14 November 2001
Today I want to discuss my visit to New York City, and my understanding about Knowledge Management.
Since last week, I've made a pilgrimage to Ground Zero and the Taliban have been routed in many parts of Af-ganny-stan. I flew to LaGuardia last Thursday, using my last free ticket on Vanguard, and spending five wonderful hours in the Kansas City Airport. I finished the fourth Harry Potter book. Be careful about reading one - it's addictive and you'll have to stay awake reading instead of sleeping at night. We landed at LaGuardia at about 1045pm, and I caught a bus to 125th and Lex. From there I went down into the subway to ride downtown to the Clarion on Park Ave.
A train came by at about eleven thirty pm, but it was an experimental train. There was a sign on the windows, and the half dozen men on the train were wearing those orange net vests that identify people as officials in many parts of New York. It was an unpolished chrome car, with shiny plastic benches. Brand new, no graffiti on it yet.
I finally caught the 6 at about midnight and rode downtown to 33rd St. It's a short walk from there to the hotel, but I'm on a ten day trip and have a heavy duffel bag. I always have trouble getting into a good exercise routine on the road, so hauling a heavy bag around, even one with wheels, is good for me. The cool air and the Pan Am building were my first glimpse of midtown Manhattan above ground. I wonder how many steps I climbed? It was exhilarating. I staggered to the hotel.
The next morning, I went down to Grand Central and admired the renovated room. I liked it fine when it was dirty too, but I really like the main terminal now. A friend and I took a train down to the end of the island, to see the place where the WTC used to be.
I've seen pictures on TV, and I've heard people on TV talk about how TV doesn't really show it. Until they start making Smellovision, you won't have a clue what to expect. The smell is everywhere. When I was in college, I once had the misfortune to be operating a VW Beetle when the engine siezed up - the camshaft broke into three parts. That smelled bad. I had a job after I graduated from college sawing aluminum in a window factory (no, I didn't study that in college) and I can remember the smell of the radial arm saw blade gnawing through the oiled aluminum (and a glove or two, but thankfully never a finger). I knew the smell at Battery Park. It was burning metal. It's a smell you can't fake. It is the smell of something that can't be undone.
We couldn't get within a block or two of the actual WTC site. There were bicycle racks and police in those same orange net vests. I went up to one as asked, "Is this all we can see?" In hindsight, that's the kind of question that you might expect from some rubbernecking driver or Jerry Springer addict. I was worried that he might tell me to get lost and quit dissing dead heroes or something. But he seemed to understand that all I wanted to do was to connect with the event as closely as I could without sharing their fates. He said that I could go around to the west side, and told me where most of the memorial shrines were to be found.
The scale and scope of the damage and ruin is not something you can tell on TV. Large office buildings have their corner edges chewed off. It would look pretty amazing if it weren't for the buildings that are in piles of rubble. There IS smoke rising from the site, and when I saw it I got pretty hot, too. I was really frustrated to think that we can only kill our enemies once. I wanted to kill them a lot of times, and let everyone else do it too. There is a malady called the WTC cough, and grit in the air. You never know if you're breathing in part of somebody who went to work two months ago and never came home.
It's a holy place, a place to think about life and death, about why people would want to hurt each other, and how we can take care of the people we care about. You don't have to fly to New York, ride a subway, and walk around to think about these things. As a matter of fact, I think we should all think about it all the time, and whoever figures it out first should raise their hand and tell the rest of us.
The Economist, November 3rd, had a survey of the near future. It was written by Peter Drucker, and described the new coming society where skilled laborers, called "knowledge workers," will be the largest group of workers. It's worth reading - he describes how agriculture once occupied most workers, and then the industrial revolution came along and most workers switched to manufacturing. Then the information revolution came along and most workers have switched from manufacturing to services. I still think we're all going to work as part time clowns and federal judges someday, but that's not important.
The article made me think about how we work. I thought about L Ron Hubbard's maps of work as networks, where particles move from node to node. To Hubbard, management was avoiding lost particles. Hubbard was a goofball but it's a very sensible model.
Work takes place in an environment of networks and value chains. As the goods and services move from node to node, value is added or that node gets "disintermediated." If we think of these networks and chains as maps, then the work done by men, the creation of value, is the transformation of inputs (coming from the previous node) to outputs (going to the next node). We've transformed inputs by physical labor. It's amazing - we eat Raisin Bran and then convert it into a neat stack of widgets. Anyhow, we move some combination of "stuff" and information from one point to the next. In the process of doing that, we use knowledge about the process we're performing and about the environment. That knowledge is applied in units, that I will call "Knowledge Units" or "knits."
Drucker points out that we have had knowledge workers for centuries - they are called doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Funny think about knowledge - when you use it, it isn't gone. But if you don't use it, it deteriorates and we can't remember how we did it last time. Maybe I pushed THIS button first ... oops. So people learned a long time ago to store knowledge - on paper, on clay tablets, on rocks, any way that we could store symbols and retrieve them later.
Now we have some really cool new ways to store and retrieve symbols using computers and networks. It's heady drink, thinking of all the ways that we can work differently in the future. I don't want to pick a knit, but every job can be viewed as a mixture of moving stuff and moving information. The latter part can be digitized and done by computer.
We can display the symbols much better than we can display their meanings. For example, the military is dreaming of "smart dust" that is a mote-sized sensor - camera, microphone, etc. A matrix of these would give them great information about the movements of people, winds, equipment, you name it. We have good systems for displaying the outputs of those sensors. What we don't have are systems for interpreting the meanings of this data - we can't tell a man from a dog from a horse very easily. A big part of the reason is that we don't know how our minds work. If I can think about it, I can teach it and I believe that I can code it. But the actual efforts to code this information are hampered by tools that aren't designed to think.
It's frustrating to think about thinking machines, when we can't even keep our PC's running a full day without having to reboot them.