"If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult."
--Heraclitus (c. 500 BC)
Knowledge Tools, as a genre, are the next Killer App.
Until very recently, all applications have been linear multiplier methods, many fantastically effective, that duplicate or enhance already existing job functions. Often these job tasks are so enhanced or seem so wildly more effective that they look like knowledge tools. But they are not. They are Leverage Tools.
More + More = Much More
Word Processors multiply a single individual into two to 2,000 people on typewriters or an entire generation of Egyptian Scribes. Spreadsheets replace two to 20 trained accountants or 250 Renaissance monks.
What this linear leveraging effect does -- and does not - do is possibly best illustrated on the downside. If you are an illiterate on a typewriter, you become a more far more rapidly productive and widely distributed illiterate on a word processor. If you can not manage money or design a spreadsheet on paper, you can not do it any better on Excel; but, because Excel prints so neatly, you might convince people that a disastrously poor idea is a concisely presented grand plan. If you have no artistic talent whatsoever and obtain a copy of Corel Draw, you're now a really bad artist who can produce and distribute your art far more easily.
Any apparent growth in knowledge comes from this leveraging technology: a user's improved ability to retrieve and disseminate information. But, although the processing function is more efficient, the product is only a lot more information faster -- not generally new knowledge except by luck of the numbers.
New Model Software Design
Meantime, at the entryway of the 21st Century, the world operates in a new communications environment where older methods and channels of communication and handling of information are increasingly ineffective, more costly, overwhelmed, far too late and result in competitive disadvantage, lost opportunities and disaster. The need is known and clear: Rapid creation of new knowledge from the world sea of information.
Knowledge Tools by definition are software applications or assemblies of components into applications that actually create by design a phase change in the information being used. That phase-changed information enables the user very rapidly and in a very timely manner to perceive new knowledge; to understand the unexpected.
Many of these components of a Knowledge Tool are not necessarily new: already existing software tools are used in a new way that achieves the desired result for each KT application. This is accomplished through the KT's special assembly, Focused Pattern Presentation System and maximization of speed and currency . The initial change from an older Leverage Tool to a Knowledge Tool is one of introducing new non-linear usage paradigms, not necessarily an entirely new invention.
This approach meets the newest model of software design: not applications as we know them now but assemblies of components that meet a specific blend of business needs. This is the development line clearly pointed to by the directory structures of Microsoft Office and the assembling of unbundled components by OLE 2.0 built on the foundation provided by Microsoft's new COM (Common Object Model) technology. For example, if you are a word-oriented person you would work with a Word frame with attachments; if numbers-oriented, the frame for your assembly would be Excel; if graphics-oriented, the frame would be a CAD or DTP environment.
The critical new component of a Knowledge Tool is its Focused Pattern Presentation System (FPPS) -- an expert-designed application-specific construct that forces gathering of information known or suspected to be relevant; presents that information in a rich highly interrelated format; provides easy, non-linear access through hyperlinks and multiple menus; and enables an Informed User to create new knowledge from the output. Speed in gathering and manipulating information and the currency that this makes possible are key catalytic factors in the process.
A Level 1 Knowledge Tool is solely user directed and has little or no learning ability within it's system. Its effect is limited to the skill of the user and has no self direction capability. However, in the hands of an Informed User, it can be very powerful. In critical situations it can provide the margin for success.
In recent years, much of this could be done crudely on a case by expensive case basis with assemblages of existing tools or customized apps that often are additionally expensive despite their crudity. But the approaches only now can be created by cost-effective tools and critically important new design approaches.
Knowledge Tools, Level 2
The next generation of Knowledge Tools - Level 2 -- will be enhanced primarily at the front end: the search function.
A Level 2 KT will have an automated information gathering system -- a mechanical observer -- and at least some capability to input that information into the Focused Pattern Presentation System which interrelates with defining at least the categories of information most probably required. It also will have data alerts that inform the user of the existence of new relevant data and, while the mechanical search is in process, allow automated tree follow-ups on new data. Input will include placing data in special queues within a Focused Pattern Presentation System for prioritized presentation.
A superb example of a Level 2 mechanical observer would be a modification of the web crawler -- a "dumb" but highly efficient Internet - based tool that crawls from server to server (where allowed) and reads articles, indexes them and makes this index available. A system such as this would have to include not just OLE linked menus (to link disparate tools in this new configuration) but have to control data presentation in a multimedia format (graphics, text and sound). In essence the system would create catalogs of recovered data weighted by references.
Level 3: Knowledge Tools Loosed
The third generation of Knowledge Tools will fold in the use of agents at the front end and expert systems at the back door.
The agents, self directed, heuristic software applications that are tasked on the big networks to accomplish some goal, will automatically and consternate gather relevant information throughout the world and input it into the Focused Pattern Presentation System with appropriate adjustments. An excellent example of such technology already under discussion is the Reservation Agent. It would enable you to request a ticket to Tokyo on such and such a date with your personal preferences.
The agent would then leave your control, find the most cost-effective ticket, reserve the space, pay for it, confirm the reservation to your personal information system, inform you if the flight was changed and remind you of the flight so many hours or days in advance.
The Level 3 KT will find information in the unceasingly massive and available world data stream, acquire it, and followed up on it. It will leave messaging tasks in place to inform the sender/tasker of a change to the information and its potential meaning anywhere on the routing chain. And it's sub-agents will track newly created follow-ups as required.
Meantime, at the back end, an expert system in the Level 3 KT will have growing capability to analyze focused information, map trends and generate potential new knowledge. They also will surely provide tentative new conclusions, suggestions and action option lists -- all for decisions by users.
Wither?
Implications of Knowledge Tools are formidable.
There are multiple practical applications for such tools in internal and external communications throughout the public and private sectors -- in crisis management, marketing, merchandising, public affairs management, intelligence, education, journalism: any area where information is overwhelming users, where speed and currency are essential, where communications content and presentation modalities are inadequate, where there are crippling and unacceptable indirect ratios between cost and communications effectiveness.