“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.”

– John Gaule

A while back, I wrote about how useful it would be to be able to combine collaborative information and structured data. While Wikis and other collaborative information sources are great, I would argue that they aren’t useful until they can be used in aggregated or statistical form for strategic decision making or automation. Until then, they are too “abstract” to be useful (at least in the mechanical sense of the word).

Recently, ran across DBPedia, an organization that is turning Wikipedia entries into RDF, the language used for the semantic web. DBPedia has actually has downloadable datasets based on Wikipedia that are available today. These are datasets that can be queried with existing tools and linked to other datasets. Wow!

Even if you aren’t a Wikipedia fan, this is really a big step forward for the enterprise. Think about the amount of knowledge that exists in your organization that isn’t captured, but is critical to your operations. It has always been a big pain to try and sit down and do formal knowledge engineering. However, most people are comfortable enough with a Wiki to sit down and start typing. For a small organization this might not be such a big deal, but for a larger enterprise this could provide some very useful information.

The first time your Director or CXO can make a financial decision based exclusively on the information from your company wiki, it will have proved its worth. Until then, it is just another trendy tool. The work that DBPedia is doing is an important step in making this a reality.

OK, when USA Today has a story about information management you can be sure that the phenomenon is big enough that it will impact non-techies on a large scale.

When tech analyst John Gantz at researcher IDC began tallying up all the digital information generated annually, he first looked in the obvious places …

Gantz ultimately calculated that 161 exabytes of digital data — or about 161 billion GB — were generated in 2006. And the amount is expected to rise fast.

It is worth a quick read, although if you are a data geek a lot of this is pretty elementary, so you might just want to forward the URL on to your favorite business leader or project manager.

The article is a bit light on is the downstream ramifications of the data deluge. Obviously, there will be a lot of SAN units sold, but that opportunity is long gone unless you are able to take advantage of the innovators dillema. Looking over the horizon, there is a huge opportunty for people who can make this data not just searchable, but accessible and usable and trustworthy for decision-making.

An outsourcing article on VentureBlog got me thinking. The point that the author is making is based around reinvention:

Question: Since 1995, two million American manufacturing jobs vanished. How many manufacturing jobs did China add during the same period?

Answer: None. China lost sixteen million manufacturing jobs since 1995, a higher percentage of their manufacturing workforce than the US.

Sounds interesting. We should all flexible, adaptable, forward thinking, skill-building, constant-learning individuals who are always looking to the horizon. Not only should we be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, we should be doing it on a regular basis.

Now, compare this to the dour assessment from the New Statesman:

Personnel managers, he finds, look not for people who are committed to and proficient at specific skills but for those who have the “potential” to cope with change. The upward career mobility so familiar to previous generations has been replaced by downward mobility.

By their late forties, people often work at lower skill levels than employees who joined more recently. And because such a high premium is put on flexibility and seizing the new, “you are constantly . . . walking away from your own commitments”.

This surely explains why everything is done so badly. You don’t try to improve your performance and do your present job well; you get ready for the next big change. It may also explain why the government seems always to be struggling to improve the population’s skill levels.

Souns a bit grim, doesn’t it? There are two sides to every coin, and it seems that our ruthlessly efficient focus on productivity improvement and global reach might have some downside.

My Take

Flexibility is important, and we need it in a rapidly changing environment. Make no doubt about it, things are moving faster and faster.  However, taking on the motto of semper gumby isn’t necessarily going to make things work.

1. The need for flexibility is often brought on by indecisiveness, negligence or incompetence, and not opportunity.  When used for the right reasons, flexibility is key.  When used for the wrong reasons it is just an excuse for additional stress.
2. Experience has a tangible value in the workplace, and the savings brought by every hour of work not done. To paraphrase a French philosopher, “A project plan is not done when every hour of work is added together, it is done when every unecessary hour of work is removed.”
3. Age matters!  It is much easier to be flexible when you are young and relatively unencumbered.  At the same time, it is easy to feel a sense of entitlement as you get older and have more to deal with.

Overall, the most useful people will be those with the right combination of drive, wisdom, experience, and flexibility to fit the situation.  A solid organization will recognize this and in itself be flexible to the needs of their employees and ultimately to the bottom line.

Media Temple is a very cool evolution in remote hosting. Part web host, part application server, part grid, it is an interesting look into the parallell computing world we are rapidly moving into.

Most interesting to me was their grid service, which provides an on-demand capability for web hosting that allows a site to handle the slashdot effect without having to blink an eye. Sites (and their corresponding media and applications) are running on multiple servers, which allows traffic to be spread out seamlessly, allowing for spikes in service and usage. This is all done without significant additional configuration, which makes it all the more sweet.

Now, they have had some problems, especially with non-grid oriented applications. However, I think that these are pretty minor compared to the utility that high-performance sites will get from using a grid environment.

Absolutely worth a look …