Techno Musings

Recently, Google announced and launched wiki-like features for anyone who has a Google account to make use of. It would be possible to annotate, fix and generally personalize search results.  Personally I think that this is a step in the right direction.  What it essentially is saying is that the power of the human mind is as important as all of the Internet, cloud or data center automation in the world.  I think that both Google and Amazon get this, I firmly believe that Google has the most powerful SPAM identification in the world in the form of GMail and one of the best image tagging services too in the form of the Google Image Labeler.  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is another example of using the power of people and machines together.  In essence one could almost say that this thing that we call the Internet is allowing for the genesis of the first cybernetic organism.  For Amazon it is possible that one can get paid money for participating, for Google well, when you label images it comes in the form of an addictive game, where rank and status are the currency.  Much of this assumes that it is the human beings that connect the dots by being information routing and classification entities leaving behind their breadcrumb trails and tags for others to follow.  This is real power and I want to illustrate why with an example: GMail + Postini.

I’m sure that everyone knows about both systems by now, but the connection between the dots: GMail users are creating the best possible SPAM filter that can exist for enterprise users.  I know I’m personally a part of the processing engine that Google uses, or at least I estimate they use, to find SPAM for Postini.  In essence it is the hybrid human computing system that has long been discussed in science fiction novels.  Sure there aren’t fancy electrodes or connections directly to the brain, but in a very real sense for Google humans and computers are working together to solve an extremely complicated problem, getting rid of evil SPAM.  It is this interaction that I want to focus on and it is this point that makes things like the Google Search Wiki and Wikia Search so extraordinary.  You see putting the power of the computing system into the hands of everyday people and then allowing this combination to generate better intelligence for others to follow is what the future is about.  That is because the follow-on generation — yes I’ve talked about them before, the Millennials they are called — are all about closer interaction with technology and people than most people in the workforce today. They are going to drive significant changes in the workforce and generate innovations which have yet to be thought about.  Much of that innovation will come from their interactions between one another and the net and it is the responsibility of those of us coming up in the Information Technology workforce today to prepare the way for them.  This is yet another reason why I’m proud to work for Hitachi and not for say one of our competitors; Hitachi in a very real way gets that as an engineering company they impact peoples’ lives around the world and they intentionally foster innovations which will make things better for future generations.  While still concerned about profitability we aren’t necessarily driven into unnatural behaviors just to hit the bottom line profit targets.

Now getting back off of my soap-box for a minute and returning to wiki style things.  I really think that the melding of wiki-like interfaces and search interfaces will be something that is critically important in the future.  If you can come with me into the future a little bit, you could imagine platforms where the users themselves with simple to use web based interfaces can find things in the enterprise uplifting and augmenting them to connect seemingly divergent information into new information assets.  Further it is these end users of the Millennial generation who will be managing their own content, their own information with little or no assistance from the IT organization.  No white-tower organization or centralized IT group will dictate the information taxonomy, processes or workflows, instead through social interactions these behaviors will evolve.  Just as in a previous post related to content management an organization is like like an organism (hmm notice how similar the words are) which means that it is more subject to the actions of evolution rather than top down enforcement.

Enough for now…