Collaborative Module Extracts Tacit Knowledge
Autonomy this week is releasing Collaboration and Enterprise Networks (CEN), a new module designed to capture, visualize and manage employee expertise and make knowledge available throughout the enterprise regardless of location.
Automating knowledge elicitation has been to date one of the most elusive challenges for technologists.
Traditional collaboration systems rely on employees filling out forms or using a list of pre-defined keywords to describe their areas of interest.
These approaches fail for a variety of reasons: they generate additional work for employees by requiring them to fill out forms and update them, systems fail to capture the employees’ areas of expertise because employees either misrepresent their areas of expertise or do not continually update their profile as their projects and interests change. In addition, by relying on keywords, the collaboration tools do not match up experts because they may have selected different words to describe themselves or they could not find the most relevant tag for their profile.
Furthermore, ‘voluntarily offered’ information does not necessarily reflect the real intimate and personal, often subconscious, reasoning processes.
Autonomy to the rescue?
But fear not: Autonomy’s software aims to eliminate manual efforts by automagically generating implicit and explicit profiles.
As users interact with content, the system understands the concepts within the content and automatically develops a profile or adjusts it as the users work projects change.
In addition, because Autonomy thinks it understands conceptually user profiles and content, it will link together employees that are working on similar projects even though it may not sound like they are doing related work.
For example, at a pharmaceutical company an employee researching medicines for depression will be linked to an employee in another R&D department who is working on medicines to treat eating disorders, because
both are working with similar drugs.
Daniel Rasmus, vice president at Giga Information Group thinks that Autonomy suite of products is being used to bring a new level of personalization to the employee. “Autonomy builds dynamic profiles of staff member interactions with information sources and maintains them over time, reflecting a historical context, but one that is also weighted toward more recent information” he comments.
From the point of view of productivity, a tool like this could be kind of magic.
It allows enterprises to get an overview of what information they have, who is working on or using that information, how much and how well they think (gulp) and who the experts are on particular topics within the organization.
The technology also allows network traffic profiling through “mapping and visualization” (color-coded views of where information is located and how much is there) delivers enterprises a clear picture of their activities on a daily basis.
That's cool.
From a free net citizen’s perspective however (any free citizens on the internet?)
the technology opens up new areas of concern.
Who owns employees mental processes and reasoning abilities? Surely, not their employer.
Firms often hire specialized personnel with narrowly focused contracts, rewarding them for a limited number of tasks (employee a, salay a, job task a)
A tool like this could allow the firm to extract a much higher value from individual employees than they are actually being paid for, especially the ultra talented and underpaid, without even having to acknowledge their inputs.
It’s all done for you, don’t even have to know what is going on.
As an employee, I would want to know if my mind is being extracted, to what extent, I would want to see what representation of my mind is stored where and to what purpose, and I would want to have a mind extract of the people who access the information, as asymmetric mind extraction is not fair.
Much clearer and more advanced legislation is needed to define how to integrate such wonderful new technologies into workplaces, as to allow both productivity increments for firms, and mind and soul protection for employees.
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