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After posting yesterday on Blogs and Wikis behind the Firewall it reminded me of a discussion a few years ago at an Artificial Intelligence (AI) lecture at university. The interesting thing about AI, and for that matter Ubiquitous Computing as well, is that they are multidisciplinary collections of specialities who meet on this common ground. Rather than being one set-in-stone foundation of practice that you can learn from any given book on the subject. Anyway, the story runs like this…

At an AI seminar the instructor decided to challenge his students by handing out an assignment which, to that point in time, hadn’t been solved by AI specialists after decades of research. I can’t remember the exact problem off hand but it had to do with natural language understanding. So all the students took this impossible task away for the weekend and that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. The next week one of the students came forward with an answer! Seriously, he’d solved the problem in a weekend.

The reason it was an unsolved AI problem was that computer scientists had all been thinking about the problem in the wrong way, they were thinking as computer people. The student, however, had never really had anything to do with computer science and came from an information theory background. I believe it was his first exposure to AI that week at the seminar. And he solved the problem because in information theory (think of librarians) it had been solved long ago.

Now the real interesting part is that if this was such an easy problem to solve why didn’t it get solved earlier? This guy became an overnight AI authority, by the way, so it was a significant step forward for the science. So how come with all the scientific brains nobody had just asked a librarian?

We all live and work in silos. Organisations are rife with silos. And this is entirely where your corporate blog would be aimed at increasing your corporate value. Knowledge is power and knowledge management is a real issue for organisations. So, given that you choose to follow this route, your inward facing departmental blog has a potential to engage those vertical silo on a horizontal level. It can help you capture new ideas from outside the team. When you think about it - why the hell aren’t you doing it already? Why don’t your teams have this feedback mechanism to at least capture ideas and knowledge?

Update: Also worth listening to, the South by South West podcast of Charlene Li’s presentation - Social Strategies for Revolutionaries.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:10 pm and is filed under blogging, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.