I have just started using a service called Evernote to try and allow me to keep my notes and thoughts organized across all moments of inspiration, brainstorming and discussions with others whenever or wherever they occur. So far it looks to be a promising solution. Evernote is essentially providing me with cloud based storage with their particular access paradigm on top of it. They have clients for all manner of OS and device as well as a web client. I can access my Evernotes pervasively, wherever I am, and from whatever technology mechanism I have at hand. This is one of the promises of the cloud and they fulfill this promise.
This however, is not the ultimate promise of the cloud. Ultimately I would like to be able to access my Evernotes and any other data or data management/manipulation services from the cloud as a single federated source of information and information processors/transformers. Aside from the fact that there are no standard cloud information sharing protocols or data manipulation standards being used by all service providers, one of the key problems is the issue of federation and trust. We’ve got passport, openID, and other technologies for a federated identity management solution, but the adoption of these technologies seems to be absent in many of today’s cloud offerings. I use a few different cloud services now, and I have a different userid for all of them. Even if they provided a means for me to link their services with one another, I would still have to manage a different identity across services.
This same federated/aggregated service mashup challenge exists in the systems and server monitoring space. With services moving to the cloud, multiple datacenters and 3rd party IT interfaces, you need a management and monitoring tool that can manage these components locally, but still be able to aggregate them into a global view with the flexibility to mash them together into higher order views that take the local information and, through a little magic, allow you to create global knowledge.
For Example, in up.time we have had our local monitoring instance – or what we call and LDC instance - and our global console – or EMS - deployed in a large distributed enterprise to allow customers to extend basic monitoring from a local monitoring tool into an enterprise service delivery knowledge platform. This provides you with critical information on your infrastructure, as well as knowledge about how those services are delivered across your business, with the explicit understanding of the business impact of those services. When we have silos of valuable information, combining them together turns that information into actionable knowledge.
The cloud is allowing us to create highly accessible and pervasive silos of very valuable information. However, no matter how much information you have, it’s only valuable when we can convert that information into knowledge. The potential for the cloud as a future knowledge platform, with the appropriate federation between services and between users of those services, is a great opportunity enabled by technology of the 21st century. It has the potential to fundamentally change how we do things.
When speaking of knowledge, “Tacitness generally describes the extent to which knowledge is not codifiable (Galunic and Rodan, 1998). Tacit knowledge is personal, context specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate whereas explicit or codifable knowledge is transmittable in formal and systematic language (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Furthermore, intangibles like specific knowledge is expensive to transfer across because it cannot be easily aggregated meaningfully (Hayek, 1945).” – (Theory of the firm, Bach Seung, Bai – 2004)”
We are filling the cloud with an unimaginable amount of tacit knowledge about anything and everything imaginable at an astronomical rate. Combined with the AI technologies already available to mine, link and understand this data, we will be able to take these islands of knowledge from across the cloud and leverage it into a global knowledge platform with a tacit knowledge breadth that covers virtually everything. We will be able to access this ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy‘ from anywhere at any time, and it will always be up to date, with literally hundreds of millions of people updating this knowledge base in real time.
(I realize there are several major challenges to the earthly H2G2 related to the information processing, but look at where we are today already, and in a very short period of time, it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’)
Remember those commercials? I have recently been spending a fair bit of time in our Knowledge Base (KB) and it occurs to me that our KB is sort of like our collective brain in terms of storing product information and other useful tips, hints and mini how to guides. Unfortunately, like the brain in those commercials, our KB has recently been (ahem) on a bit of a hiatus.
