Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time

I’m fond of this quote by Winston Churchill, and I often use it in my meetings and presentations in this modified version

Semantic technology is the worst technology for processing unstructured information, except for all other technologies

Actually, a perfect technology for knowledge management does not exist because a definition of knowledge itself does not exist, at least not one so rich and complete to be shared by everyone.

We all have our idea of knowledge and we prefer to approach information our own way: if I could remember word by word all I know and had the time to read directly all the sources I have available, I would be 100% sure of being well-informed.
And I wouldn’t need any technology, either perfect or imperfect

But the many reports available on the explosion of knowledge, from here to 2010 for example, are clear: we will have then 988 billions Gigabyte of digital information, at least according to the projections based on 2006 that closed with 161 exabyte (billion gigabyte). Now, it is definitely true that the majority of this information consists in multimedia material, but most of the rest is plain text that requires the best possible technology to become, at least in part, usable and useful.

In most people’s mind, Secret Services belong to a mysterious world, where technology is beyond belief and all instruments and tools are far from ordinary.

Yet drawing parallel between the activities we carry out in our business companies (but also in our leisure time) and those of a spy can be quite surprising.

In the field of information management, we have more in common with Intelligence than we can imagine:

•           finding the most correct data and clues;

•           sharing and spreading knowledge in the most effective way.

You may already know about “A-Space”, a project of social networking promoted by the Intelligence Community with the goal of improving the quality of intelligence and promoting information sharing.

“A” stands for “Analysts” (that is to say secret agents) and “Space” echoes a famous Web 2.0 site: MySpace.

A-Space will take part in Intellipedia (a group of 3 top-secret Wikis, with a name based on the famous Wikipedia), whose members come from 16 different secret agencies.

Only one year and a half has passed since its creation and Intellipedia already contains more than 29,000 articles, with an average of 114 new articles everyday and more than 4,800 changes to already existing material.

It’s  interesting and promising to see how specific tools of Web 2.0 can contribute to the solution of problems connected to information sharing (also at a global level) in the field of intelligence. But the new thing here is the association of Intelligence with web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, very user friendly and, typically, used by young people.

“Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence”, New York Times.

“Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace”, Financial Times.

The problems of search and integrated management of information, caused mainly by technological limits, are the same for everyone: agents and secret services, companies and common people. But of course the needs and the objectives are different, and certainly also the risks and complexity of the situations to be faced.
Therefore, the approach to solve such problems is different, in terms of concreteness and speed.

“If Hewlett Packard knew what Hewlett Packard knows, we would be three times more profitable.”

It’s fun (and also a bit alarming) to realize how this statement made some years ago by Lew Platt (CEO of HP in the Nineties) is still current and more effective than most recent definitions of what Knowledge Management is supposed to be.

In the business world, the KM concept has undergone so many transformations, and it’s been associated to with so many killer applications (content management,  data-information management, e-learning,  portals,  contents access via Intranet… ) that we can compare it to a phoenix: it seems to be dying, but then it re-emerges from its own ashes, mutates, and becomes powerful again.

Beyond names and definitions, the only certainty is the issue for which KM was created. We are flooded with an enormous  quantities of potentially interesting data that we are not able to use, and therefore controlling what we have and what we know is becoming more and more difficult.