. The main objectives of this collaboration are joint research activities, training, and the promotion of knowledge management in engineering through KBE (Knowledge Based Engineering) and design automation technologies...
February 03, 2004
ifla establishes knowledge management section...
NOTICIAS.INFO :: IFLA Establishes Knowledge Management Section
"The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) recently announced the creation of a Knowledge Management Section. "The Section will provide an international platform for professional communication and for understanding of the significance of knowledge management for librarians and the institutions that employ them" says IFLA.
According to IFLA, the Section aims at following developments in knowledge management and promoting its practical implementation within the IFLA community. Meeting the demand of librarians to maintain their competencies and skills in an ever changing working environment, the Section seeks to provide theoretical and practical knowledge in focused areas of knowledge management such as interactive communication in various types of information settings, using IT for the exchange of knowledge and experience in an organizational context, etc.
IFLA, which maintains formal associate relations with UNESCO, is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users."
February 01, 2004
bill gates on knowledge worker infrastructure...
ZDNet Australia :: Electronic paper: just a pipe ream?
By Angus Kidman, Technology & Business magazine
..."As people moved to partially do e-commerce, in some ways it was even more complex because you had the straightforward information passing electronically, but all the exceptions would result in phone calls and faxes and e-mail, and having the understandings that were created in parallel in that knowledge worker side, and getting the back-end systems to understand that sometimes the impedance and the mismatch there even took away the benefit of having a piece of it be electronic," Microsoft's Gates conceded in a speech to CEOs at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit.
Ever the optimist, however, Gates argued that the emerging demand for Web services would help realise the promise of a truly electronic world--and banish paper forever. "When you have these Web services, that you can capture the full richness of what's going on with complete visibility to the knowledge workers, to update those things and be notified appropriately of things, that is where you get real benefit of saying that the paper approach really is completely obsolete."...