A Call to Arms for Information Professionals

The AI world is advancing at a breathtaking pace with staggering sums of money, but it's built on unstable and illusory foundations. Our role is not to stand on the sidelines shouting warnings. It is to quietly, strategically, and indispensably become the people they cannot do without—the ones who ensure the entire system can actually function.

Is Your Agentic AI Built on Sand or Bedrock?

Data and knowledge do not, anymore, exist as separate components. They are rapidly merging into a single architecture. As KM'ers, we can no longer leave data management solely up to the admins. Rather, we need to work closely with them on creating data architectures that are contextually and semantically rich enough to be reliably actionable for use by autonomous and semi-autonomous agents.

A System of Systems … With a Twist

Many long-standing technologies such as swarm intelligence, biomimicry, neural networks, and the like are now being stitched together. Think of what could happen if each of those technologies interacted not only with each other but also with the environment at large, its living and artificial elements, as an integrated whole.

Inefficient at the speed of light

While process mining started years ago as a mainly data-driven exercise, its stated goal is to be knowledge-driven. Given KM's multidisciplinary scope, we can play a major role in achieving that goal. Any process, no matter how simple, has the potential to reach across an entire business ecosystem, including all stakeholders. This seems like a perfect match for collaborative workflow, AI/ML, knowledge graphs, human sensemaking, and many of the other arrows in our KM quiver.

The rise and potential fall of the citizen developer

The citizen developer movement was heralded as a revolution. Like most revolutions, things have sometimes gone differently than planned. The logic is sound, empowering those who know the business best to build the tools and systems needed to do their job. Ah, if only things were that simple …

The end of tech glory days

The tech industry's glory days may be fading a little, but this is not a time for despair. It's an opportunity for renewal. By shifting to a needs-driven approach, the industry can ensure its relevance in a rapidly changing landscape.

The third place of knowledge management

The third place I alluded to goes far beyond mechanistic KM or curated knowledge and takes us into the actual world of tacit knowledge. Here, knowledge comes from and often remains as personal experience, impressions, and intuition; it's undocumented and often hidden and elusive.

Pushing the boundaries of knowledge curation

Knowledge democratization occurs in two directions, seemingly engaged in an endless tug of war: acquisition and dissemination.

Should we go back to paper-based KM?

The sheer volume of largely useless data we have accumulated across the years severely limits the ability of AI to work well, and it comes at a heavy environmental and financial cost.

Dispatches from the edge

Edge-of-chaos decisioning means being continually informed on the critical elements needed to make better, faster decisions.

Rebooting the information refinery

In the field of knowledge management, of course, the idea of turning data into information into knowledge has been a foundation concept for knowledge managers. But frankly, the ability to achieve this alchemy of data to knowledge has not been broadly demonstrated in practice. A next generation information refinery is required to make something meaningful and valuable out of the raw data flying around the firm and throughout the internet economy.

A deep future approach to KM

We're familiar with the near-term portion of the time spectrum—from femtosecond lasers used in eye surgery to high-frequency trading in milliseconds on the major securities exchanges. Unfortunately, the extreme opposite end of the time spectrum, the "deep future" receives little if any attention. Decisions in fields such as genetic engineering, nuclear energy, geopolitics and the like can have serious implications for human civilization. But the impact of those decisions might not become apparent for many thousands of years and hundreds of generations.