Posted by mike cahill on March 07, 2002 at 04:27:25:

In Reply to: Re: Santa Fe Institute and KM posted by Prac on March 06, 2002 at 06:16:44:

I write without proofing and quickly.

ur touching on some sensitive issues when you allude to the facts that many, many IT projects do not pan out either functionally or financially. If your experience has put u in a position to have a deep understanding of these risks, I would like to communicate directly with you.

very few, very very few senior people in the industry have ever acknowledged the high financial risks that buyers take when they buy even slightly novel systems (which they all want so that they can implement differentiating competitive strategies … here i speak of real software and real money, ERP, CRM etc., not knowledge management that is somewhat ill defined.

if you want to get your head straight on how mature knowledge management is, just take a look at a tiny project that SRI did recently at http://www.ai.sri.com/~wilkins/suo/suo-final.pdf and look at page 64 and the discussion of the Sussman Anomaly. This entire paper is real caution on the idea of KM and how it might be used to solve simple problems that machines choke on.

On the REAL end of KM are relatively straightforward ontologies that are being implemented in e-commerce today … literally “kid stuff”. Taking a look at what might be “reasonably” done in the near future, look at IEEE’s ontology program, http://suo.ieee.org/.

On the dreamier end is the cutting edge of research, re SRI. Beyond dreamy is some of the very difficult and unusually exotic stuff that one occasionally reads on this board, where the posters don’t have a common view of what an ontology is, or knowledge … for that matter.

Re ur own investment. Always ask yourself one key question. Can your work contribute to someone’s bottom line or competitive differentiation? If you don’t have a clear answer to that … pause and think carefully.

Best
mike

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• Re: your are touchng on delicate issues now Prac 06:52:51 03/07/02 (0)

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