There is an excellent article on O’Reilly Radar about the use of Web applications in a military environment. Basically, DARPA came up with a combination of a Wiki and Google Maps that would allow soldiers to see where IEDs were being utilized by the enemy, sharing intelligence in real time and allowing patterns to be found and actions to be implemented by the people on the ground.

This really is an outstanding example of the power of information architecture. Traditional intelligence focused on getting information up the chain of command, getting it analyzed, and getting a comprehensive plan back to the troops. However, this situation was too fluid, too fast, too rapidly changing to go through all that rigamarole. So, the oversight and aggregation process was automated.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

First, it seems to highlight a general rule of technology: Once a process can’t move faster or be more flexible than automation, it will be subsumed. We have seen this a million times in a million different ways. Most of us have been a part of this process, either as an automator or being automated.

Second, it highlights how important it is for management and administration to improve as rapidly as the organizations they support. In the past, it has been the job of management to drive their subordinate organizations to improve, and often they did not hold themselves to the same standards. I can recall a time where the person who demanded that we automate everything possible required us to manually fill out and send an Excel spreadsheets that documented our progress.

I think that we are in the throws of new wave of organizational change based on newer, more flexible technologies like Wikis, Open Mapping Tools, and Social Networking. We should be seeing a lot more of stories like this in the MSM over the next year or so as it moves into the more public consciousness. And, in 24 months it will be a part of the common wisdom, and we won’t remember doing thing any differently.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 7:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized, In the News, Understanding, Over the Horizon, Mashups, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.