Posted by Prac on March 06, 2002 at 06:16:44:

In Reply to: Re: Santa Fe Institute and KM posted by mike cahill on March 05, 2002 at 19:44:12:

Mike, I'll try to explain some. In his book "The Quark and the Jaguar", Murray Gell-Mann shares quantum physics in a very interesting manner. I was busy with formal commercial KM research at the time, and the contents of the book influenced my designs and thinking tremendously, and I think, permanently.

For example, his concept of 'intermediate', has inspired me to search for ways of determining and managing the 'intermediate' within social structures, departments, teams, or otherwise. I have since found that fractal geometry seems to be a relevant model for developing methods around this thought. I am no mathematician though, and would need to collaborate extensively with relevant knowledge owners, once i have accumulated the finances to fund research and development for about a year.

If you know of existing methods, it would save me years of work, and I could actually move onto other research areas.

I was working on enterprise architectures at that time, in order to produce business and IT alignment. Scalability is obviously a major IT and business issue, and his thoughts on the subject has made me believe that scalability can be conquered, whereas the reality of modern technologies and businesses prove otherwise.

Adaptive architectures, networked organizations and the like do seem to offer some form of hope, but my take on it is that the architecture (design principles) rely on evolutionary systems thinking, and I have found basic systems thinking in organizations to be very immature, on average, or non existent.

What does that say for the future of all these great designs? I think they are bound to continue failing, as project and programme management methodologies are proving to us.

Information Engineering methodologies, even object orientation, are bound to fail, due to the lack of systems thinking required to deliver scalable (and I don't mean adding more processors or RAM, or disk space) enterprise-wide solutions.

They don't have to fail, but their method sets are of limited adequacy and could be fairly well criticized. I think there are various factors which restricts adequate development, but I am nto affiliated to organzations in a restricted or restrictive manner, and am funding my own research, which secures the vision of the architectures one may be looking for. Murray Gell-Mann, who was the chairman of the SFI at that time, inspired my mind with his book, and more his rationale, worldview, and thinking on the universe. I'm sure there are many other authors out there who have also inspired me, and who could have done the same for me, but it happened to have been him.

I could offer many more items, but I think this would suffice.

Since that time, I have been working on producing models and methods, which are as holistic as I could get them(quantum?).

The main eye-opener for me, which is probably old hat to many of you here, was that KM is probably a quantum theory of sorts. I am searching for superstrings, as I am convinced they exist in many invisible shapes and forms. KMs resource boundaries, where it could borrow knowledge from, is as limited as the knowledge we have available to us in the world, or within any particular context.

Theory aside, the main challenge has been, and remains, to produce practical methods, which could be used by most anybody, without expecting them to have gone through the years of research and rationale in order to understand and use the methods.

I have reached deadlock on my knowledge base, and now it is time for some further informal research, in order to see how far the envelope can be pushed, and still remain relevant as per the original intention. I am sticking to my approach of knowledge from anywhere could add value to the process, which means I do not discriminate against my own learning by restricting my reading to any particular field. Knowledge nuggets could be found anywhere, anytime, and never knows exactly where and how it would occur.

I think it is important to have a framework to guide the discovery, identification, and translation of those potential nuggets.

I have had great news that an organization wishes to test these methods for their purposes. I am happy for the opportunity to learn more by applying the material and to hopefully refine it further based on each learning experience, or field test if you wish.

Time is my friend, and sometimes my foe. Thus is my mindset.

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Follow Ups:

• your are touchng on delicate issues now mike cahill 04:27:25 03/07/02 (1)
  • Re: your are touchng on delicate issues now Prac 06:52:51 03/07/02 (0)

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