“The greatest wisdom is to recognize one’s own ignorance” – Nicoleus Cusanus
THE PACE OF CHANGE
I have been involved in most aspects of ICT for a number of years and in a number of projects large and small. During that time, I’ve been fortunate enough to have met and inter-acted with a number of leading edge technology-related firms and groups of people who have made significant contributions to progress and knowledge we all often take for granted these days.
The pace of change over the last 100 hundred years is something mind-boggling, especially if you measure it against a specific point of time in the past.
The year is 1909. Here are just a few statistics I picked up randomly from an American Almanac for that year:
Sugar cost four cents a pound
Coffee was fifteen cents a pound
Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen
The average life expectancy was 47 years
There was no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day
Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub
Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone
Two out of every 10 adults couldn’t read or write
The average wage in 1909 was 22 cents per hour
The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph
More than 95 percent of all births took place at home
Ninety percent of all doctors had no college education
The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower
The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year
A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year
There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads
Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea hadn’t been invented yet
Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were available in over-the-counter drugstores
Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo
Nothing much progressed in the world during the first half of the 20th Century, not at least with the kind of pace we see it running today. Relatively few jobs had much to do with computers and computer-related technology.
AGE OF INFORMATION
But by the mid-1950s, researchers noticed that the number of people holding “white collar” jobs had just exceeded the number of people holding “blue collar” jobs. These researchers realised that this was an important shift. It was clear that the Industrial Age was coming to an end and as it ended, the newer times adopted the title of the “Information Age” Why that term, you ask?
Well, it’s largely because large frame computers, computerised machinery, fiber optics, communication satellites, the Internet, and other ICT tools became a significant part of the growing world economy.
Then, microcomputers were developed and many business and industries were greatly changed by ICT in essentially a form that transformed products made of atoms to products made of bits which can be produced very cheaply, make a copy of it quickly and ship it across the world instantly at very low cost.
Then of course, with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, is when the Internet truly became a global network. Today the Internet has become the ultimate platform for accelerating the flow of information and is, today, the fastest-growing form of media.
But with all this now available at the touch of our fingertips I sometimes wonder if any information acquired is actually being transformed into knowledge leading the more enlightened of us to gain some institutional wisdom that can perhaps be applied to improve humanity and the world it lives in.
Since ICT covers any product or service that leads to storing, retrieving, manipulating, transmitting or receiving information electronically in digital form, I decided to ask a more well-versed associate of mine who runs an ICT-based company called Digital Summit. It is a company that specialises in providing professional service that helps healthcare and educational institutions in New Zealand transform themselves into knowledge-based organisations.
DEFINING KNOWLEDGE
After a long and fruitful discussion, I learned something more about what knowledge is and how it can be organised intelligently using ICT approaches so that users of the information systems this company builds can actually get more bang for their buck, as the saying goes. He calls both the approach and methodology behind the flow of work they do the Trident Solution™.
First of all, I learned that there are actually two forms of knowledge:
1) tacit knowledge, which is possessed by people and not generally recorded; and,
2) explicit knowledge, which is recorded information and usually stored in form of databases.
Then, there are also three kinds of knowledge:
1) subject matter knowledge, which identifies the location of knowledge but requires a broad level ontology to evolve as knowledge is developed;
2) collaborative knowledge, which defines the best way to carry out activities within an organisation. It supports tasks in getting any related information, finds the best ways to get consensus and reach agreement; and,
3) organisational knowledge, which defines objectives of workspaces and tasks needed to achieve them. It also contains information of the location of any tacit knowledge.
By becoming a knowledge-based organisation using Digital Summit’s Trident Solutions™ approach, my associate explained, it then becomes possible to provide organisation members access to both tacit and explicit knowledge using client databases and computers in a Web environment.
I think Digital Summit is on sound ground and even on a more solid one if their incorporate social media using Web 2.0 into their service models. To that, my associate already hinted that it’s in the works and just to wait for their new website to be completed and published in due time.
POWER OF COMMUNICATIONS
In the meantime, I also invite you to view a fascinating video clip below of U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown as he delivers a talk on web-based technologies and about how we all can use today’s interconnectedness to develop a shared global ethic and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and the economy.
In this video, Brown suggests what modern technology is capable of – harnessing the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organise as a community to fundamentally change the world.
If anything the pace of change has wrought over the last 100 years that we can now use for the good of our species, then perhaps it is what companies like Digital Summit and others like it around the world may be doing, in small part, to make that happen maybe a little sooner. May the force be with them.
Learn more about what the author of this blog does in the field of Social Media on Web 2.0
