Controlling context builds productivity
But what if you weren't forced to switch context in the first place. Say the telephone company understood that this context-switching trauma was a common phenomenon in all households and they provided some technology that permitted you to stay in context so you wouldn't lose your way. Say you went to the phone and you gave it a voice command such as, "Please find Fred Burchel's phone number." The phone might respond: "I have three phone numbers: home, office, mobile. Which do you want?" You respond by saying: "Home," and the phone then dials the number for you.

In effect, you were collaborating with the phone without forced context switching--the phone came into your context. There was no need to change context and lose your productivity (or your mind) in frustration as you rack your brains trying to remember why you came back into the kitchen. We've all been there. It's a common human trait. In fact, memory improvement books, such as The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas help people remember long lists by chaining adjacent items together in a tree-like ordered fashion, rather than trying to remember a flat unordered list.

Controlling context with flexible applications
Today there's an alternative to applications that are packaged to fit someone else's context. Advancements in object-oriented systems technology facilitates not only high reuse of solutions components, but permits corporations to wire components together adaptively to meet their needs, down to the needs of individual groups of users. These flexible applications can be brought into the users' context by dynamically reconfiguring them rather than the other way around.

If you're reading a document and you want more relevant information, why not ask the document to find them for you by using the document's knowledge signature as an automatic knowledge fulfillment query. You could generate a context-driven eKAP knowledge extract by using the source document to seed a collection of relevant document context relationships and then send a knowledge broker into other source document repositories as a proxy to bring back directed context to fill in the missing subject information.

From there, you could search for authors of specific types of documents that reflect knowledge that is key to your needs. Using your new findings, you could add more and more documents to your Knowledge Extract as you work your knowledge to solve your needs within the context of the initial problem--exploring the possibilities by building on the knowledge you already have.

Be sure to watch out for my next article to find out why building Knowledge Management applications is like wiring a circuit board. We will discuss how we can harness state-of-the-art object component technology that automatically leverages the way we learn to build self-generating intelligent knowledge management applications and agents that stay on top of meaningful details for you in a responsive and scalable fashion.

Bain McKay is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist of CIRI Lab Inc. where he and his research team build advanced Knowledge Management technology using the latest methods in Cognitive Science and computing technology. Bain can be reached at bmckay@cirilab.com or at http://www.cirilab.com.