“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.

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 …

An interersting finding in IT World relating the people who commit sabotage in the workplace and their work behaviors. The article details that …

The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were “disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly.”

From an organizational point of view, this seems pretty obvious. People who aren’t happy and aren’t performing are the most likely to act out. This isn’t an IT specific thing, I would guess you see the same behavior in people who work in finance and embezzle company funds.

The article goes on …

According to security management vendor Calum Macleod of Cyber-Ark, most organizations are leaving themselves exposed by “not paying due care and attention to the people who are charged with looking after their systems and applications.” Even outsourcing cannot resolve the problem fully, he said.

This sounds like a wise thing. Organizational problems are the responsibility of the organization, and the responsibility isn’t just to punish or to root out bad seeds. The responsibility is to make a culture where this sort of thing is unlikely to happen, then to monitor for any possibilities that may arise.

While it is individuals that perform these acts, they don’t happen in a vacuum and often there are components of the behavior that can be prevented cheaply, quickly, and easily. Don’t discount your people by ‘profiling’ out suspects and thinking that will solve your problems.