It's not possible to compare "open world" wikis and weblogs to their corporate counterparts, directly . They deliver different services. While the average wikilog serves as a generalized web publishing tool, a corporate wikilog means a strategy to overcome the problem of cognitive overload.
One of the recurrent questions concerning System One is how, we as a company, define our product. Is it the proclaimed evolutionary step into the future of a next generation enterprise content and knowledge management software ? Or represents System One the adoption of wikis and weblogs to the necesseties of todays enterprises ? Although the named aspects are valid ones to describe functionalities of our software suite, they are not the right ones to define it as a innovative product.
Without any doubt System One is a tool for knowledge workers, but it’s less about knowledge- and communication-managment than about cognitive workflows. System One is the perfect tool to avoid cognitive overload, with it’s balanced combination of just-in-time-information-retrieval, social software and semantic web functionalities.
The principle objective of the tool suite is to address the problems that ” ... today’s workplace is a complex knowledge environment in which the flow of information is mediated by an ill understood array of technologies, at-hand resources, and continuously shifting team of people. Few of us believe, any longer, that office work is straightforward and procedural. ... People interact with each other and with their tools in little known ways; they constantly develop work-arounds to standard operating procedures, and their primary work space is not confined to the physical region within arm’s reach, but is a distributed cluster of 2D and 3D spaces near key resources, computers, telephones and bookcases. Indeed modern workspaces now include virtual spaces—customized computer `desktops’ and applications that have their own worlds of organizational structure, information space, and workflow requirements. Given this complexity of tasks and spaces it is no wonder that workers have trouble effectively managing their office activities and coping with information. Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. The upshot is a workspace of increased complexity, saturated with multi-tasking, interruption, and profound information overload….” (Kirsh, David; 2000).
The working demands resulting from being forced to solve tasks inside an environment that’s enmashed in virtual space interrupt worflows perpetually. People have to change their mode of working all the time and have to put to much afford into finding and addressing information resources. Very often this results in the blind accumulation of information and in the dissemination of to much information of inadequate quality.
What System One achieves is to complement and simplify every users workflow by redesigning the virtual working environment. Our software makes information clutter disappear because the many modes that define a digital workplace get unified into one universal mode. Searching for information, fulfilling tasks, communcating with colleagues get surmountable with one tool which at the same time facilitates collaborative working.
Finally System One assures everybody inside a company that a pool of appropriate digital artefacts (wikis, weblogs, tags, etc..) is present to solve any task by changing the methods, algorithms and practices of corporate agents. At the same time System One offers ways to build cognitive scaffoldings by introducing new representational formalisms, better visualization strategies and better search engines. As a result System One can be considered an universal information device making it simple to capture, record and share contextualized knowledge within and outside companies.
Why? The wonderful thing of personal publishing, be it in your weblog, wiki, wikilog or on del.icio.us, is, that persons apply personal filters to the world of content out there. For me personally, writing a weblog has always been a decent way of reducing cognitive overload, by expressing my cognition, applying my personal weights and filter to the information out there. By contextualisation of information (through other weblogs) it serves as a perfect way to reduce the mass that we face. Excuse me my doubts, I hope to see something of System One soon that convinces me that I am wrong, but the last sentence could be as well be written with weblogs in mind.
"an universal information device making it simple to capture, record and share contextualized knowledge within and outside companies."
Within organizations, they are defined by their members. Except for a tiny fraction, it means publishing content (deliberately with the bad taste the words 'content' and 'publishing' brings), which means work. And it means having new additional information sources, as most people don't abstract so far that they see it as substitute for cumbersome email and so on, which also means more work. The sheer amount of potentially interesting RSS-feeds is sometimes even hard for me.
So what's an obvious benefit for you and me is more of a threat for the average corporate staff under constant pressure.
Automated Collaborative Filtering is great for searching information, especially fuzzy. Traditional wikilog/bookmark sharing etc. systems are openly accesible 'containers' for information, which contents can also be reasonably filtered (in the sense of reduction) with some degree of enthusiasm and technical skills. What System One wants to achieve is rather a bit of an trojan horse strategy: By adding sophisticated just in time information retrieval components, the main reason for adoption isn't having additional tacit knowledge as endpoint at hand that saves some of the hassle of skimming through raw information, but to use ones own tacit knowledge for instantly and directly boiling down the individual information overload.
And this is something much more obvious for average users. At the same time, the things that make wikis, weblogs etc. so great are adopted through the backdoor.
System One, as I understand it, promises to be just the right environment for such a kind of mutual control, working the fits between the pieces of the work and the flow, switching between analysing the flow into "steps", or "waves", or plain "interrruptions", on the one hand, and re-synthesizing it with the help of the piece of work you have to offer, on the other.
System One thus promises to do away with complexity, or better: to let deal the social software with it using collaborative filtering to monitor it and selectively put it on the screen. Using that kind of software you still know of the complexity but you don't have to let it bother you. Instead you go for forms, that is, in G Spencer Brown's use of the word, for little packages combining the determinate with the indeterminate.
Cognitive workflows are vague in Italo Calvino's sense of the word: inviting others to join in and add on your decisions, as you added on theirs. Your screen allows you to watch what is happening.
Let's go for a postclassical notion of organization to emphasize what is going on here. Classical notions insisted on the world being determinate, postclassical notions, as they have been urged upon us with evolutionary theory, social sciences, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Goedel, start with the undecidability of the reality of the world we live in (and of). Classical organization and management are teleological. They ask for the ends to order the means to get there. Postclassical organization and management accept any decision to be taken by the organization as an indeterminate decision, a decision to be taken, that is. For, as Heinz von Foerster used to say, "it is only undecidable questions *we* are able to decide."
The idea is easy enough. It turns ontology into at least ontologies, if not ontogenetics. The hard work consists in letting it become organizational reality. System One to me seems to be a system which locates the indeterminateness of what the organization and its management is up to where it belongs, at any one decision being a decision linking your piece of work to the workflow you try to be a part of. The workflow is a cognitive one in that you have to be able to surf your links, logs, and wikis in order to identify the tie, or break, where your work may be able to fit in. If you can't count on the indeterminateness and thus undecidability of any one phase of the flow you are looking at, you don't have the slightest chance to discover what you have to decide in order to be able to fit in. Thinking, from your most idiosyncratic perspective, and doing it, amounts to the very same thing - which is not a thing any more, but a form, turning everything you rely upon into the medium those forms are built from.
And it is equally hard to imagine an implementation of it. I agree, we have to see this in order to be able to believe it. Yet, aren't we already working in this kind of cognitive, and material, flows?