>K.C. Indicated:
>... there are two points of focus
>a) improving the value of the information in the history
>b) reducing the work of accessing it
Greg responded...
>And I ask, is there not also a third? Is it not also essential to develop
>a belief that the information is of sufficient value that I am willing to
>overcome the self-discounting which occurs when I admit that I don't know
>and some other source might be smarter than I?
Yes.
However, even assuming we get people who have that tendancy to set aside
their usual way of doing things and to search the history, if there is
little of value there or it takes a lot of work to retrieve it, they are
not likely to continue the "new" behavior of looking 'outside'.
>K.C. also comments:
>The difficulty with improving the value of the information in the history
>is that it requires people with a history to use as a basis for "guessing"
>what information will be useful in the future. ...
>
>And [Greg] respond:
>
>Would not the "guessing" tend to bias the development of the information
>and potentially eliminate what might be most useful? And, we are
>overwhelmed with data, there is far less informaiton, even less knowledge,
>and far less wisdom. And if I consider the wisdom which I have managed to
>acquire in the last 40 years it would probably fit quite nicely on less
>than a dozen sheets of paper. So what does it make most sense to capture?
Well... though I didn't say it very clearly, I believe that wisdom comes
from experience. Assuming that "history repeats itself", only those with
experience can know ("guess") what is of value.
Of course, this argument is null and void in situations where nothing is
as 'usual' -- a company going into a completely new market, to give one
example. But in spite of all the change going on, some things _do_ stay
the same. At least _part_ of AT&T is still in the long distance phone
business, to give another example.
Perhaps it is experience which gives us the clue as to what stays the
same.
Then KC wrote...
>(Of course, I'd love to have someone show me that it is possible
>to improve the value of the information in the history... :-)
And Greg responded...
>I wonder if the answer might be that if I learn, then that past
>information which was of little value might be of more value, for I may be
>better able to understand the value in it!
No doubt, not all information is 'immediately' of value.
Should we capture _everything_? I think not.
The discussion during a business meeting about where to go to lunch is not
likely to ever prove of value in the future. (Not that it is _impossible_
for it to ever prove of value, just unlikely.)
A record of what decisions have been made is often of value. So we have
the two extremes.
In the middle is the "roads not taken"... these are the things which may
prove of value in the future... and may not. In fact they are likely to
_not_ be of value... unless of course you just happen to need to know.
And then they may be of _extreme_ value... since the cost of regenerating
the thinking that went into them may be very high.
As some of the people on this list know, I am an information 'collector'.
When I work on a project, I save _everything_. Well, no, not the
discussions about where to go to lunch... but just about everything else.
:-)
If I need to retrieve something from this history, I usually can. But
alas, my history collection is not accessible to others... because I have
a chronological style of memory... so I organize my material by date.
Since it exists in a variety of forms (paper, electronic... even napkins
with bits of design scribbled on them), automating the search process is a
problem.
I suppose if we threw enough technology at the problem, we could get all
the material into an electronic form. And if we threw enough money at the
problem we could even solve the indexing problem -- i.e., how do you
'code' the contents of that diagram scribbled on the napkin?
But we'd have a huge amount of stuff... and still wouldn't know what was
of value. Or how long to keep it... etc.
I guess the bottom line is, even if people want to use historical
information, there has to be some way of a) insuring there is something of
value in the material captured, b) making it humanly possible to _find_
the valuable bit.
Don't know if I've answered your question Greg, or just wandered further
afield...
-- kcbyK.C. Burgess Yakemovic Group Performance Systems, Inc. kcby@gpsi.com http://www.gpsi.com
"Helping people with people, through technology.... because the "soft stuff" is the _hard_ stuff!"
4776 Village North Court phone & fax 770-395-0282 Atlanta GA 30338 USA