Logjam
Exponential growth of unstructured information over the past several years reflects the success of our focus on automating the generation of information. Few tools were effective in helping us assimilate and harvest the bounty of hidden information order in the underlying info-structure from automated information production for true business value. This is because they took a structured approach that had the effect of hiding information under preconceived, fixed, structured patterns.

As a result, today we're inundated with information overproduction, "drowning in information but starving for knowledge," which is in turn exacerbated by our lack of skill to read and assimilate a fraction of the material produced. We need help assimilating the information we have stockpiled, clearing the InfoGlut logjam that gets in the way of making decisions. That way we can leverage reusable concept combinatory patterns that work, and eliminate those that don't. Automating information production in today's InfoGlut marketplace only amounts to piling-on. We don't need more information faster, we need tools to help us understand its significance so we can learn its value and reuse it to business advantage.

Increasingly we find ourselves over-stressed under a burgeoning load of InfoGlut that leaves us manually searching, filtering, and organizing results to personal need. The urgency to keep abreast in a world running far ahead has caused a reaction that has moved beyond procrastination into alliteracy, where users refuse to read, as opposed to illiteracy where users can't read. They prefer instead to replace the necessary learning and in-depth assimilation with information surfing, a pacifier that has not been effective, much like an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

Information surfing only skims the surface, which is fine if you know what's significant below the surface. But that's not the case with 1G-KM (First Generation Knowledge Management). 2G-KM addresses that problem, promoting meaningful pattern associations to the hyperspatial semantic surface and monitoring emerging patterns in the remaining information bulk that percolates under the surface, ready to pounce on it and bring it to the attention of those who are interested and need to know.

Why search won't work
Modern search engines don't solve the problem either. While they have come a long way and are much improved, they still suffer from myopia. They're merely cogs, back at the information gathering stage, very early in the Knowledge Management life cycle. Information volume is not where the problem is. It was the problem in the 1970s and 1980s when information was perceived as power. But this is the 21st century. Today, knowledge is power--information is glut. It's a plague that gets in the way of making decisions and doing business. We need to move beyond search, which is stuck in the age-old information collection stage, into knowledge recognition, capture, preservation, leveraging, and monitoring. Then we can use emerging and well-formed concept patterns as knowledge that works, and share them with those who need it to drive the business forward and protect it from competitive, economic, and technology challenges.