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If BP Only Knew...
Tom Davenport had a very interesting piece in last week's issue of Business Week, suggesting a causal relationship
between the Gulf Oil spill and BP's gradual disinvestment in Knowledge Management. KM devotees will probably know that BP was a real thought leader in this area, and was one of the first large firms to
take the idea seriously. In fact, our own work developing a classified employee directory at the company then known as DMR Consulting was heavily influenced by the architecture of BP's
"Connect" intranet. Two of BP's Knowledge Managers went on to write Learning to Fly, still one of the best books on the subject.
As Davenport tells it, sometime in 2000 BP's focus shifted from improving knowledge to improving its share price. Instead of organizational learning, the motto was "full steam ahead."
Instead of stressing peer review and careful judgment, it encouraged risk taking and a focus on short-term costs and benefits. In fact, the oil spill didn't come out of the blue, but followed two
refinery explosions in 2005, and an Alaskan pipeline rupture in 2006. They should have seen it coming.
Wave Goodbye
A week ago today, Google pulled the plug on its Wave collaboration platform, after a private beta and just three months after opening it to the public. Depending on your point of view, this was either an admirable example of a "fast failure" or the latest misstep by a company that's starting to lose its cool factor. (On that note, some pundits are wondering if Google will be the next Microsoft.) Google CEO Eric Schmidt has put a positive spin on the decision, saying that it's emblematic of an innovative culture that aims high, is willing to take big risks and is not a afraid to admit its mistakes.
It's certainly a cautionary tale for those who try to go too far, too fast. We wrote about Wave when it was first announced, and given the Google imprimatur, it sounded pretty cool. A combination of Instant Messaging, email and a Web collaboration space, it seemed to bring together all the key elements for a powerful virtual workplace. But the ideas were just different enough that people couldn't quite figure out what to do with it. It failed to reach a critical mass of users, and Google decided to move on.
For Knowledge Management practitioners, this may have a familiar ring. Technological changes are great when they map closely to a preexisting model. Email is clearly better than a mimeograph
machine. But the human behaviors that underlie collaboration are going to be a much tougher nut for virtualization.
The Wired Life
There's an unintentionally forward-looking scene in Hal Ashby's 1979 film Being There. Confronted by a gang of street toughs, Chance the gardener tries to make them go away by clicking a button on his
television remote control. It's harder today to imagine a character whose world view has been totally formed by what he's seen on TV. But what about folks who absorb most of what they know through
digital media?
A recent article in PC World suggested that we're being rewired by our gadgets to the point that we expect real-world objects to behave like their digital counterparts. Have you ever tapped a word to call up a definition, only to realize that you're reading a book, not a Kindle? (OK, neither have we, but that's because we're old!) We don't have TiVos either, but it might be interesting if you could pause and rewind conversations at will. And we’d probably agree that one of life's great tragedies is the lack of an Undo button.
And yet, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that an increasing number of people think our digital doodads are producing more stress than they're worth. Somewhat surprisingly, younger people report more negative feelings than older people. And the people who are the most computer-dependent are better educated and more affluent. It's the down side of the wired life.
The Rise of the Machines
With the machines getting smarter (and us getting dumber), it's reassuring to read that in at least one area, humans are still beating the computers
hands down. That area is protein folding.
It started at the University of Washington in Seattle, where the biochemistry department decided to use a BOINC program to run its protein-folding algorithms. That's a distributed computing model that seeks to tap the processing power of volunteers' idle computers. And some of those volunteers wrote in to complain that they could see better ways to do the job. Given humans' highly developed talent for spatial manipulation, they can see a solution intuitively, which the algorithms cannot. So UW turned its distributed computing program into an on-line game called Foldit. It's actually a mix of human and machine computation, and it's producing real results.
As with other on-line games, Foldit players can
collaborate, develop strategies and advance to higher levels. But along the way, they're working out the optimum models for folding proteins, which may actually help cure certain neurodegenerative
diseases. How's that for a win-win situation? To get a bigger picture, read this article in Nature.
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