Few people can speed-read, fewer know how to power-read, and even fewer power-learn. In fact, most people fail to read at all, resulting in an emerging corporate phenomenon called alliteracy--refusal to read. In place of reading, learning, and leveraging the plethora of knowledge concepts found in corporate documents, users choose to recreate them.

Strange bedfellows
In a strange twist of reality, first generation Knowledge Management solutions placed a major emphasis and expenditure on Knowledge Management through reuse. Yet these technologies employed methods that actually confine concept re-usage opportunities rather than increase them. By applying structured approaches, information is not free to dynamically express meaningful concept pattern usages that influence business productivity. And by applying compute-expensive, mathematically-driven, and top-down manually declared knowledge processing and editing methods, the opportunity for structured models to get left behind quickly by the business dynamics renders them labor intensive, untrusted, and unused. Data warehouses admit they suffer from this business dynamic. There's a lot of very expensive 1G-KM product gathering dust on corporate shelves because they didn't deliver to the promise. What's needed is technology that dynamically works under the hood for us. And not just knowledge users, but every user, watching for and harnessing the effects of meaningful business dynamics as reflected through concept pattern cause-effect-impact usages.

1G-KM low-dimensional technology by necessity must eliminate concept usage alternatives and process what it can in batches ahead of time because it cannot address the requisite dynamic high-dimensional scalability demand. By hiding the glut of information bulk under the surface, it addressed the immediate emotional and business stress facing users today who are overwhelmed with unbridled choices as they quickly become mired in the information logjam. But 1G-KM was not successful at discovering high-dimensional dynamic order that formed within the hidden information bulk lurking below the surface. So, the value-added relief was short-lived, much of the technology was shelved as an expensive experiment, and the emotional and business stress resurfaced with unsatisfied users. The need ran deeper that the technology could reach.

What Knowledge Management users needed was a way to automatically leverage the value-added reuse of knowledge concept patterns, so they could reuse rather than redo corporate knowledge to make better business decisions faster, building an incremental path towards successive improvement. They leverage what they know based on how well concept patterns work on targeted problem contexts.

In the next article in this series, I'll list the requisites for a successful knowledge management technology and will discuss in more detail the shortcomings of First Generation Knowledge Management Technology and structure-based approaches.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.