Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Towards an OHS Manifesto
>In every sense of the world, there is a strong correlation between
>what I have said and the Personal Knowledge Management software your
>firm http://www.r-objects.com/ offers. (01)
I know, that's one of the reasons I've been lurking on this list ;-) (02)
> Indeed, that is the primary thrust of KnownSpace. In fact, I have
>been thinking that a "PKM" might be the very next Killer Application. (03)
My own opinion is that something of that nature has to be -- not sure
whether the next, but one of these days/years/decades. (hard to
predict) (04)
Note that most big software investments over recent years have gone
into automating repeatable processes, be they customer service, or
sales funnel management, or supply chains or what have you -- but if
you poll CEOs, they are much concerned with making sure their
employees are smart, and those smarts are being used. For me, the
very essence of being smart is close to the opposite of a repeatable
process. Taking these things together, the big push towards knowledge
worker productivity improvement has to come real soon now, as soon as
we figure out how exactly to do it - which obviously assumes that MS
Office is not the answer (and we can probably take this as a given on
this list) (05)
> Forgive me: us old farts are going to have a heckuva time accepting
>new technology. My view is this: start with the kids. (06)
Ah, now I understand. I follow this argument. (07)
On the other hand, to put this into perspective, every new cycle of
technology, regardless of whether software or automobiles, or
whatever, has had that problem of resistance to change, and having to
find smart ways of getting around that resistance. (08)
In his famous book, Andy Grove was arguing that a new technology
needed to be "10 times" as good as an established way of doing things
to win, along a dimension that is customer-relevant such as money. In
other words, 10 times more (preferably measurable) bang for the buck
for specific users. Those technologies succeed that find such a
segment, and go from there, and all others fail in the market. (09)
The problem with the education market is that there's not much money
to be made for software companies, compared with other software
market segments. And decisions are made because of all sorts of
drivers, just not economic drivers. (whether you like that or not
depends on political position, but the fact remains) (010)
>I should point out that Doug Engelbart is very interested in
>improving the software industry and I think that to be a great use
>case pool as well. I, however, as a software developer myself, am
>already struggling with a new approach of my own invention:
>OntoCentric(tm), which wants to build everything starting from a
>central ontology. Even though I am trying to invent a new
>technology, it's not easy to use it for I have far too much baggage
>dragging me into old habits. (011)
I think you are just making the "10 times" argument using yourself as
a user ;-) If you were convinced that the "new way" of doing things
(and I admit I know nothing about your approach, so this is
definitely not a value statement) was 10 times better than the old
one, e.g. you could write code 10 times as quickly as before, I think
it's likely you'd go through all of the pain of all this newness. If
it is "only" 3 times or so, it's often not enough to overcome that
barrier (012)
> OTOH, for the reasons stated above, I still maintain my belief that
>education -- that is, environments that stimulate the growth of
>world-class critical thinkers -- to be of the highest value to
>humanity in the near term. (013)
As this famous quote says: "a race between education and catastrophe". (014)
The problem is, how do you make money off it. And the fact of the
matter is -- again, regardless of what we'd like or political opinion
-- that things that make money happen, and things that don't, tend to
not to. So the trick is to do it in a way so that lots of people can
make lots of money in the process, because the likelihood that it
will happen that way is just waaaayyyyy higher... (015)
Anyway, so much about random thoughts. I appreciate your response.
And this is an interesting list. (016)
Cheers, (017)
Johannes Ernst
R-Objects Inc. (018)